Daily Inspiration Quote by Nicolas Roeg

Roeg’s relief here isn’t about ego; it’s about escaping a particular kind of creative hostage situation. Coming up as a cinematographer before becoming a director, he’s describing the quiet asymmetry that can haunt film sets: directors “own” the story, but the camera department owns the image-making grammar. If you don’t speak that grammar, you’re stuck translating taste into vague wishes - “make it moodier,” “more dreamlike” - and then praying the person holding the lens shares your instincts.

The subtext is control, but not the petty kind. Roeg is arguing for literacy: the ability to see a scene before it exists, to anticipate what blocking, lens choice, light, and movement will do to time, intimacy, and meaning. His films trade on precisely that alchemy. In works like Don’t Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth, visual decisions aren’t decorative; they’re narrative engines, bending chronology and perception. A director who can talk shop with a cinematographer isn’t micromanaging so much as protecting the film’s internal logic from becoming an accident of coverage.

There’s also a collaborative note buried in the line: “we could discuss.” Roeg isn’t rejecting cinematographers; he’s rejecting blind faith. The ideal set, in his view, is an argument conducted in images, where intention survives the practical chaos of production because both sides share the same technical vocabulary. It’s a craft-based democracy: the camera isn’t a service department, it’s a co-author - but only if the director can read the draft.