Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard King

King’s line lands like a quiet provocation: the institution built to manufacture directors may, in practice, dismantle the very instincts that make someone worth watching. “In this way” does a lot of work. It implies he’s not anti-education in general; he’s pointing to a particular mechanism of harm, the kind you only notice after the fact. The phrase “can be” is equally pointed: a measured warning, not a tantrum. He’s indicting a system without pretending every classroom is a crime scene.

The subtext is about aesthetic risk and self-trust. Film schools often teach a standardized language of “good” filmmaking: three-act structure, coverage, the correct lens choice, the correct references to cite. That fluency is useful, but it can also train students to optimize for approval rather than surprise. When critique becomes a performance and taste becomes a rubric, the student’s relationship to their own material gets mediated through imagined gatekeepers: festivals, grants, professors, the industry’s current notion of “relevant.” Destructive, here, means sanding down the odd angles that might have become a signature.

There’s also a class-and-access context hiding in plain sight. Film school is expensive, network-driven, and often calibrated toward professional pipelines. That pressure encourages safe competence over unruly specificity. King, speaking as a working director, is likely responding to a generation that arrives technically polished yet emotionally cautious, fluent in cinema but hesitant to be personal. The sting of the quote is that it frames “training” as a potential erasure: you can learn the craft and still lose the nerve.