JAGGER PAINTS IT BLACK IN PERFORMANCE
Filmed in 1968, Donald Cammell’s masterpiece PERFORMANCE starred Mick Jagger as ex-rock star Turner, living in twilit exile in Notting Hill. When James Fox’s hunted gangster Chas Devlin seeks refuge, an evil, psychedelic convergence of violence, morality, sexuality and spectacle begins. Fifty years on, new book Performance – The Making Of A Classic presents Jagger, Fox, co-director Nic Roeg, who died last month, and others recall the creation of a film that achieved madness…
Mick Jagger: “I hadn’t really given any serious thought of being in films. Donald was so enthusiastic and so convinced that the role of Turner was something that I could do, I wanted to give it a go. We were young and when you’re young you have no fear… There has been a lot of rubbish written about all the pseudo side of things, but it was no more than Donald had written a part of a rock star and I was a mate. The difference was I knew Donald really well. He wasn’t someone who I met in a meeting in LA pitching me a part in his movie. We had a trust and friendship.”
Donald Cammell, screenwriter/co-director: “I was interested in the idea of an artist at the end of the road. It could have been any kind of artist: a painter, a writer, a concert pianist. But I had
access to the biggest rock’n’roll singer in the world, and I was interested in that world. And there is no art form in which the violent impulse is more implicit than in rock music. And I was very interested in what was happening with Mick at that time, the flirtation with Their Satanic Majesties…”
Ken Hyman, head of Warner-Seven Arts UK: ”Performance came along and it fitted in with what was termed in those days as the ‘Youth Market’. I have to say that I wasn’t enamoured with the script, as it was. But we had just acquired Atlantic Records, and Ahmet Ertegun, who ran the label, was very anxious to do a deal with Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones for Atlantic.”
MJ: “Obviously I was playing myself a little but it really wasn’t me because I wasn’t that kinda person, so you have to imagine yourself becoming that person, living that kind of reclusive lifestyle. I think Donald had this fantasy version of what he felt a rock star’s life was like when he came up with Turner, but for me it really was a case of looking and feeling confident, and that comes across on the screen.”
Sandy Lieberson, producer: “I had seen [James Fox] in [1963 film] The Servant and felt confident he could be our Chas. Donald and I believed he could transform himself into an East End gangster. Casting against type really excited me.”
James Fox , Chas Devlin: “Donald handed me the script. I was immediately taken with it… he saw something in me that I hadn’t recognised, something angry and violent. In fact, Donald, I felt, looked at violence very much like a painter, he would dissect its components, really drilling down into the glamour… I think once in a lifetime you get the chance to help create a character like Chas. I had to transform myself into Chas and then transform from the hardnosed gangster to somebody who came under the spell of the hippy world… it was such a range, so I would say it was my best performance.”
DC: “A lot of [the inspiration for the character of Chas] was based on a man called Jimmy Evans. He killed a number of people and was known as a man who enjoyed the mayhem. He was a highly adrenalised character, very good looking; he walked like that, he talked like that. He was a real East End hood and I was a bit frightened of him.”
Billy Murray, Steve: “It just felt so real. You’d go out during that time and see guys all dressed like George Raft, immaculate, and at the drop of a hat the atmosphere could turn. That feeling is all over those gangster scenes in Performance. Much of this was down to [showbiz/underworld-affiliated film consultant] David Litvinoff, and of course he had influenced Donald.”
JF: “I took up boxing and got myself fit. I spent hours in the gym. Just being around those guys helped me find Chas. I met with [East End villain] Ronnie, Ronnie Kray. You add the haircut and the clothes I took to wearing, and living in the area, and it felt great, quite liberating actually… a big part of my research for Performance brought me into the world of boxing.”
BM: “Ronnie, being gay, took a shine to me, he fancied anything that moved. Did Ronnie fancy me? I would have been upset if he didn’t fancy me! Look if you had to choose to be pals with either Ronnie or Reggie [Kray], you’d always choose Ronnie. Ronnie was funny, he was good company. He knew I wasn’t gay and that was cool. Yes, he was a psychopath, but I can communicate with psychopaths. As soon as you read the script, [it was clear] that Harry Flowers was based on Ronnie Kray. I thought it wise to pass it by Ronnie. ‘Ronnie, I’m doing a film and it’s all about you.’ ‘Does it slag me off, son?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, that’s all right then innit.’”
Stanley Meadows, Rosebloom: “Scenes like when us ‘chaps’ shave the chauffeur’s hair – that was pretty shocking at the time. [Actor] John Sterland actually agreed to have his hair shaved. I remember David Litvinoff being there and insisting this had to happen. He’d been there and knew an awful lot about that world. Bloody frightening stuff when you look back, really.”
Nic Roeg, co-director: “Often violence in films is a pantomime, people get shot and they get up. You see them getting the shit beaten out of them without any consequence. I have always been very conscious of the huge responsibility involved in filming someone being shot… with Performance, I felt it important to show that horror and, as I said, highlight that it’s more than just bang-bang-bang. And yes, we are born in violence, we are violent creatures and we have to understand that. But I felt then, and still feel, that if we start to relish violence,then that is it,we are lost.”
MJ: “I knew all the people that Donald surrounded himself with. They classed themselves as the underworld and gangsters, but I’m not sure they
“THE VIOLENT IMPULSE IS IMPLICIT IN ROCK MUSIC.” Donald Cammell
actually were – you know people like Johnny Bindon [Moody] and Johnny Shannon [Harry Flowers]. It was kinda like a frisson of danger for Donald… Casting these real life people, or close to it, rather than just actors, brought this sense of authenticity. That was the thing, in a way, of the film, to stay away from too much conventional acting; obviously you had James and Anita [Pallenberg] who had acted, but it gave Performance that neo-realism Donald was after.”
JF: “To me, because Mick and Anita’s characters conspire against Chas, it’s a myth that’s been built up around the film that it was actually perpetrated against me. Anita was never a problem for me. Whether Donald gave her those instructions or not I don’t know, but I always found her to be great. It’s just another myth that’s been allowed to grow over time and I have no issue with any of them, they only add to the allure of the film… Mick and I were friends. However, his character was isolated, a harder person than the Mick I had known, more cynical. I don’t think his acting in Performance has received all the credit it deserves.”
MJ: “I think knowing the material really well helped with any nerves. I knew it as well as Donald, as well as anybody. It wasn’t like going on to a huge Hollywood set, which is kinda nerve-wracking when you’re confronted by this massive green screen and a huge crew. It was my acting debut, but I was with people I knew and my scenes were in a small room in a London house. It wasn’t that difficult really. [Design consultant] Christopher Gibbs did a great job on the interiors, it didn’t feel like a set at all.”
SL: “[Nic and Donald] both brought their ideas to the visual side of it but Nic was always a partner, he was always a co-director. The two of them became a single focus on the story, on the characters, what was being said, so it was an intimate relationship. They were on the set together, they would have dinner together, they were talking together, they were drinking together, they were smoking together – whatever. So it was an incredibly intense, personal and exciting relationship to see.”
MJ: [Of the reputedly authentic sex Turner has with paramours Pherber and Lucy, played by Pallenberg and Michele Breton] “I’ll stick to that word ‘mythical’, and say all the stories around the filming of those scenes in Performance are so good I’m not going to deny them!”
SL: “[When portions of the film were destroyed by developers at Humphries Laboratory, fearing prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act, it] was one of the most bizarre exercises I have ever witnessed. We went down to the basement and on the concrete floor they removed the film from the cans and with a hammer and a chisel they proceeded to destroy the print. Why they used a chisel I don’t know. I was just bewildered, we were not making a porno movie! “[Warners] were going to stop the money to the film. They didn’t like any of it. They hated the violence, calling it sadistic, and the three-way sex. My view was, allow us to complete the film and then re-evaluate things and they could then decide if they wished to release it… thankfully, Ken is a wise guy and saw the logic behind my argument and we continued shooting.”
JF: “There would be constant script changes, especially toward the end. My recollection is that the second part of the film, if you like, was always left open. Donald and Nic wanted to see what would happen in Turner’s house. And boy did things happen!”
MJ: “Memo From Turner [which Jagger sings to the assembled mobsters, while persuading them to take their clothes off] is like watching a total kind of video, a foreshadowing of MTV. It’s very cleverly done, although at the time I didn’t quite understand what Don wanted in that scene when he told me – it was sort of thrown in a bit last minute and wasn’t in the original parts of the scripts. It was a sequence that he added later.”
SM: “Why the nude scene came about I have no idea, just one of the ideas that were thrown around on a daily basis. There was just no way I was going to do it. I actually had it written into my contract that I would not display my
genitals… Donald tried to sell me that [Francis] Bacon baloney, but I was having none of it. Nic shot me from the chest down to my belly button. That is as far as I was going.”
SL: “Despite all the headaches I felt it was a very happy shoot. We had the film in the shape we wanted. It was the cut we wanted to show Warner Brothers. However, Warner Bros organised a preview of Performance on an unsuspecting audience at the Granada Theatre in LA on March 20, a Friday, and we kicked off the screening at 10pm… It was a disaster! All the Warners top brass were in attendance… bizarrely, they also invited the head of the ratings board in the US, Dr Aaron Stern, who was also a psychiatrist. It was a very tense atmosphere. The Santa Monica audience had no idea what they were going to see. They were not young and hip. They were a middle-aged, staid cinema-going audience. It was a great cinematic disaster and for that reason alone it should go down in the history books.”
NR: “We were invited along to an industry party after the screening. It was the last place we really wanted to be. It was probably originally intended as a celebration but guests were walking away from us. I remember that we found ourselves in a room on our own; we were pariahs!”
MJ: “They found it hard to understand, too much sex, too much violence, it was not going to appeal to a mass audience. I mean, what were they expecting? …it was an English art movie with a low budget and never going to be a mass market A Hard’s Day Night… they took a violent reaction to the whole movie but when things calm down you come together and say, ‘Right, what can we do?’ They wanted my character to come in earlier but hey, that’s pretty normal. [After the re-cut, released in 1970] Donald went on for years as to how they destroyed his movie.”
JF: “The whole edit is a story in itself. You can understand to a degree the issue Warners had from a business decision, they didn’t end up with the film they thought they were getting, and the subject matter, I thought, was going to be tricky. But for the film to be held back for that length of time was a surprise when you consider other films of that period… I was disappointed that during that editing process they cut out some really wonderful stuff; in particular the story of Chas was shortened and that I felt was a shame.”
Frank Mazzola, film editor: “I knew I was going to have to slide things back and forth and extend something to hit right on a note, on a frame. I could do three or four or five of these cuts and it would go, Bang! It was perfect. It was like a beat, an abstract beat, and all of the beats work no matter where they were. I understand now what was going on. There was a sense of poetry. There was a sense of music and metre and visual metre, because film is a visual metre. How did we get into that madness? It just unfolded. It was there for us to discover, like going into a diamond goldmine or something and there’s the vein. They wanted Mick Jagger in earlier and we had to figure out what we had, footage we didn’t use, and could use, to put him on the screen. Donald said there was a bit where he is spraying the walls, he’s painting. I said, Let’s try it. You could do anything to that film and it would work… it was all about feeling. It was poetry. It was organic. It was coming from the spirit.”
JF: “When I had my Christian conversion in ’69, my friend Johnny Shannon asked me, ‘Do you want me to sort them out, Jim?’ I thought that it was so super of him. He thought I had got involved with a real heavy cult who were going to take my money and screw with my mind… People always try and make a cause-and-effect out of my involvement in Performance. ‘James Fox became a religious maniac and left the film industry.’ It’s rubbish. My life was already heading to my gaining a greater religious belief.”
NR: “When I do on occasion look back at my films, and when thinking of Performance, I think that the secrets of its making were between Donald and me and Donald is not here, but if you’re pressing me, probably then yes, the phrase that best sums things up is, ‘Well, I’ll be damned.’”
MJ: “I’ve always said it’s essential that art mirrors the times we live in and I think Performance pulls this off. It wasn’t a script out of nowhere, it was a family affair. Acting-wise, I think it’s the best film of mine; it’s dark and interesting and really holds up to scrutiny… it’s amazing it has achieved such longevity and interest. We thought we were making a pretty niche English film of that period; it’s a very English film of that period isn’t it?”
With thanks to Jon Savage, Kevin Macdonald
Performance – The Making Of A Classic by Jay Glennie is a 3,000edition, 348-page large format book containing new interviews with the film’s stars and crew, over 500 photographs by Cecil Beaton, Michael Cooper, Baron Wolman and others, and images from the archives of producer Sandy Lieberson. See performance-book.com/
“it was never going to be a hard day’s night.” Mick Jagger