Nicolas Roeg Quotes

Years ago I had a house in Sussex, it was like Arcadia, with an old Victorian bridge, a pond and the Downs.

They think something’s gone wrong, but in Don’t Look Now, for instance, one scene was made by a mistake. It’s the scene where Donald Sutherland goes to look for the policeman who’s investigating the two women.

There was a village watercolour society and they’d come and paint in my field. I watched them from the window, the way they would struggle this way and that to find the perfect moment. God has made every angle on that beautiful, and I felt that tremendously.

The rules are learnt in order to be broken, but if you don’t know them, then something is missing.

The great difference between screen acting and theatre acting is that screen acting is about reacting – 75% of the time, great screen actors are great reactors.

Some people are very lucky, and have the story in their heads. I’ve never storyboarded anything. I like the idea of chance. What makes God laugh is people who make plans.

Movies are not scripts – movies are films; they’re not books, they’re not the theatre.

Marketing is a very good thing, but it shouldn’t control everything. It should be the tool, not that which dictates.

In life, we all learn from everyone.

I was very glad later when I was directing that I wasn’t in the hands of a cinematographer and hoping that he would do it well. I would know what he was doing, and we could discuss how that scene would look.

Fear has many faces.

Children’s finger-painting came under the arts, but movies didn’t.

But in marketing, the familiar is everything, and that is controlled by the studio. That is reaching its apogee now.

Any change in form produces a fear of change, and that has accelerated. Marketing is the death of invention, because marketing deals with the familiar.

And later I thought, I can’t think how anyone can become a director without learning the craft of cinematography.

You make the movie through the cinematography – it sounds quite a simple idea, but it was like a huge revelation to me.