Nicolas Roeg: A Magician in Exile

Nicolas Roeg: A Magician in Exile
by Richard T. Kelly


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.

"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.

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.

Five years later, Bad Timing — the quintessential Roeg title — discomfited both critics and paying crowds in its painful depiction of a ruinously obsessive affair between two Americans in Vienna, psychoanalyst Art Garfunkel and hard-partying Theresa Russell. In my adolescence, Bad Timing was the one movie my parents expressly forbade me to see, and nowadays I can see their point. Shooting and cutting sex scenes is one of Roeg's great fortes, a special badge of honour given cinema's usual failure to convey anything meaningful about human carnality. Mike Figgis has written with special admiration of how Roeg can show sex as "urgent and surprising," if occasionally shadowed by "the threat of violence." Ironically, Roeg nearly decided to leave the great lovemaking passage of Don't Look Now on the cutting-room floor, before deciding that it was a necessary expression of the love between Donald Sutherland's and Julie Christie's characters.

One gets the sense that Roeg's creative choices are always careful and felt but never preordained. A screenplay in his hands is no sort of a blueprint. "Stories begin with writers," he stresses, "but they're evolving all the time. Obviously you have to prepare certain skeletal things, but it's like the line in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre — 'You don't see the gold beneath your feet.'" It's with great relish that he recalls the first day's shooting of The Man Who Fell To Earth in New Mexico, when the scene of a newly-landed Newton's walk into a remote desert town was interrupted by a belching drunkard. "David said to me, 'What do I do!?' and I said, 'Keep walking…'" Roeg kept rolling, and that was the take he used. (Bowie even paid a sort of homage to said drunkard through his gesture of inebriate sorrow in the movie's famous final shot.)

On set Roeg has always wanted to be surprised — his passion is for what the camera can steal, moments in time, which can't be prepared for exhaustively, and would never be quite the same over a hundred further takes. On this score, he remembers differing with Jim Henson when they collaborated on The Witches (1990), in which evil Anjelica Huston turns children into mice. Henson wanted to use animatronic rodents, which to Roeg's eye "all looked all kangaroos." Instead Roeg found a mouse-trainer who had a particularly lively little performer in his care by the name of Bruno.

You sense that Roeg, in his pursuit of originality, has enjoyed making his movies — more so than directors who have made careers out of executing storyboards or trying to grind out formula hits. But he does acknowledge that the process contains its own special sadness. "John Huston once said that directing was rather like being the mayor of a mining town — everybody's working long days to the same end, there's fun to be had. Then the mine closes, the population leaves, the town is deserted and the director is the last person left. Huston said, 'Taken all in all, it's a rather melancholy affair.' And it is a loss, curiously, the end of a film — because your life has been in it. Your personal life has been put aside. It's a cliché, but the films are like children."

Roeg's filmic offspring have had difficult lives here and there. Eureka (1983), a brave parable starring Gene Hackman as a millionaire gold-prospector, was made and poorly released under the troubled David Begelman regime at MGM, got lost and rediscovered, but now seems to have got lost again. Cold Heaven (1991), based on a novel by Brian Moore, was rich material for Roeg but was made to suffer in post-production and surely deserved better. It was also the last of Roeg's half-dozen collaborations with Theresa Russell, whom he met on Bad Timing and with whom he had two children. They then separated, but their work together defined both of them for a decade, and neither has enjoyed quite the same attention since. In 2006, for instance, Roeg shot an adaptation of Fay Weldon's novel Puffball, intended to be his first theatrical feature since 1995, but only this summer will it see a limited UK release, while in the US it is strictly an On-Demand item. "It's a strange business now," says Roeg, with a heavier sigh than usual.

Roeg doesn't revisit his older films, even when called on to record commentaries for DVD releases. "I don't have a favourite," he maintains, "they're all of a time and that time has gone by. Of course, I'd like Eureka to live, but it'll live as long as it lives…" He supports his philosophy with reference to a yet more luminous name who didn't want to live off former glories: "It began to annoy Orson Welles — I mean, The Magnificent Ambersons is a huge movie, but all people would say of it was that it wasn't Citizen Kane…"

Like Welles, Roeg has expanded the possibilities of cinema, and still he retains a youthful enthusiasm for new technology's potential to liberate the capture and storage of imagery: "Everybody now is so aware of the retention of the image, there's been nothing like it before. But that's what first drew me to film, more than any individual film or filmmaker. Now you have these incredible iPhones…" If there is a ruefulness in Roeg over such developments, one suspects it is only for the fading photochemical art-form in which he was apprenticed: "The weird thing is that one's grandchildren will say, 'I don't get it, what is a 'film'? Why was it ever called 'film'?' You can start explaining about celluloid and light and they'll say, 'Oh…'"

Then again, this just might never happen. As a literary wit once remarked, the novels of Jackie Collins will be read and enjoyed long after Shakespeare has been forgotten — but not until then. And as long as the Bard has legs, I would expect that brand new eyes will be discovering and marvelling at the films of Nicolas Roeg.