Daily Inspiration Quote by Philip Kaufman

Kaufman’s line has the offhand, half-exasperated cadence of someone describing an industry that keeps rearranging the furniture while insisting the house hasn’t changed. He’s not making a grand aesthetic argument; he’s pointing to the quiet gravity of logistics. “They” is doing a lot of work here: studios, financiers, insurers, production managers, the whole apparatus that decides what a movie “is” before a director ever calls action. The film becomes less a singular artwork than a movable project file, draggable across borders in pursuit of cheaper labor, tax incentives, pliable regulations, and predictable schedules.

The geography is the subtext. Canada, Prague, Romania: places that read like scenic choices but, in Hollywood shorthand, often mean budget math and subsidy structures. The contrast with “keep ’em down in L.A.” is telling. Los Angeles isn’t framed as the default because of sunshine or tradition, but because it’s a contested ecosystem: unions, crew bases, infrastructure, and a creative community that can be expensive to sustain yet hard to replace. Kaufman’s casual “keep ’em” also hints at a tug-of-war over who controls production’s center of gravity.

Context matters: by the late 20th century into the 2000s, “runaway production” became a defining anxiety in American filmmaking, as incentives abroad and across state lines turned location into a financial instrument. Kaufman’s intent is less nostalgia than warning: when movies are optimized like supply chains, the story on screen may survive, but the cultural and labor culture that makes movies possible in the first place starts to thin out.