Nicolas Roeg: A Magician in Exile

Nearly 80, Nicolas Roeg is still making movies. It may yet be his fate to be remembered best for the brilliant run of pictures he made back in the 1970s. But is that such a misfortune when the movies in question are among the most daring and influential ever made, confirming Roeg's place among the great directors? Here Richard T Kelly talks to Roeg about a career built upon stealing moments in time, and resolving to never look back.

David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth

"When I was 12 years old" — says Nicolas Roeg, so casting his memory back to 1940 — "my father said the most extraordinary thing to me. 'The day you're born is your only chance to really have tomorrow, because by the day after you've got yesterday.' At the time I was completely confused, but gradually it began to make a little sense…" Roeg chuckles over this act of recall, perfectly aware of its irony. For if cinema is — as art schools like to define it — a "time-based medium," then Roeg is possibly foremost among those filmmakers who have articulated and poeticized our stubborn sense that time is really in the eye of the beholder. In Roeg's work the past, present and future can seem to co-exist in the same fleeting moment. Not for nothing did he put Albert Einstein in the movies, by way of filming Terry Johnson's play Insignificance (1985).

David Bowie, who played a visiting alien called Newton in The Man Who Fell To Earth (1975), once described his director fondly as a "warlock." Three decades on there remains much of the mystical and the mischievous about this brilliant man. Recently I called on Roeg at his home in London's Notting Hill — only a few streets away from 81 Powis Square, site of Mick Jagger's bohemian lair in Performance (1970) — and was unsurprised to be led into a study crammed with good books and fascinating objets d'art. A few weeks later I interviewed Roeg in front of a cinema audience after a screening of Bad Timing (1980), and watched as ardent fans pestered him with questions all the way from the stage to the street. I know how they feel: Roeg is a hero to me too.

He is a veteran now, and his more recent work has struggled to get onto screens. Yet his earlier films are endlessly current, bursting with visual ideas. The sad, sinister Don't Look Now (1973) was lately revisited by Martin McDonagh's In Bruges, but has inspired a hundred lesser works of the macabre, and contains what might be cinema's most evocative sex scene — between a bereaved husband and wife, no less. The many moviegoers who think George Clooney's tryst with Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight (1998) holds the mantle of the Hottest Thing Ever Committed to Celluloid are often unaware that Steven Soderbergh, too, was affectionately riffing on Roeg.

The endurance of his influence is one more thing that seems mildly to amuse Roeg. He remembers an early screening of The Man Who Fell to Earth after which his producer enthused to him that, however the film might fare critically or commercially, his fellow directors would be ripping him off in no time. Roeg himself is not especially cinephile, preferring to hold up life — everybody and everything in the world — as his main creative influence. But he was thoroughly trained within the film business. Back in the 1950s he served an apprenticeship in the cutting rooms of Soho, and in idle moments over lunch-hour he would run film back and forth through the Steenbeck, finding himself amused and intrigued by the resultant effects.

Don't Look Now

He then made his name as a DP, shooting Roger Corman's The Masque of the Red Death (1964), François Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 (1965) and Richard Lester's Petulia (1968). Those films were so distinctive and yet somehow kindred — in their use of colour as much as their boldness of theme and structure — that with hindsight one can see the outline of Roeg the director. (In due course, critic Derek Malcolm would question whether Roeg's directorial efforts were essentially "cinematographer's films"; Roeg, aware that Malcolm had once been a steeple-chase jockey, wondered in turn whether Malcolm ever felt he wrote jockey's reviews.) By the time Performance and Walkabout (1971) were released, the cognoscenti had decided Roeg was an auteur (even if this was to neglect Performance's writer and co-director Donald Cammell.) But it seemed clear that on top of a Roegian style there were Roegian themes — in particular, the notion of the individual cast adrift from his or her familiar moorings, both moral and physical.

Another signature was that Roeg clearly had no fear of the erotic or aggressive currents in his chosen material. No doubt this was partly why the films often inspired what Roeg calls "violent reactions." He can well remember — without malice — John Simon's description of Performance in the New York Times as "loathsome;" and Pauline Kael's crabby response to Don't Look Now. The Man Who Fell to Earth was disowned by its financiers at Paramount after chairman Barry Diller complained of its "non-linear" nature. The studio had doubtless hoped for a sci-fi hit to showcase rock sensation Bowie, but the picture Roeg turned in seemed as much concerned with the loneliness of an Englishman in America. "We're all aliens," says Roeg, not obviously concerned that his and Diller's tastes should have failed to coincide.