Happiness Quote by Nicolas Roeg

Roeg’s genius was never about neatness; it was about collision. In this quote, he’s staking out a philosophy of filmmaking that treats control as a kind of superstition. “Some people are very lucky, and have the story in their heads” sounds almost like a backhanded compliment: the clean, pre-visualized narrative is framed as luck, not mastery. By contrast, his refusal to storyboard isn’t laziness or bravado. It’s a declaration that discovery is the point, that meaning arrives through friction - between shots, between performances, between what you intended and what the day gives you.

“I like the idea of chance” is also a sly defense of his famously fractured editing and temporal hopscotch. Roeg’s films (Don’t Look Now, Walkabout, The Man Who Fell to Earth) don’t just depict disorientation; they’re built out of it. Chance becomes an aesthetic, a moral position: life doesn’t present itself in three acts, so why should cinema pretend it does?

The God line lands as gallows humor with teeth. It borrows the proverb’s punch to puncture the cult of the plan - not only in art, but in the modern obsession with optimization. Subtext: planning can be a way of avoiding risk, of insulating yourself from the present tense where anything (including failure) can happen. Roeg isn’t rejecting craft; he’s rejecting the fantasy of total authorship. For a director who made uncertainty feel cinematic, the joke is also a warning: the more you tighten your grip on the story, the less alive it gets.