Don’t Look Now director’s dazzling style was often lost on critics and audiences
Making a movie is like making a marvellous soup, according to Nicolas Roeg, who has died aged 90. ‘‘The actors, the cameraman, the editor, writer, producer, technicians – everyone, they’re all in this soup. But the taster of this soup is the director.’’
If that was the case, the recipe for The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), starring David Bowie, was a spicy one. Its ingredients included a renegade director, a cocainefuelled pop star who had never acted in a fulllength film, an inhospitable location in New Mexico, a well-oiled British crew, and an adaptation of Walter Tevis’ novel that was widely considered to be unfilmable.
Even before
work began,
Roeg and Bowie
were engaged in mind games. Roeg was invited to Bowie’s apartment in New York at 10pm, but the singer kept him waiting until 5am for an interview that lasted a matter of minutes. Once in the desert, Roeg tapped into Bowie’s paranoia by giving his fragile star little guidance. The result was a bewildering, sometimes surreal X-rated film that included heavy drinking and explicit sexuality as Bowie’s humanoid alien character discovers earthly pleasures and vices.
Three years earlier Roeg had directed an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now, a creepy arthouse horror set in fogbound Venice where Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland experience disturbing premonitions while mourning their dead daughter. One particularly intense sex scene was rumoured to have been real, an accusation that Roeg regarded as ‘‘very flattering’’, adding, ‘‘of course it’s sexy. It’s because it had truth in it’’.
Many of his films received a mixed reception, but came to enjoy cult status thanks to his unerring eye for psychological detail. ‘‘I like playing with film form,’’ he explained in 1980. ‘‘I want to write on the front of the cinema, ‘Abandon all preconceptions, ye who enter here.’ Let it get to you, let it happen. Then it will be exciting.’’
Nicolas Jack Roeg was born in north London. He had an older sister, Nicolette, an actress who died in 1987. As children they would visit the cinema, while at home their father made up fairytales for them. ‘‘I was always a bit arty-farty as a boy,’’ he recalled.
He wanted to join the RAF, but with the war ending trainee pilots were no longer being recruited, so he served with the 16th Independent Parachute Regiment, passing spare moments as his unit’s projectionist.
From working as the clapper-boy on The Miniver Story (1950), starring Greer Garson, Roeg rose the long, hard way via cuttingrooms, cameras and script writing. He was the lighting cameraman on The Caretaker (1963), Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and Far From the Madding Crowd (1967). He worked with David
Nicolas Roeg film director b August 15, 1928 d November 23, 2018
Lean on Lawrence of Arabia (1962). However, his zest for experimentation irked Lean, who fired him from Doctor Zhivago (1965); Freddie Young, Roeg’s successor, won an Academy Award for best cinematography, the closest Roeg came to an Oscar.
Roeg teamed up with Donald Cammell to cast Mick Jagger in Performance (1970), a bewildering mixture of gangster flick and psychedelic puzzle described by Life magazine’s critic as ‘‘the most completely worthless film I have ever seen since I began reviewing’’. His first solo turn as director was with Walkabout (1971), a journey of spiritual and sexual awakening featuring a white brother and sister (played by Roeg’s son Luc and Jenny Agutter) who are abandoned in the Australian Outback and taught to fend for themselves by an Aboriginal teenager (David Gulpilil).
By Bad Timing (1980), starring the American actress Theresa Russell in an obsessive relationship with Art Garfunkel’s Freudian psychology lecturer, Roeg had firmly defined his personal style. This film, notable for no fewer than 47 cigarettes being smoked, was composed of a mosaic of small pieces, flitting backwards and forwards in time and place. However, the boss of Rank, its distributor, described it as ‘‘a sick film made by sick people for sick people’’. During filming Roeg almost lost Garfunkel and the crew by working them for 24 hours without a break.
Castaway (1986), starring Amanda Donohoe and Oliver Reed, was based on the true story of Lucy Irvine who had replied to an advertisement placed by the writer Gerald Kingsland seeking an accomplice to live on a remote island. It was a more straightforward narrative and consequently a less interesting film.
Marrying people he met at work was ‘‘inevitable’’, he told The Times in 2009. The first of these was the actress Susan Stephen in 1957. They had four children: Waldo, Nico, Luc, and Sholto. The marriage was dissolved in 1977 and Stephen died in 2000.
He had married Russell in 1982. They had two children: Statten and Max. The marriage was dissolved in 2004. The next year he married Harriett Harper, who had appeared in Far from the Madding Crowd. ‘‘She gets annoyed when I introduce her as my present wife,’’ he quipped. Harper survives him with his six sons and four grandchildren.
He had little time for awards, which was just as well because his trophy shelf remained stubbornly empty. ‘‘How can you judge one film against another?’’ he would ask. Receiving an honorary Bafta in 2009, he declared: ‘‘I’m not dead yet.’’
His memoir, The World is Ever Changing, is, like his films, full of elliptical thoughts. Towards the end, Roeg began to slide off into mystical and supernatural tangents. ‘‘Is reincarnation so insane?’’ he mused. ‘‘If anything, reincarnation of the spirit would seem more reasonable than the Paradise so many young people are committing suicide for; especially in light of the particularly mortal pleasures that are promised as reward for the super-faithful who take that step.’’ –
The Times
He had little time for awards, which was just as well because his trophy shelf remained stubbornly empty. ‘‘How can you judge one film against another?’’ he would ask.