When a book is just a plot, you know, two men fight for the love of a woman in a wild frontier, I immediately ask, 'Why?'
— Nicolas Roeg
I was always a bit arty-farty as a boy. 'Come on, Mr. Arty-Farty,' my sister used to say to me.
I've always admired the tradition of storytellers who sat in the public market and told their stories to gathered crowds. They'd start with a single premise and talk for hours - the notion of one story, ever-changing but never-ending.
Years ago I had a house in Sussex, it was like Arcadia, with an old Victorian bridge, a pond and the Downs.
The rules are learnt in order to be broken, but if you don't know them, then something is missing.
Movies are not scripts - movies are films; they're not books, they're not the theatre.
I was very glad later when I was directing that I wasn't in the hands of a cinematographer and hoping that he would do it well. I would know what he was doing, and we could discuss how that scene would look.
But in marketing, the familiar is everything, and that is controlled by the studio. That is reaching its apogee now.
Film remains completely mystical and mysterious to me.
Oh, some of my films have been attacked with absolute vitriol!
I imagine if aliens came down to Earth, they'd actually be quite tall; people seem to get everything right about extraterrestrials but the size!
They think something's gone wrong, but in Don't Look Now, for instance, one scene was made by a mistake. It's the scene where Donald Sutherland goes to look for the policeman who's investigating the two women.
The great difference between screen acting and theatre acting is that screen acting is about reacting - 75% of the time, great screen actors are great reactors.
Marketing is a very good thing, but it shouldn't control everything. It should be the tool, not that which dictates.
Fear has many faces.
Any change in form produces a fear of change, and that has accelerated. Marketing is the death of invention, because marketing deals with the familiar.
I came up the old-fashioned way - tea boy, cutter, focus-puller, cinematographer - but I wasn't myself old-fashioned.
There's no one 'right' way of making a science fiction movie; there's no one way of making any kind of movie, really!
You make the movie through the cinematography - it sounds quite a simple idea, but it was like a huge revelation to me.
There was a village watercolour society and they'd come and paint in my field. I watched them from the window, the way they would struggle this way and that to find the perfect moment. God has made every angle on that beautiful, and I felt that tremendously.
Some people are very lucky, and have the story in their heads. I've never storyboarded anything. I like the idea of chance. What makes God laugh is people who make plans.
In life, we all learn from everyone.
Children's finger-painting came under the arts, but movies didn't.
And later I thought, I can't think how anyone can become a director without learning the craft of cinematography.
