Art & Creativity Quote by Mike Figgis

Sound is the stealth technology of cinema: it bypasses our critical faculties and goes straight for the nervous system. When Mike Figgis calls its power “vastly undervalued,” he’s not just complaining about audiences who don’t notice the mix. He’s taking a shot at an industry culture that treats audio as ornamental polish while worshipping the image as the “real” storytelling. Figgis, a director with a musician’s instincts, is arguing for sound as authorship.

The phrase “psychological state” is doing heavy lifting. He’s naming what good filmmakers often prefer to keep invisible: that movies don’t merely depict emotion, they engineer it. A low drone can make an empty hallway feel predatory; a consonant chord can turn a morally messy scene into something like absolution. Sound doesn’t need to be noticed to be effective; its ideal form is plausibly deniable manipulation.

Then he sharpens the point with “the more you know about music and harmony.” This isn’t romantic mysticism about “vibes.” It’s a pragmatic claim that craft expands control. Harmony is a language of expectation and release; when you understand its rules, you can satisfy them, delay them, or break them to create tension, relief, unease, intimacy. The subtext is a director’s power fantasy, but a credible one: knowledge turns mood from accident into design.

Figgis is also quietly defending interdisciplinarity. In a medium obsessed with cameras and cuts, he’s insisting the deepest edit might be a chord change.