Daily Inspiration Quote by Roland Joffe

A director admitting he’s never wanted to “berate the audience” is a quiet rebuke to a certain strain of prestige culture: the idea that seriousness requires punishment. Roland Joffe’s wording is telling. “Berate” isn’t just “challenge” or “provoke.” It’s scolding, finger-wagging, the filmmaker as disciplinarian and the viewer as a problem to be corrected. By choosing that verb, Joffe draws a line between moral urgency and moral badgering.

The intent reads as both aesthetic and ethical. Aesthetic, because berating is a blunt instrument; it can flatten nuance into lectures and reduce characters to mouthpieces. Ethical, because it assumes an unequal relationship: the artist as enlightened, the audience as complacent. Joffe’s best-known films, from The Killing Fields to The Mission, wrestle with war, empire, faith, and complicity, but they do it through immersion and emotional proximity, not contempt. His camera tends to ask viewers to look longer, not to feel smaller.

The subtext is also defensive in a savvy way. Directors who handle political material are routinely accused of preaching; Joffe preemptively reframes persuasion as invitation. He’s not disavowing politics, he’s disavowing humiliation as a tactic. In an era when “edgy” often gets confused with “punitive,” the line reads like a craft note and a cultural critique: you can demand attention without demanding penance.