Daily Inspiration Quote by Walter Salles

Salles is smuggling a paradox into the language of process: lock things down early so you can stay loose later. Coming from a director whose films often travel through physical landscapes as a way of mapping interior change, the word “vector” is doing heavy lifting. It’s not the corporate kind of strategy-talk so much as a quietly mathematical image for momentum: pick a direction, not a destination. The aim isn’t to storyboard every breath, but to establish the film’s underlying trajectory - emotional, ethical, visual - so the inevitable chaos of production doesn’t hijack what the movie is actually about.

The intent reads as practical advice to filmmakers, but the subtext is about authorship under pressure. Film sets are noisy democracies: money, weather, actors, locations, and logistics all vote. “Conceptualise…very early” is Salles insisting that the director’s most important work happens before the first compromise arrives. If you don’t articulate the governing idea at the start, you’ll end up making decisions that are merely reactive - choices that may be clever in isolation but incoherent in accumulation.

There’s also a defense of intuition hiding inside the planning. A clear “vector of development” gives you permission to improvise, because improvisation can be tested against a stable spine. Freedom isn’t the absence of constraint; it’s the confidence that the film can bend without breaking. Salles is arguing for a kind of disciplined wandering: know what you’re chasing early, so you can afford to be surprised later.