Daily Inspiration Quote by Godfrey Reggio

"Now having said that, I realize that releasing a film in the real world is like trying to get General Motors to release a handmade car"

Godfrey Reggio, Director

About this Quote

Reggio lands the joke with a deadpan inevitability: the “real world” isn’t neutral terrain for art, it’s an industrial supply chain that barely recognizes the handmade as a category. By yoking film distribution to General Motors, he’s not just calling Hollywood big; he’s pointing at a system engineered for scale, predictability, and quarterly logic. A handmade car is a beautiful absurdity inside that machine. It might be excellent, even visionary, but it breaks the factory’s assumptions about speed, standardization, and profit.

The quote carries the weary self-awareness of an independent director who’s done this dance before. “Now having said that” signals a retreat from idealism into logistics: the moment when a filmmaker realizes that making the work is only half the struggle; the other half is convincing a mass-market apparatus to treat a singular object as if it were compatible with mass production. The subtext isn’t simply “studios are bad.” It’s that the entire culture of release - marketing, slots, gatekeepers, audience conditioning - is optimized to move units, not to nurture experiences that don’t behave like products.

Coming from Reggio, whose films (like Koyaanisqatsi) are closer to cinematic essays than plot machines, the metaphor also defends form. He’s arguing that certain kinds of movies are, by design, “handmade”: idiosyncratic, hard to summarize, resistant to the trailer-friendly promise of a familiar ride. The line is funny because it’s true; it’s sharp because it admits he’s asking an assembly line to honor craft.

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Godfrey Reggio

Godfrey Reggio (born March 29, 1940) is a Director from USA.

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