Daily Inspiration Quote by Atom Egoyan

Egoyan’s “I suppose” is doing a lot of quiet work: it’s a public shrug that masks a private argument. He acknowledges the anxieties - the dutiful list of concerns any director is expected to have (budget, scale, audience expectations, politics of representation, the fear of not saying “enough”) - then immediately demotes them. The second clause is the real confession: “I really felt that I had to.” Not wanted to. Had to. The phrase frames concentration as necessity, almost self-defense, against the centrifugal force of modern filmmaking where every project is pressured to become a thesis, a spectacle, a brand extension.

“Scope” here isn’t just story size; it’s moral and emotional jurisdiction. Egoyan has long been drawn to intimate catastrophes: the way trauma reorganizes memory, the way technology mediates intimacy, the way communities rehearse denial. A “very, very concentrated” scope is his antidote to melodrama and to the false grandeur of omniscient storytelling. By narrowing the frame, he avoids the cheap comfort of explanation. He forces the audience to sit with partial knowledge, with the sensation that something essential is missing - which is often the truest experience of loss.

The repetition (“very, very”) lands like a director talking himself into discipline. It also signals risk: concentration can read as restraint, but it can just as easily be misread as evasion. Egoyan’s subtext is a rebuttal to that suspicion. He’s implying that precision is not timidity; it’s a method. The smaller the circle he draws, the harder it is to lie inside it.