Nature & Animals Quote by Norman Jewison

Jewison’s line snaps into place like a cut in a chase sequence: our sympathy is kinetic, almost reflexive. He’s not romanticizing criminals so much as naming a camera-ready truth about how audiences are wired. Put something on the run, frame it as pursued, and viewers start scanning for exits with it. The hunted becomes the story; the hunters become the system.

The subtext is about power and point of view. “Fugitive” is a loaded word - guilt hangs in the air - yet Jewison yokes it to “animal,” stripping the situation down to instinct and vulnerability. That move quietly indicts the machinery of pursuit: police, institutions, mobs, even “justice” can look like predation once the narrative lives inside the breathless, cornered body. It’s a director’s observation about identification, but it’s also a cultural diagnosis: we distrust organized force and side with whoever seems least protected.

Context matters here because Jewison’s career (In the Heat of the Night, Fiddler on the Roof, Jesus Christ Superstar) is steeped in clashes between individuals and the codes that try to contain them - race, tradition, religion, law. In late-20th-century North American cinema, the antihero and the wronged outsider became default protagonists, mirroring post-Vietnam skepticism and a growing suspicion that “order” often means someone else’s order.

The intent, then, is craft advice disguised as anthropology: if you want an audience to feel something fast, don’t start with virtue. Start with pursuit.