Daily Inspiration Quote by Nicolas Roeg

Roeg isn’t dunking on marketing so much as warning what happens when the trailer starts writing the movie. Coming from a director who made films that trusted audiences to keep up (and didn’t always get rewarded for it), his line reads like a quiet manifesto: promotion can help a work find its people, but when it becomes the governing logic, the work shrinks to fit the pitch.

The phrasing is telling. “Very good thing” is concession, almost diplomatic, acknowledging the real-world machinery that keeps films financed and seen. Then he draws a hard boundary: marketing should be “the tool,” not the hand on the steering wheel. The subtext is an argument about authorship and risk. When marketing dictates, choices get reverse-engineered from focus groups, four-quadrant fantasies, and poster-friendly loglines. Editing rhythms flatten. Ambiguity becomes “confusing.” The strange, the slow, the morally complicated get treated as liabilities because they’re harder to sell in 15 seconds.

Roeg’s career sits right at the fault line where this tension became industry religion: the shift from cinema as director-led art to cinema as IP-managed product. His movies often worked by fragmentation and mood, by meaning that arrives late or sideways. That’s exactly the kind of experience marketing struggles to promise without taming it first.

There’s also a broader cultural barb here. “It shouldn’t control everything” isn’t just about film; it’s a diagnosis of a society where branding becomes a substitute for value, and where the metrics of attention start masquerading as taste. Roeg is insisting on an older idea: the work leads, the sales follow, or you end up selling a hollowed-out version of the thing you meant to make.