Daily Inspiration Quote by John Schlesinger

A line like this lands with the quiet authority of someone who watched an era glamorize its own bad behavior, then call it liberation. Schlesinger is drawing a hard boundary between a cultural mood - late-60s permissiveness, male gaze aesthetics, the “anything goes” swagger of New Hollywood and Swinging London - and the later moment when that swagger starts reading as laziness or cruelty. The phrasing matters: “may have worked” is a backhanded concession, acknowledging that objectification wasn’t an accident; it was a style, a marketable pose, a set of images that audiences and gatekeepers rewarded.

The subtext is industry-facing. A director isn’t just talking about personal ethics here; he’s talking about what stories get financed, what kinds of scenes get normalized, what an actress is asked to endure for a “realistic” performance. By framing objectification as an “attitude,” he pins it to a worldview rather than a few bad apples. It’s a critique of default settings: how camera language, casting, and character writing conspire to flatten women into props for male self-discovery.

There’s also a self-aware defensiveness: Schlesinger, whose career bridged the permissive 60s and the more self-scrutinizing decades that followed, is signaling adaptation. The line doesn’t claim moral enlightenment so much as cultural accountability. What once played as edgy now reads as dated, and in film, “dated” is often the first step toward “indefensible.”