"I thought that subtitles are boring because they're there generally to serve us with information to make you understand what people are saying in a different language"
About this Quote
There is something almost endearingly blunt in Tony Scott admitting he once thought subtitles were "boring" because they exist to "serve us with information". It frames reading on screen as a kind of utilitarian chore: subtitles as instruction manual, not cinema. Coming from a director celebrated for velocity, heat, and sensory overload, that bias tracks. Scott built movies that try to make you feel first and decode later; anything that drags the eye away from the image threatens the engine.
The phrasing gives away the real friction. "Serve us" positions the audience as consumers being handed a necessary product. It also quietly demotes language to logistics: the job is simply to "understand what people are saying". But subtitling, at its best, is not a neutral delivery system. Its constraints force translation into rhythm. It decides what can be sacrificed, what must be emphasized, how sarcasm lands, how long a thought gets to breathe. Subtitles don't just transmit meaning; they stage it.
The context here is a late-20th/early-21st-century Anglo film culture where foreign-language work was too often treated as homework, and where blockbuster grammar prized frictionless absorption. Scott's remark captures that old prejudice while inadvertently explaining why it persists: subtitles ask audiences to collaborate. They demand a tiny redistribution of attention, an acceptance that cinema can be both seen and read. For a filmmaker obsessed with pure momentum, that's not boredom; it's resistance.
The phrasing gives away the real friction. "Serve us" positions the audience as consumers being handed a necessary product. It also quietly demotes language to logistics: the job is simply to "understand what people are saying". But subtitling, at its best, is not a neutral delivery system. Its constraints force translation into rhythm. It decides what can be sacrificed, what must be emphasized, how sarcasm lands, how long a thought gets to breathe. Subtitles don't just transmit meaning; they stage it.
The context here is a late-20th/early-21st-century Anglo film culture where foreign-language work was too often treated as homework, and where blockbuster grammar prized frictionless absorption. Scott's remark captures that old prejudice while inadvertently explaining why it persists: subtitles ask audiences to collaborate. They demand a tiny redistribution of attention, an acceptance that cinema can be both seen and read. For a filmmaker obsessed with pure momentum, that's not boredom; it's resistance.
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