Education Quote by Nicolas Roeg

A director’s version of “earn your chaos,” Roeg’s line defends rebellion from the charge of being mere sloppiness. Coming out of cinema, it’s a pointed shot at the mythology of the pure instinctive genius. Film sets run on rules: continuity, coverage, eyelines, pacing, narrative causality. Break them without understanding and you don’t get daring; you get incoherence. Break them on purpose and you get meaning.

Roeg’s own work is the receipt. He’s associated with fractured timelines, jumpy edits, and sensual, disorienting montage (the kind of “mistakes” that make traditionalists reach for smelling salts). Yet those ruptures land because they’re calibrated. They manipulate viewer expectation, not by rejecting craft, but by exploiting it. The audience has internalized the rules of storytelling; Roeg weaponizes that literacy. When he scrambles chronology, you feel time as memory. When he cuts against continuity, desire and dread leak into the seams.

The subtext is almost moral: ignorance isn’t authenticity, it’s absence. In art culture, “no rules” often gets sold as freedom, especially to newcomers hungry to skip the tedious part. Roeg draws a line between rule-breaking as critique and rule-breaking as not bothering. It’s also a quiet defense of tradition as something you metabolize, not something you obey. The rulebook isn’t a cage; it’s the map that lets you choose where to set the fire.