Leadership Quote by Satyajit Ray

"I think they quite like me when I work because I'm one of the safer directors to back, because even if my films don't bring their costs in back home, once they're shown outside of India they manage to cover the costs"

Satyajit Ray, Director

About this Quote

Ray slips a small act of resistance into what sounds like a producer-friendly explanation. On the surface, he is talking spreadsheets: risk, recoupment, the comforting arithmetic of distribution beyond India. But the phrasing - "they quite like me", "safer directors to back" - is deliberately wry. He positions himself as palatable to financiers not because he flatters local tastes, but because his work travels. The compliment is backhanded: the industry’s confidence in him is outsourced.

The subtext is about two markets pulling Indian cinema in different directions. At home, Ray’s films could be admired and still struggle commercially, competing against a mass-audience machine that sold spectacle, stars, and escapism. Abroad, his films became cultural capital: festival circuits, art-house bookings, critics framing him as an auteur who offered the West an India that looked "serious", humanist, legible. Ray isn’t naive about that dynamic. He understands that international prestige can be converted into domestic solvency, and he states it plainly, almost clinically.

What makes the line work is its quiet indictment of how patronage operates. The director who should be funded for artistic vision is funded for export potential. Ray’s "safety" isn’t conformity; it’s convertible reputation. In a single sentence, he reveals the odd bargain of postcolonial modernism: to make uncompromising local art, you sometimes need validation from elsewhere to keep the cameras rolling.

Quote Details

Topic	Movie
Source	Verified source: An Interview with Satyajit Ray (Satyajit Ray, 1969) Text match: 100.00% Provider: Cross-Reference Evidence: I think they quite like me when I work because I'm one of the safer directors to back, because even if my films don't bring their costs in back home, once they're shown outside of India they manage to cover the costs.. This quote appears verbatim in a transcript of a Q&A interview between Lindsay Anderson and Satyajit Ray, described on the transcript page as having taken place at the National Film Theatre (NFT) in 1969 or 1970. In the transcript, the quote occurs immediately after Anderson asks Ray: "Producers don't like you very much, do they?" and Ray replies with the quoted line. The web page is not itself the primary publication; it is a later reproduction/transcription. I could not, from available online sources in this search session, locate the contemporaneous primary publication/recording (e.g., an NFT printed program booklet, an audio recording, or a magazine/collection that first published the transcript) that would allow a definitive 'first published' year or page number. Because the transcript itself explicitly dates the event only as '1969 or 1970', the year above is best treated as approximate (earliest possible per the transcript’s description).
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