Daily Inspiration Quote by Atom Egoyan

Egoyan is doing that filmmaker thing where the knife is hidden inside a compliment. He insists there is "no mystery" in production, then immediately points to the real mystery: why the industry treats craft like an altar. The sentence is built as a dismissal that turns into an indictment. He knows "exactly what it involves" - not wonder, not discovery, but logistics, money, coverage, continuity, approvals. By foregrounding "production values", he’s naming the obsession that can quietly crowd out the harder-to-measure parts of cinema: mood, ambiguity, emotional aftertaste.

The parenthetical jab - "or as they would say" - is the tell. Egoyan draws a line between his vocabulary and the crew-and-exec dialect of visibility: "seeing it all up there on screen". That phrase sounds benign until you hear the philosophy embedded in it: if the audience can see it clearly, it counts; if it’s subtle, off-screen, unresolved, it’s suspect. In other words, value becomes synonymous with what can be displayed, not what can be felt.

Context matters because Egoyan’s films (often psychological, elliptical, built around absence and fractured memory) thrive on what isn’t fully shown. He’s not pretending to be above technique; he’s refusing the idea that technique is the point. The intent is a warning from inside the machine: production can be perfectly understood and still produce something spiritually empty when "up there on screen" becomes the only aesthetic north star.