Nicolas Roeg

“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.”

“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'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.”

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

“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 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.”

“Mirrors are the essence of movies.”

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

“Fear has many faces.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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