Daily Inspiration Quote by John Schlesinger

There is a small confession buried in Schlesinger's phrasing: he knows exactly how easy it is for a director to bully an audience into feeling something. "In your face" isn't a neutral aesthetic critique; it's a moral one. It suggests symbolism can become a form of bad manners, a kind of cinematic shouting that substitutes for insight. Schlesinger is talking about craft, but also about power: the camera can make metaphors feel compulsory, like the viewer has no choice but to "get it."

The fascinating subtext is the double hedge - "perhaps", "a bit" - as if he's softening a rebuke he still believes. Then he repeats himself ("best to control that as best I can"), a verbal stutter that sounds like someone describing a habit they had to unlearn. He isn't rejecting symbolism; he's admitting to an earlier impulse to overdetermine meaning, to make the theme legible at all costs. Age, here, reads less like wisdom-as-brand and more like the slow discovery that subtlety isn't vagueness, it's trust.

Context matters because Schlesinger came up in a period when cinema was renegotiating realism: British New Wave grit, then the more psychologically and sexually frank American 70s. His best films often balance social observation with intimate character (Midnight Cowboy, Sunday Bloody Sunday). The line captures a director moving from statement to implication, from proving his point to letting it accumulate. Subtle symbolism doesn't disappear; it migrates into performance, framing, and omission - places where the audience can meet the film halfway, and feel smart rather than managed.