"I wouldn't have wanted to miss the opportunity to make those three films that didn't do well. They were really important to me, and the things I learned doing them were important to me"
About this Quote
Failure, in Michael J. Fox's telling, isn’t a smudge on the resume; it’s the tuition. The line is built on a quiet defiance: “I wouldn’t have wanted to miss the opportunity” reframes box-office disappointment as something almost enviable, a chance you might regret not taking. That inversion matters coming from a performer whose public image was forged in crowd-pleasing hits. Fox is pushing back against the entertainment industry’s brutal accounting logic, where a movie’s worth is flattened into a weekend number and a career is treated like a stock chart.
The specificity - “those three films” - is doing a lot of work. He doesn’t romanticize failure in the abstract; he names a small cluster of misfires, suggesting he’s carried them around, studied them, maybe even protected them from the easy narrative of “mistakes.” It’s also a subtle correction to how audiences consume celebrity: we remember the iconic roles and pretend the rest didn’t happen. Fox insists the off-peak work counts, even if it didn’t “do well.”
The repetition of “important to me” is the tell. He’s not arguing that the films were misunderstood masterpieces; he’s asserting a private metric of value - learning, craft, resilience - in a system that rarely rewards any of those without a hit attached. The subtext lands like a career-long thesis: you don’t grow by curating only the flattering chapters, you grow by keeping the ones you’d be tempted to delete.
The specificity - “those three films” - is doing a lot of work. He doesn’t romanticize failure in the abstract; he names a small cluster of misfires, suggesting he’s carried them around, studied them, maybe even protected them from the easy narrative of “mistakes.” It’s also a subtle correction to how audiences consume celebrity: we remember the iconic roles and pretend the rest didn’t happen. Fox insists the off-peak work counts, even if it didn’t “do well.”
The repetition of “important to me” is the tell. He’s not arguing that the films were misunderstood masterpieces; he’s asserting a private metric of value - learning, craft, resilience - in a system that rarely rewards any of those without a hit attached. The subtext lands like a career-long thesis: you don’t grow by curating only the flattering chapters, you grow by keeping the ones you’d be tempted to delete.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning from Mistakes |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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