Art & Creativity Quote by Mike Figgis

Sadness, for Figgis, isn’t a glitch in the human operating system; it’s the baseline hum that art has to reckon with. Coming from a director who’s spent a career letting mood do as much work as plot, the line reads like a manifesto for why film music exists at all: not to decorate an image, but to argue with it.

The key word is "counterpoint". In music, counterpoint means two independent lines that gain meaning by rubbing against each other. Figgis smuggles that whole idea into cinema. Visuals tend to seduce: the sunset, the beautiful face, the elegant composition. Left alone, that beauty can feel self-satisfied, even dishonest. Music lets the filmmaker tell a second truth at the same time - to undercut glamour with dread, to lace tenderness with regret, to suggest what the camera can’t: memory, shame, longing, premonition. It’s an emotional subtitle track.

The subtext is a quiet skepticism about the image itself. Pictures can present surface; music can reveal cost. That’s why he frames music as "good for" sadness, not "good against" it. He’s not trying to fix the human condition; he’s trying to make it legible.

Contextually, this fits late-20th-century film language where directors and composers treat score less as wallpaper and more as narrative force. Figgis is staking a claim: cinema gets deeper when sound refuses to merely agree with what we see.