Time & Perspective Quote by Anthony Minghella

A funny little tragedy sits inside Minghella's matter-of-fact complaint: the moment you’re put in charge of an arts institution, the job stops being about art and becomes about justification. He isn’t describing a scheduling nuisance so much as a civic failure. The British Film Institute, in theory, should be self-evident - a national memory bank and a living workshop for cinema. Yet his chairmanship is swallowed by the need to translate that mission into the only language power reliably understands: budgets, measurable outcomes, a defensible reason to exist.

The line works because it’s both personal and structural. "I didn't understand" signals a sobering initiation rite: even a celebrated director walks into institutional leadership thinking the work will be curatorial, strategic, cultural. Instead, he meets a political economy that treats culture as discretionary spending and public institutions as suspects. The repetition - "what it's for, why it exists, why it needs its money" - isn’t redundancy; it’s exasperation made rhetorical. Each clause tightens the screw, implying that the argument is never finished, never won, always reheard by new gatekeepers.

Context matters: Minghella is speaking from late-20th/early-21st century Britain, where arts funding often had to prove "value" in instrumental terms (tourism, education, industry) rather than intrinsic ones. The subtext is that the BFI’s real value is precisely what resists a neat spreadsheet: preserving fragile histories, widening access, and insisting that a national culture includes more than whatever the market already rewards.