Top 40 Nicolas Roeg Quotes

‘Eureka’ was very bad timing. The early 1980s: Reagan and Thatcher were in, greed was good, and here was a film about the richest man in the world who still couldn’t be happy. Politically and sociologically, it was out of step.

Nature repeats itself, but it never starts from the beginning.

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

Film can be more of a reality than a page with words can ever be.

Don’t you think it’s something strange that you rarely look at yourself in the mirror, except to do things like stand and ponder? I mean, in Shakespeare’s day, it was thought that the mirror would reveal something, that it is trying to tell you something – not just to tidy your hair, but something more.

Oh, some of my films have been attacked with absolute vitriol!

My father was an extraordinary man.

Men and women’s needs and desires overlap but go in different directions as well.

Film remains completely mystical and mysterious to me.

How can you judge one film against another?

I made a film called ‘Bad Timing’ that I thought everybody would respond to. It was about obsessive love and physical obsession. I thought this must touch everyone, from university dons down.

When a book is just a plot, you know, two men fight for the love of a woman in a wild frontier, I immediately ask, ‘Why?’

I’ve been told my movies are difficult to market.

There’s horror in your life, believe me, whether it’s coming, or you’ve just been lucky to miss it today.

I love that perhaps we don’t see the things that are there because we have no yardstick to see things by, to compare them.

I came up the old-fashioned way – tea boy, cutter, focus-puller, cinematographer – but I wasn’t myself old-fashioned.

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

When I went to the cinema as a boy, when I saw a war film, I thought the general was the star, and that Cary Grant was an extra. I had no idea about the structure of film, but I loved going to the cinema.

When my sister and I were very young, my father used to tell us fairy stories that he’d made up. My mother was always telling him that he should write them down, but he would say, ‘Well, they’ve all been done before. There are so many blooming books in the world – why should I write another one?’

There’s no one ‘right’ way of making a science fiction movie; there’s no one way of making any kind of movie, really!

Grief is an emotion that’s almost unplayable because you’re in a separate emotional state; it’s an inconsolable emotion.

Too many films today feel formulaic and familiar. I prefer it when the familiar is made to feel strange.

Oscars are won with two or three shots only, because if it’s really beautifully photographed, you don’t really notice it until the astounding moment emphasizes it.

I’ve always admired the tradition of storytellers who sat in the public market and told their stories to gathered crowds. They’d start with a single premise and talk for hours – the notion of one story, ever-changing but never-ending.

People are mistaken to view cinema as some sort of gimmick. It’s very much ingrained in the ways in which we understand each other.

I think the big studios shaped and formed the artists that they put under contract.

I generally try to avoid talking about my old films – I find it difficult.

‘Puffball’ is a love story… no, it’s a life story.

I’ve always loved the future. But I must say the future changes a lot quicker than it used to. An era used to last thirty or forty years – now we’re lucky if it’s five.

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.

I’ve never tried to enhance my reputation. Never moved upwards from one thing to another. That sort of thing is of no interest to me at all.

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.

I’ve used mirrors in a lot of movies. I think the mirror is an extraordinary thing, also the reflective, a reflection in water, etc.

We all have our beliefs or our agnosticism.

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

Mirrors are the essence of movies.

Our lives are full of all the genres. Fear and hope and sadness.

I like getting up early, but I haven’t got a routine – mainly because I never have a clear idea of what day of the week it is.

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.

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