Daily Inspiration Quote by Norman Jewison

A director announcing an adaptation with nothing more barbed than "I really like that film" is a small masterclass in how Hollywood taste gets laundered into production. Norman Jewison isn’t pitching a thesis; he’s signaling affiliation. Bread and Tulips is a gently offbeat Italian romantic comedy, beloved for its human-scale charm and its refusal to turn whimsy into spectacle. By choosing it, Jewison is implicitly placing himself in a lineage of crowd-pleasing storytellers who still crave European air in the room: warmth, melancholy, and ordinary people allowed to be interesting without needing to be heroic.

The bluntness of the line is the point. Directors often wrap adaptations in grand talk about "relevance" or "reinvention". Jewison strips that away, as if to say: the justification is aesthetic desire, not market logic. That plain preference becomes a kind of authority claim. He has nothing to prove except that he’s watched something good and wants to translate its feeling.

There’s subtext, too, about what adaptation means in practice. When an American director takes on an Italian film, it’s rarely a neutral act; it’s a wager that the story’s delicate local textures can survive recasting, language shifts, and studio gravity. Jewison’s casual tone can be read as confidence - or as a quiet warning that the industry will happily remake what it can’t monetize in subtitles. Either way, the quote frames adaptation as love first, commerce second, which is exactly how filmmakers prefer the story to be told.