Daily Inspiration Quote by Bob Balaban

Balaban’s line lands like an offhand shrug, but it’s really a quiet indictment of how Hollywood measures “progress.” He’s talking about Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a movie whose effects were built in an era when you couldn’t fix it in post because post barely existed. That limitation didn’t just shape the technique; it shaped the taste. When you have to light a miniature, shoot it, and commit, you end up designing images around texture, shadow, and believability rather than sheer volume of spectacle.

The deliberately clunky phrasing - “more expensive… because they were better actually” - does part of the work. It mimics the commonsense frustration of anyone who’s watched a modern blockbuster drown in weightless pixels. Balaban isn’t making a nostalgic plea for analog purity so much as pointing at a mismatch between budget and craft. Money buys computing power; it doesn’t automatically buy judgment. The subtext is that contemporary effects often chase omnipotence (bigger, faster, noisier) instead of persuasion (does it feel real enough to make you lean forward?).

Context matters, too: Balaban is an actor and producer who’s spent decades inside the machine, not a tech scold lobbing stones from the outside. That insider status gives the comment its bite. He’s naming a truth the industry hates to admit: constraints can be an aesthetic advantage, and “new” isn’t a synonym for “convincing.”