Time & Perspective Quote by Nicolas Roeg

Roeg isn’t romanticizing amateur painters so much as diagnosing the compulsion behind looking. The village watercolour society “struggle this way and that to find the perfect moment” reads like a gentle skewering of aesthetic panic: the fear that beauty is real but only briefly accessible, and that you’ll miss it unless you plant your tripod in the correct patch of grass. Roeg watches from the window, placed in the position he often gives his characters: near the action but slightly removed, alert to how desire and perception choreograph people.

The line “God has made every angle on that beautiful” isn’t piety; it’s a provocation. If every angle is beautiful, then the hunt for the “perfect moment” becomes less about the landscape and more about the artist’s need to impose hierarchy on abundance. Nature, in Roeg’s framing, is not stingy. Humans are. We edit, we narrow, we select - partly because selection is craft, partly because selection is control.

“I felt that tremendously” lands with surprising nakedness for a director associated with cool formal daring. It hints at the private engine behind his visual style: the belief that reality is already overdetermined with meaning, and filmmaking is an argument with that excess. The painters’ fidgeting is also a mirror of cinema itself: a medium built on picking one angle and one moment while knowing, uncomfortably, that countless other angles were just as true. Roeg’s empathy is in the tension - not mocking the search, but recognizing it as the price of making anything at all.