Time & Perspective Quote by John Dykstra

The grind Dykstra describes is less a complaint than a brag disguised as gratitude: a 24-hour-a-day immersion that sounds punishing, yet he frames it as the secret ingredient. That tension is the point. In film tech culture, especially the effects world Dykstra helped define, “we never left” becomes a badge of honor, a way to turn logistical extremity into mythmaking. It’s also a neat rhetorical pivot away from ego. He doesn’t say the work was brilliant because he was brilliant; he says it worked because the room worked.

The repeated “we” matters. It flattens hierarchy and recasts a notoriously specialized, high-pressure pipeline as something closer to a band on tour: living off the same rhythms, sharing the same fatigue, laughing at the same failures. “Enthusiastic” is doing quiet labor here, laundering what could be read as exploitation (sleeping at work) into chosen devotion. That’s not necessarily dishonest; it’s how creative industries often narrate survival. If you can name the ordeal “family,” it stops being just overtime and becomes belonging.

Contextually, this is the vernacular of a specific era of innovation, when practical constraints and untested tools forced teams into constant proximity. Collaboration wasn’t a corporate value; it was the only way the thing got finished. Dykstra’s intent, then, is partly historical: to credit the collective improvisation behind a finished “movie” that audiences experience as effortless spectacle, and to remind you that wonder is often built like a startup, not a studio: cramped, communal, and fueled by camaraderie.