Time & Perspective Quote by Bille August

Three months, four hours a day: the schedule sounds like a monastic residency, but Bille August frames it as something looser, almost disarmingly human. The headline detail is craft - “we sat and went through the whole script” - yet the emotional center of the memory is the admission that “most of the time we talked about life.” That pivot is the real point. August is quietly arguing that what we call directing isn’t just shot lists and line readings; it’s an education in perception, temperament, and courage.

The name “Bergman” does a lot of work here. Ingmar Bergman stands for a certain severe, psychologically exacting cinema, the kind that seems forged in solitude. August punctures that myth without diminishing it. The subtext is mentorship without pedagogy: Bergman doesn’t lecture, he shares time. Four hours every afternoon suggests ritual, repetition, trust - the slow accumulation where artistic decisions start to feel less like “choices” and more like a worldview.

There’s also a tactful honesty in “to be honest,” as if August anticipates the reader’s expectation of granular, technical wisdom and chooses to disappoint it on purpose. He’s telling young filmmakers: if you want the secret, it’s not a trick; it’s proximity to a mind at work, and the humility to let “life” be part of the script process. Calling it “a wonderful time” lands like restraint - a simple phrase for an experience that was probably formative, even destabilizing.