Guess quote

Nicolas Roeg [1928-0] English

Rank: 101
Director, Film director

Nicolas Jack Roeg CBE BSC is an English film director and cinematographer.
After National Service he entered the film business as a tea boy moving up to clapper-loader, the bottom rung of the camera department, at Marylebone Studios in London.

Learning, Movies, Sad

Quote	Tags	Rank
You make the movie through the cinematography - it sounds quite a simple idea, but it was like a huge revelation to me.		101
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.		102
Men and women's needs and desires overlap but go in different directions as well.		103
The rules are learnt in order to be broken, but if you don't know them, then something is missing.		104
Film remains completely mystical and mysterious to me.		105
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.		106
And later I thought, I can't think how anyone can become a director without learning the craft of cinematography.	Learning	107
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.'		108
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.		109
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.		110
Our memory and the movies keep movie stars alive for us, and Tony Curtis is still a star.		111
Marketing is a very good thing, but it shouldn't control everything. It should be the tool, not that which dictates.		112
Movies are not scripts - movies are films; they're not books, they're not the theatre.	Movies	113
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.		114
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!		115
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.		116
Our lives are full of all the genres. Fear and hope and sadness.		117
You cannot intellectualize yourself out of obsession. You cannot cure yourself of it.		118
But in marketing, the familiar is everything, and that is controlled by the studio. That is reaching its apogee now.		119
Children's finger-painting came under the arts, but movies didn't.		120
In life, we all learn from everyone.		121
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.		122
Marketing is such a key issue; in fact, the marketing department is often involved in the approval of scripts now.		123
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.		124
We're all influenced by everything unless we're locked in an empty room.		125
I realized I've spent all my life creating a past.		126
I've always thought there was something very marvelous and magical about mirrors, and that they are connected to memory as well.		201
You can't hide in life. We are all being watched by some larger vision.		202
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.		203
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.		204
Fear has many faces.		205
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.		206
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.		207
Years ago I had a house in Sussex, it was like Arcadia, with an old Victorian bridge, a pond and the Downs.		208
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.		209
There's no one 'right' way of making a science fiction movie; there's no one way of making any kind of movie, really!		210
Oh, some of my films have been attacked with absolute vitriol!		211
I was always a bit arty-farty as a boy. 'Come on, Mr. Arty-Farty,' my sister used to say to me.		212
I came up the old-fashioned way - tea boy, cutter, focus-puller, cinematographer - but I wasn't myself old-fashioned.		213
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?'		214
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.	Sad	215
My father was an extraordinary man.		216
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?'		217
I don't look back on any film I've done with fondness or pride.		218
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.		219
We all have our beliefs or our agnosticism.		220
I wouldn't like to be a non-believer in anything.		221
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.		222
How can you judge one film against another?		223
'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.		224
There's horror in your life, believe me, whether it's coming, or you've just been lucky to miss it today.		225
I've been told my movies are difficult to market.		226
I've always noticed that films set in any sort of future very rarely draw on the present.		301
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.		302
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.		303
I generally try to avoid talking about my old films - I find it difficult.		304
Too many films today feel formulaic and familiar. I prefer it when the familiar is made to feel strange.		305
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.		306
Film can be more of a reality than a page with words can ever be.		307
Mirrors are the essence of movies.		308
'Puffball' is a love story... no, it's a life story.		309
Grief is an emotion that's almost unplayable because you're in a separate emotional state; it's an inconsolable emotion.		310
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.		311
Tony Curtis was a joy to work with. He had a curious innocence that is very young and wise at the same time.		312
I think the big studios shaped and formed the artists that they put under contract.		313
Nature repeats itself, but it never starts from the beginning.		314
We can't get our youth back.		315
I like women in film. I like women in general, but I especially like to show them on film. They are not ciphers.		316
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.		317
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.		318
When you admire someone's work, you are amazed by who you think they are.		319
I think I've never really liked the idea of genre, a film that follows the rules of a genre.		320
I like the probability of the impossible.		321
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.		322

The script ran 0.008 seconds.