Daily Inspiration Quote by Bruce Beresford

It lands like an offhand confession, but it’s really a quietly strategic piece of self-mythmaking: a mainstream film director reminding you he’s been wired for “high” art since adolescence. Beresford doesn’t claim he was destined for opera; he says he was interested at 16, an age that signals genuine, formative obsession rather than careerist taste. That detail does a lot of work. It frames opera not as a late-life prestige hobby but as an early, private passion that kept running underneath his public filmography.

The phrasing is deliberately unglamorous: “really been interested,” “really like,” “staging them.” No grand talk about transcendence, no reverence for the canon. Just craft. “Staging” is the key word because it translates opera into a director’s native language. He’s not positioning himself as a music person; he’s positioning himself as a storyteller who thinks in bodies, space, rhythm, and spectacle. That’s also the subtext: opera is an arena where a director’s control is both more visible and more constrained. You’re negotiating with a score, with tradition, with singers, with audiences who arrive carrying opinions. Saying he likes staging them reads like a director admitting he enjoys the hard mode.

Contextually, it’s a small rebuttal to the idea that directors “slum it” into opera for cultural capital. Beresford’s intent is to normalize the crossover: film and opera aren’t opposites, they’re sibling mediums built on timing, blocking, and emotional engineering at scale.