Time & Perspective Quote by Philip Kaufman

Kaufman is doing the director’s version of a bait-and-switch: he starts with the safe language of craft ("a great story") and ends with a blunt political diagnosis ("repression of expression is all the rage"). The pivot matters. It signals that for him, historical filmmaking isn’t museum work; it’s a way to smuggle urgency past the audience’s defenses. You come for the period detail, you leave with a bruise.

The line also reveals how directors justify adaptation and timing. He’s not claiming prophecy so much as pointing to a depressing rhythm: the past doesn’t stay past. By framing repression as a trend - "all the rage" - he uses a fashion metaphor to mock how quickly society normalizes censorship, surveillance, or moral panic once it’s dressed up as protection. That irony lands because it’s casual, almost chatty, as if he’s narrating an obvious shift everyone can feel but few want to name.

Contextually, Kaufman has been drawn to stories where private desire collides with public control (from political paranoia to sexual policing). His comment reads like an artist watching the release calendar get overtaken by the news cycle: the film’s historical setting stops being a setting and becomes a mirror. The subtext is a warning about cultural backsliding, but also a defense of art itself - not as commentary bolted on after the fact, but as a record of what repression feels like from the inside, when it’s still being sold as common sense.