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Wit & Attitude Quote by Maggie Smith

"There's this wonderful first assistant and he'll be saying, 'Now Harry goes down among the dragons.' You have to hold yourself together. Because if you lose it for a second then you're sunk"

About this Quote

Film sets love to market themselves as dream factories; Maggie Smith reminds you they run on discipline, not magic. The line lands because it punctures the grand myth of performance with the most unglamorous job title imaginable: first assistant director. Not a visionary, not a muse, but the traffic cop of chaos, barking out a sentence that sounds like a child making up an epic: "Now Harry goes down among the dragons". The comedy is in the contrast. A grown adult, armed with a clipboard, has to translate fantasy into logistics, and everyone has to pretend that translation isn’t ridiculous.

Smith’s intent is partly affectionate teasing, partly a warning. The subtext is that acting isn’t just emotion; it’s containment. You can’t indulge the absurdity, even when the absurdity is objectively hilarious, because the machine is expensive and fragile. "Hold yourself together" isn’t about dignity so much as survival inside a system that punishes a crack in the mask. The payoff is the brutal simplicity of "then you're sunk" - not embarrassed, not slightly off, but done. One break becomes a contagion: laughter spreads, takes multiply, time evaporates.

Context matters: Smith came up in theatre, where seriousness is a kind of oxygen. Dropped into a global franchise built on spectacle, she’s clocking how professionalism becomes its own spell. The dragons are fake; the stakes, weirdly, aren’t.

Quote Details

TopicMovie
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Smith, Maggie. (2026, January 17). There's this wonderful first assistant and he'll be saying, 'Now Harry goes down among the dragons.' You have to hold yourself together. Because if you lose it for a second then you're sunk. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/theres-this-wonderful-first-assistant-and-hell-be-76827/

Chicago Style
Smith, Maggie. "There's this wonderful first assistant and he'll be saying, 'Now Harry goes down among the dragons.' You have to hold yourself together. Because if you lose it for a second then you're sunk." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/theres-this-wonderful-first-assistant-and-hell-be-76827/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"There's this wonderful first assistant and he'll be saying, 'Now Harry goes down among the dragons.' You have to hold yourself together. Because if you lose it for a second then you're sunk." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/theres-this-wonderful-first-assistant-and-hell-be-76827/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

Maggie Smith

Maggie Smith (born December 28, 1934) is a Actress from United Kingdom.

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