Time & Perspective Quote by George A. Romero

Romero is talking about the hangover that comes with authorship: once you have made a film, it stops being a story and becomes a scrapbook of stress, compromise, and human weather. The telling detail is that he "somehow forget[s] the movie". What survives in memory isn’t the clean object audiences see; it’s the messy process, the favors called in, the arguments, the accidents that became solutions. A finished film, in that state, feels less like a creation than evidence.

The phrase "can’t forgive the movie" is a sharp, almost moral framing. Forgiveness implies injury, and Romero is admitting that the film wounds its maker by refusing to match the private ideal that got them through production. It also suggests guilt: directors know exactly where they cut corners, where the money ran out, where they settled. That’s why time matters. Years later, the film becomes historical rather than personal; it exits the director’s nervous system and enters culture, where its flaws can read as texture, even signature.

Coming from Romero, this lands with extra bite. He’s the patron saint of doing more with less, a filmmaker whose limitations often became the point: gritty realism, political bite, the sense that society itself is fraying. His subtext is a quiet defense of imperfection as part of the medium’s truth. Objectivity isn’t just distance from ego; it’s recognizing that a film is not the sum of what you meant, but what you managed to capture with other people in the room.