Justice & Law Quote by Philip Kaufman

Kaufman isn’t defending the Marquis de Sade so much as defending the discomfort de Sade produces. The line works like a director’s note to the audience: don’t flatten this man into a Halloween mask of “pervert villain,” because the story gets less interesting the moment you think you’ve solved him. “Whatever you think” concedes the moral recoil most people feel, then immediately yanks the conversation away from verdicts and toward texture. That’s a filmmaker’s instinct: character over courtroom.

The subtext is also strategic. By highlighting de Sade’s opposition to the death penalty, Kaufman introduces a moral asymmetry that scrambles our tidy categories. It’s not redemption, it’s complication: someone capable of writing extreme cruelty can still hold a principled stance against state killing. That contradiction is the point. Kaufman is arguing that people are not coherent brands, and that the modern hunger for clean takes - hero/monster, victimizer/victim - misses how power, desire, and ideology actually mix in one human being.

The second clause does quiet reputational triage. “Never put in prison for murders or anything like that” doesn’t absolve de Sade; it narrows the charge sheet, separating literary fantasy and scandal from proven homicide. In the context of adapting or depicting de Sade, Kaufman is making an ethics pitch: if you’re going to portray him, do it with accuracy and unease, not easy moral theater. Complexity here isn’t aesthetic garnish; it’s a refusal to let certainty do the thinking for you.