Daily Inspiration Quote by Alain Resnais

Resnais slips the dagger in with a shrug. The line pretends to be modest, almost administrative: no grand calling, no mystical “cinema chose me.” But that refusal is the point. Coming from a director canonized for formal audacity and intellectual rigor, “I never had any special appetite” reads less like self-effacement than a quiet provocation against the romantic myth of the auteur as prophet.

The sentence is built on a disarming pivot: not desire, but necessity. “You have to make a living” drags filmmaking down from the clouds and plants it in the same category as any job that pays rent. Then he flips it again: “miraculous” restores wonder, but on new terms. The miracle isn’t artistic transcendence; it’s the economic anomaly of getting paid to do something as precarious, collaborative, and culturally contingent as film. Resnais is acknowledging the lottery of patronage, funding systems, and institutional luck that make “art” possible. It’s gratitude with an edge: the industry is arbitrary enough that survival feels supernatural.

Context matters. Resnais came up in postwar France, amid cinephilia and the New Wave’s mythology machine, while his own work often resisted easy narrative pleasure. By downplaying appetite, he also deflects the expectation that art must spring from personal confession. His films are frequently about memory, structure, and time - less hunger than investigation. The subtext: seriousness doesn’t require passion-talk. Sometimes the most radical stance is admitting the work is work, and still insisting it can be astonishing.