Daily Inspiration Quote by Dino De Laurentiis

“Making movies is all about instinct” reads like a veteran producer’s shrug at the fantasy that filmmaking can be engineered into certainty. Dino De Laurentiis came up in a postwar Italian industry where budgets were fragile, audiences were fickle, and taste moved faster than any committee could predict. For someone who made everything from art-house adjacent prestige to big, risky commercial swings, “instinct” isn’t mystical; it’s a survival tool. You don’t get to wait for perfect information when the set is burning money by the hour.

The line also doubles as a quiet power play. Film is famously collaborative, but the producer-director axis still rewards the person willing to decide before consensus forms. By elevating instinct, De Laurentiis legitimizes the gut call: casting against type, backing an untested script, betting on a director’s temperament, sensing the market before it announces itself. Instinct becomes a permission slip to override spreadsheets, test screenings, and polite doubt.

Subtext: rationales are often retrofitted. In cinema, success gets narrated as strategy, failure as miscalculation. De Laurentiis punctures that post-hoc storytelling. He’s implying that the industry’s talk of “packages,” “data,” and “models” frequently disguises something older and messier: taste, nerve, timing, and the ability to read a room.

Contextually, it’s also a warning to young filmmakers seduced by rules. Craft matters, but the final leap is judgment under uncertainty. Movies aren’t just made; they’re guessed into existence.