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Parenting & Family Quote by Phillip Noyce

"Making movies is eating candy. It's a very expensive candy, so you value when you can do it. So when you can do it twice at once, it's like, you know, a kid in a candy store!"

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Noyce’s candy metaphor is disarmingly childlike on purpose, a director’s way of smuggling a hard industry truth inside something sweet. “Making movies” is framed as pure pleasure, not martyrdom: a rush of color, sugar, and immediacy. That matters in a business that loves to mythologize suffering as proof of seriousness. He’s rejecting the auteur-as-tormented-artist pose and replacing it with something more honest and more strategic: the work is fun, and the fun is precisely what’s at stake.

The twist is the adjective doing the heavy lifting: “very expensive.” Candy is cheap; cinema isn’t. Noyce acknowledges the gatekeeping economics of filmmaking without turning the line into a complaint. Expense here isn’t just budgetary, it’s access: financing, schedules, studios, and the fragile alignment of hundreds of people. You “value when you can do it” because permission is intermittent. That subtext lands especially well for a director whose career moves between studio projects and more personal work; it’s a reminder that creative freedom often arrives packaged as logistical opportunity.

“Twice at once” suggests the rare luxury of overlapping projects, a moment when momentum beats scarcity. The “kid in a candy store” image reads like giddy gratitude, but it also hints at appetite: filmmakers are trained to want the next thing before the current one is finished. Noyce makes that hunger sound joyful rather than greedy, which is its own kind of PR - not for the audience, but for the director’s own endurance.

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Making movies is eating candy its very expensive candy
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Phillip Noyce (born April 29, 1950) is a Director from Australia.

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