NICOLAS ROEG

PERFORMANCE ARTISTE…

Nicolas Jack Roeg (1928-2018) began his career at Marylebone Studios, which sat opposite his home. Over the 23 years before he became a director, he worked his way up: tea boy, clapper loader, camera operator… He was second-unit cinematographer on David Lean’s Lawrence Of Arabia and was DoP for such distinguished auteurs as François Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451), John Schlesinger (Far From The Madding Crowd) and Richard Lester (Petulia).

Roeg’s big break came with Performance in 1968 – or 1970, by the time Warner Bros finally released it. The studio had expected a straightforward Mick Jagger vehicle; instead, Roeg and co-director Donald Cammell handed in a kaleidoscopic, hedonistic picture that swirled with sex, drugs, violence and head-scratching issues of identity. In 1999, Performance was voted the 48th best British film of all time by the British Film Institute.

With solo directing efforts Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell To Earth and Bad Timing, Roeg established himself as a dazzling storyteller given to non-linear plots and disorientating edits. “I’ve never storyboarded,” he said. “I like the idea of chance.”

From 1983’s Eureka to his final narrative feature Puffball (2007), Roeg’s later films curried less favour with critics and audiences – even his genuinely nightmarish adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches (1990) flopped at the box office. “I’ve been told my movies are difficult to market,” he shrugged. “People love things in boxes. But it’s just life. Life and birth and sex and love – they don’t necessarily all go together.”

As well as Jagger in Performance, Roeg teased memorable performances from David Bowie in

The Man Who Fell To Earth and from Art Garfunkel, embroiled in an obsessive relationship with Theresa Russell, in Bad Timing. But the biggest rock star was Roeg himself, whose anarchic technique made him an icon to, among others, Soderbergh, Boyle and Nolan. The latter says Memento would have been “unthinkable” without Roeg. JG