Nicolas Roeg Quotations

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.

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

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

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

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.

Film remains completely mystical and mysterious to me.

When I look around, I begin to understand what Socrates meant when he said, 'How much there is in the world I do not want.'

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.

Our memory and the movies keep movie stars alive for us, and Tony Curtis is still a star.

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

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

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

I imagine if aliens came down to Earth, they'd actually be quite tall; people seem to get everything right about extraterrestrials but the size!

Movies are not scripts - movies are films; they're not books, they're not the theatre.

You cannot intellectualize yourself out of obsession. You cannot cure yourself of it.

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.

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

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

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 realized I've spent all my life creating a past.

I've always thought there was something very marvelous and magical about mirrors, and that they are connected to memory as well.

Marketing is such a key issue; in fact, the marketing department is often involved in the approval of scripts now.

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.

We're all influenced by everything unless we're locked in an empty room.

You can't hide in life. We are all being watched by some larger vision.

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.

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

Tony Curtis was a joy to work with. He had a curious innocence that is very young and wise at the same time.

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

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

Critics reach that age when it is as valuable and daring to hold a negative opinion as it is for a positive. We learn and understand from both.

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

How can you judge one film against another?

I don't look back on any film I've done with fondness or pride.

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

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

We all have our beliefs or our agnosticism.

'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.

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.

I like women in film. I like women in general, but I especially like to show them on film. They are not ciphers.

I think I've never really liked the idea of genre, a film that follows the rules of a genre.

I was always a bit arty-farty as a boy. 'Come on, Mr. Arty-Farty,' my sister used to say to me.

I wouldn't like to be a non-believer in anything.

I've always noticed that films set in any sort of future very rarely draw on the present.

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

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.

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

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

'Puffball' is a love story... no, it's a life story.

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

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

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?'

When you admire someone's work, you are amazed by who you think they are.

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

Youth is so exciting. It'll take over. I don't want to be swept away. I want to be with the taking-over people, right to the end.

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?'

A lot of my movies have come to be thought about only years after the fact, and I'm sad about that but also happy about it in a way, as it's given them longevity.

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.

Any cuts that are done to any film, they're usually things that have some personal resonance for whoever has got permission to cut it and feels they should. But it has very little to do with the actual weight, the truth, of the piece.

I hate it when people talk about Tony Curtis and say: 'His real name was Bernie Schwartz... ' That was just the name that he was given at birth. It's not the person he lived his life with, and became.

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 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.

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.

I've always felt that, although Truffaut was greatly revered and admired, at the same time, in terms of film and how much he loved film, he was underestimated.

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.

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.

We're selective about sound, we tune out things, or maybe you overhear something - and that's an area that's as yet totally unexplored.

I stayed at MGM for about two years, and in that time I became part of the camera crew and worked my way up to be a focus puller.

So quite a lot of people who've come into cinema from the commercials world have had to learn the very fact of what cinematography is over again.

Soon, just as people can now go to Rymans and buy paper to start writing a book, they'll be able to get stuff to start shooting a film.

In marketing, the familiar is everything.

My father was an extraordinary man.

Mirrors are the essence of movies.

In life, we all learn from everyone.

Movies which set out to be 'commercial' usually have an artificial look about them-a certain waxlike quality. They allow for no failure, no moment of mistake.