Art & Creativity Quote by Nicolas Roeg

Roeg is drawing a hard border around cinema at the exact moment most people keep trying to smudge it. “Movies are not scripts” isn’t a swipe at writers so much as a refusal to let the blueprint outrank the building. A script can be exquisite and still be, in Roeg’s worldview, an instrument panel: useful, partial, not the flight. By insisting movies are “films,” he’s pointing to the medium’s irreducible grammar - light, time, cuts, sound, texture, the way an image can imply what dialogue would only underline.

The quick pile-up of negatives (“not books,” “not the theatre”) reads like a defensive maneuver against prestige hierarchies. Literature gets credit for intellect; theatre gets credit for seriousness and performance; cinema, historically, gets treated as a delivery system for other arts. Roeg’s line pushes back: film is not secondhand culture. It’s its own way of thinking, closer to sensation and memory than to exposition.

Context matters. Roeg’s career (Performance, Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth) is basically a long argument that narrative should behave like consciousness: fractured, associative, haunted by what you don’t quite see. His editing collapses cause and effect into mood; his images carry meaning the way dreams do, without asking permission from plot.

Subtext: stop judging cinema by how well it “adapts” or “faithfully” translates. The measure is whether the film creates a lived experience - whether it makes time feel different. Roeg is staking a claim that the camera doesn’t illustrate stories; it composes reality.