Daily Inspiration Quote by Ismail Merchant

Merchant’s line is a quietly barbed reminder that “good taste” is often just risk management wearing a monocle. He’s not pleading for sympathy about bad notices; he’s drawing a line between evaluation and permission. Studios and critics, in his telling, become twin gatekeepers of legitimacy: one controls the money, the other controls the cultural afterlife. If you let either one dictate your next move, you’re not producing films so much as auditioning for approval.

The subtext lands because Merchant speaks from a career built on the long game. Merchant Ivory productions weren’t designed to spike opening weekend; they were designed to accrue prestige, audience trust, and durability over time. That model is structurally allergic to the studio instinct for predictability and the critic’s appetite for novelty. So the “terrible reviews” aren’t just bruised feelings; they’re evidence of a mismatch between the tempo of serious filmmaking and the churn of cultural verdicts.

There’s also a deft inversion here: critics and studios are supposed to be the grown-ups, the arbiters of quality and viability. Merchant recasts them as conservative forces that would have shrunk his output to a single, self-censoring experiment. The point isn’t that judgment is worthless; it’s that dependence is. In a business where consensus arrives late (if at all), the only way to make a body of work is to keep working through the noise.