Nicolas Roeg - biography

Biography

Nicolas Roeg is best-known for the following films:

Nicolas Roeg Quotes

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“There are three lovely critical expressions: pretentious, gratuitous, profound - none of which I truly understand.”

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

“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.”

“Time and speed are desperate shackles and terribly difficult to fight. But it’s worth having a go.”

“Halfway through shooting [Performance], they’d already started to hate it. Do you recall the scene in the bath with Mick, Anita and Michele? Someone from Hollywood complained the bath water was too dirty. I mean...!”

“Movies are not scripts - movies are films; they’re not books, they’re not the theatre.”

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

“In life, we all learn from everyone.”

“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.”

“Fear has many faces.”

“I don’t think of them as singers. They’re performers, prepared to get up and perform. Thy’re free of a pattern of acting I’m not happy with.”

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

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

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

Filmography

The Film Director