Time & Perspective Quote by Roland Joffe

A director admitting he was talked into reincarnation is really a confession about how movies get made: less divine inspiration, more conversation, compromise, and the occasional “silly” note that cracks the project open. Joffe starts with resistance, which matters. He’s defending taste and plausibility, signaling he doesn’t want mysticism as an easy cheat or sentimental garnish. Then he pivots: the idea isn’t adopted because it’s fashionable, but because it exposes a structural drug every storyteller craves - time.

The line stages a quiet conversion from plot gimmick to formal obsession. “Element of reincarnation” sounds like a studio-friendly hook, a marketable twist you can pitch in one sentence. “This whole time dimension” is bigger, stranger, and harder to control. That shift reveals intent: he’s not chasing spirituality; he’s chasing narrative architecture, the chance to braid lives, echo choices, and make consequence visible across eras. Reincarnation becomes less about souls and more about montage - what cinema uniquely does well, cutting between moments to suggest a single, haunted continuum.

There’s subtext, too, about authorship. The “they” is faceless and collective: producers, collaborators, the industry itself. Joffe lets the note land without resentment, implying a mature kind of ego - not the auteur as tyrant, but the filmmaker as someone alert enough to recognize when an external suggestion leads to a deeper, personal fixation. The fascination isn’t with the supernatural; it’s with the elasticity of time, and with the medium’s power to make that elasticity feel emotionally real.