"I think there are a lot more relationship scenes in my movies that people tend to overlook. A lot of scenes really feel real and are about the characters"
About this Quote
Jan de Bont is pushing back against the lazy filing of his work as pure adrenaline delivery system. As the director behind Speed and Twister, he’s been typecast in the cultural imagination as a traffic engineer for spectacle: keep the momentum up, keep the bodies moving, keep the camera chasing. His line is a quiet correction: the relationships were never absent; the audience just learned to stop looking for them.
The phrasing matters. “People tend to overlook” shifts responsibility outward, implying a kind of critical inattentiveness that comes with genre prejudice. Action cinema gets read as mechanics, not interiority, so any human texture is treated as incidental rather than structural. De Bont’s insistence that scenes “feel real” is also a defensive claim of craft. In movies built on implausible premises (a bus that can’t slow down, a storm worth courting), realism can’t live in the plot; it has to live in behavior. Micro-choices, glances, awkward pauses, the way characters negotiate fear and attraction under pressure - those are the anchors that make the set pieces land.
There’s subtext, too, about authorship. De Bont came up as a cinematographer; his reputation is visual velocity. He’s arguing for a fuller reading of his direction: that the kinetic style isn’t a substitute for character, it’s the environment that reveals it. When relationships are forged mid-crisis, the romance isn’t a detour from the action. It’s the action, translated into intimacy.
The phrasing matters. “People tend to overlook” shifts responsibility outward, implying a kind of critical inattentiveness that comes with genre prejudice. Action cinema gets read as mechanics, not interiority, so any human texture is treated as incidental rather than structural. De Bont’s insistence that scenes “feel real” is also a defensive claim of craft. In movies built on implausible premises (a bus that can’t slow down, a storm worth courting), realism can’t live in the plot; it has to live in behavior. Micro-choices, glances, awkward pauses, the way characters negotiate fear and attraction under pressure - those are the anchors that make the set pieces land.
There’s subtext, too, about authorship. De Bont came up as a cinematographer; his reputation is visual velocity. He’s arguing for a fuller reading of his direction: that the kinetic style isn’t a substitute for character, it’s the environment that reveals it. When relationships are forged mid-crisis, the romance isn’t a detour from the action. It’s the action, translated into intimacy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Relationship |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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