Daily Inspiration Quote by Mark Rydell

Rydell’s awe lands less as compliment than as a sideways confession: directing can look like wizardry even to another director. The line hinges on that repeated “able to do it,” a phrase that keeps the achievement intriguingly vague. “It” isn’t merely making a film; it’s pulling off authorship under pressure - coordinating egos, money, time, and taste into something that reads as inevitable. By refusing to name the specific skill, Rydell emphasizes the mystery of how style becomes command.

The provocative move is the comparison to Orson Welles, cinema’s mythic auteur, and the claim that the two talents are “polar opposites.” Rydell is sketching a spectrum of directorial power: the flamboyant, baroque, intellectually showy Welles at one end; someone else (an unnamed “he”) at the other - perhaps a director of restraint, actor-centered subtlety, or invisible craftsmanship. The subtext is a quiet pushback against a common critical bias: that only one kind of genius counts. Film culture tends to canonize the loud signature, the instantly recognizable flourish. Rydell insists that its inverse can produce the same authority.

There’s also a generational, insider’s context here. Directors are trained to talk about “vision,” but Rydell talks about aptitude, almost like a mechanic recognizing two incompatible toolkits arriving at the same functioning machine. His amazement isn’t naïve; it’s professional humility mixed with disbelief that cinema rewards contradictory temperaments. The line ultimately deflates auteur mythology while keeping the romance: whatever directing is, it’s stranger than a single definition.