Daily Inspiration Quote by Ellen Burstyn

There is a brusque pride baked into this line, the kind that only makes sense if you remember what Ellen Burstyn is really talking about: movies as competition, not just entertainment. “Nobody would want to leave that film to go get high” isn’t a moral lecture so much as a backhanded measure of cinematic power. The baseline assumption is bleakly practical: getting high is an available, tempting alternative, a rival experience with its own gravity. Burstyn’s flex is that the film she’s describing can outpull it.

The intent reads like an actor’s ultimate compliment to a project: not “important,” not “beautiful,” but impossible to abandon. She frames the audience as restless bodies with options, and stakes the film’s value on whether it can hold them in their seats. That’s both affectionate and a little cynical, a performer’s awareness that attention is finite and constantly shopping around.

The subtext also hints at the era and the milieu Burstyn came up in: New Hollywood, counterculture, the normalization of drugs in creative circles, and the way “getting high” became shorthand for escape, enhancement, or opting out. By positioning the film as stronger than that impulse, she’s asserting that art can deliver a more intense trip: emotional, immersive, maybe even punishing.

It’s a line that lands because it refuses prestige-language. It judges a film by its grip, not its virtue, and in doing so it captures a very modern anxiety: if your work can’t compete with the world’s anesthetics, it doesn’t matter how good it is on paper.