Time & Perspective Quote by Lasse Hallstrom

Hallstrom is quietly describing a director’s ideal operating system: solitude first, then surrender. On The Shipping News, he engineered distance between home and set not as a lifestyle preference, but as a creative buffer zone. That commute becomes a private pre-production lab, a stretch of time where decisions can harden just enough to be useful: shot ideas, emotional beats, the day’s rhythm. It’s the opposite of the romantic myth that cinema is made in bursts of inspiration; he’s talking about discipline disguised as routine.

The second half of the line is the real tell: “still remain open to surprises.” Hallstrom isn’t endorsing rigid storyboarding or auteur control. He’s naming the tension every good director has to manage: arrive with intention, but don’t strangle the living thing in front of you. Planning gives you a baseline; openness lets weather, an actor’s spontaneous choice, or an unanticipated texture of location re-write the scene into something truer. The subtext is humility. Film is too collaborative, too contingent, to be fully commanded.

Context matters: The Shipping News is a moody, place-driven story, where landscape and atmosphere do as much acting as the cast. Hallstrom’s method fits that material. By literally placing himself “far enough away,” he’s protecting a mental space where the film can be designed - and then, crucially, re-designed by reality once the cameras roll. That’s not indecision; it’s craft with a wide aperture.