Imagination is not something apart and hermetic not a way of leaving reality behind it is a way of engaging reality.
They seem much rarer now those auteur films that come out of a director's imagination and are elliptical and hermetic. All those films that got me into independent cinema when I was watching it seem thin on the ground.
You always say 'I'll quit when I start to slide' and then one morning you wake up and realize you've done slid.