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Daily Inspiration Quote by Daniel Day-Lewis

"Making a film, setting it up and getting it cast and getting it together, is not an easy thing"

About this Quote

Day-Lewis’s line reads like understatement, but it’s really a quiet rebuke to the fantasy that movies spring fully formed from inspiration and star power. Coming from an actor famous for disappearing into roles, the sentence is almost anti-mythic: it strips the glamour off filmmaking and replaces it with logistics, negotiation, and the grind of coordination. The repetition of “getting it” is doing the work here. It’s not poetic; it’s procedural. That plainness signals respect for the machinery behind the curtain.

The intent feels defensive in the best way: a reminder that performance is only one spoke in a wheel. “Setting it up” points to financing, scheduling, locations, legal clearances - the unsexy infrastructure that determines what stories get told and which never leave a drawer. “Getting it cast” nods to the delicate politics of taste and marketability, where artistic fit competes with availability, budgets, and the gravitational pull of names that can unlock money. Even “together” implies how fragile the whole enterprise is: a film is less a singular artwork than a temporary coalition of workers, egos, and time.

In context, it’s also a subtle assertion of humility and authority at once. Day-Lewis isn’t bragging about craft; he’s aligning himself with crews and producers, implying that seriousness about acting includes seriousness about the system that makes acting possible. The line lands because it refuses romance and insists on reality - and in an industry built on illusion, that’s its own kind of honesty.

Quote Details

TopicMovie
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Day-Lewis, Daniel. (2026, January 16). Making a film, setting it up and getting it cast and getting it together, is not an easy thing. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/making-a-film-setting-it-up-and-getting-it-cast-120258/

Chicago Style
Day-Lewis, Daniel. "Making a film, setting it up and getting it cast and getting it together, is not an easy thing." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/making-a-film-setting-it-up-and-getting-it-cast-120258/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Making a film, setting it up and getting it cast and getting it together, is not an easy thing." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/making-a-film-setting-it-up-and-getting-it-cast-120258/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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Daniel Day-Lewis

Daniel Day-Lewis (born April 29, 1957) is a Actor from United Kingdom.

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