Time & Perspective Quote by Adrian Lyne

Every new film begins with a trap: the audience has already seen your moves. Adrian Lyne, a director whose career was built on highly legible adult thrillers and glossy romantic obsession, is admitting the quiet terror behind mainstream storytelling: genre is both a promise and a prison. When he says “avoid that,” the “that” isn’t just bad writing. It’s the gravitational pull of inherited scenes, recycled emotions, the shorthand that gets a project financed and marketed but also flattens it into product.

Lyne’s phrasing matters. He doesn’t claim you can purge cliche; he aims for “a few moments.” That modesty is the tell. In commercial cinema, originality isn’t an all-or-nothing virtue; it’s a scarce resource you sprinkle where it counts. The subtext is pragmatic and slightly rueful: films are built from familiar beats because they have to be understood quickly, by many people, in a crowded marketplace. The director’s job is to smuggle in flashes of specificity - a gesture, a detail, a turn of vulnerability - that feels unbought.

Contextually, Lyne comes out of an era when studios still bankrolled adult dramas, but even then they demanded recognizability. Today, with IP logic and algorithmic taste shaping greenlights, his comment lands as both craft advice and cultural diagnosis. Cliche isn’t merely laziness; it’s the default language of an industry optimized for predictability. His ambition is small on paper, radical in practice: make something that, for a minute or two, surprises the viewer into feeling again.