Man who put the sex into the 70s
As he dies at 90, how — from a sex and drug-fuelled Jagger romp to a notorious Venice love scene — film director Nicolas Roeg was the...
Director Nicolas roeg didn’t just capture the moment that was the Seventies. He helped to create it and reflect it in cinematic form. think of the androgynous David Bowie as the extra-terrestrial in the Man Who Fell to earth, naked virginal 17-year-old Jenny Agutter in the Australian wilderness in Walkabout and the stricken, doombeckoning features of Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now and you have moviemaking at its most provocative.
And we haven’t even got to Mick Jagger in the melange of rock music, sex, crime and drugs that was Performance, which he co-directed with Donald cammell.
roeg’s career is revered wherever cinema is taken seriously. Not that it was an easy one. the director, who died aged 90 on Friday, battled with the major studios, who never understood the often kaleidoscopic and fragmented nature of his films.
Which meant, as he liked to wryly recount, that — as famous as some of those movies became — none of them ever resulted in his being sent a royalty cheque by the studios who financed them.
this may, of course, be a reflection of Hollywood’s creative accountancy, but it’s also an admission that roeg didn’t make movies solely to fill his pockets.
‘Nic didn’t give a damn about making the biggest, most profitable film ever,’ his friend and producer Jeremy thomas told me yesterday. ‘Nor did he want to send messages. He was fabulously intense about examining life in a non-judgmental way.’
Although roeg embraced, thomas says, the youthful counter-culture of the Sixties and Seventies, so darkly depicted in his directing debut Performance in 1970, he was hardly a young revolutionary.
Already in his early 40s, he had been in the movie business for 23 years by then, having worked his way up from being a runner at Marylebone Studios after doing his National Service.
He’d only gone there because the studio had been across the road from where he lived in central London. roeg’s rise was slow and steady, reaching the role of camera operator on David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia and cinematographer on Dr Zhivago — until he and Lean fell out.
Both men had their own opinions on how things should be done. Lean was old school . . . and roeg wasn’t.
SooN came his opportunity to direct, with Performance. Most first-timers might have played it safe and given Warners, which paid for the film, a happy Mick Jagger pop movie — a rolling Stones version of A Hard Day’s Night, if you like.
But roeg didn’t see it that way. Shooting mainly in a decadently outfitted basement in North Kensington, where Jagger’s character was accompanied in bed by both Anita Pallenberg — the girlfriend of rolling Stones guitarist Keith richards — and Michele Breton, as well as countless drugs, roeg managed to enrage the film’s American financiers.
Performance, they said, was unreleasable. ‘the most completely worthless film i have ever seen,’ was one printable comment. And they wanted their money back — relenting only two years later after a change of management.
the rows actually helped made roeg’s name. Looking back on that troubled production, producer Sandy Lieberson sees it now not only as a moment when film-making in Britain changed, but the point when Nic roeg altered with it.
‘Nic had gone to work all those years in the established collarand-tie way things were done in those days, and then he got his opportunity to direct, and it changed him.’
Jeremy thomas suggests roeg’s personality would have altered in line with whatever movie he was making — similar to how method actors live their parts.
For roeg, stories didn’t have to be told in chronological order, leaving it up to the viewer to think about what was going on. it made some of his films seem like jigsaws, and ensured they were never less than intriguing if unsettling.
Unsurprisingly, he wasn’t asked to direct any Hollywood family hits with happy endings. instead, he became one of the most admired and influential film directors of his age, an influence that ranges from young directors experimenting with Youtube videos to the masters of our age.
Danny Boyle, the prizewinning director of trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire, considered roeg his favourite film maker, classing him alongside Hitchcock. ‘Don’t Look Now is permeated with a feeling of dread,’ he says, ‘of impending doom, which we all feel, instinctively about our soul, our future, our families.’
Not everyone wanted to see films about impending doom. But that was roeg, always pushing at societal boundaries, often making waves with notorious sex scenes.
For years, rumours circulated that a long sex scene in a Venice hotel between Julie christie and Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now — in which they play a married couple whose daughter drowns — appeared so realistic because the sex was actually real. it wasn’t, of course, and roeg found it flattering that audiences thought it must be.
From then on, other directors would make their sex scenes more realistic, too. For better or worse, because the lovemaking was so beautifully and emotionally filmed, roeg had broken through to a new sexual realism.
this, of course, was tough on the stars. Both Art Garfunkel and theresa russell wanted to leave his 1980 psychological thriller Bad timing after a few days filming.
in the end, they didn’t quit and theresa russell would become roeg’s second wife — he was divorced from actress Susan Stephen in 1977. His great days, however, were in the Seventies, with the locked-in feeling of Performance being followed by a story of sibling rivalry in Walkabout, set in the Australian outback.
Again, it was a dark theme — after their father’s suicide, two teens are left to fend for themselves.
the Man Who Fell to earth in 1976 was David Bowie’s first movie starring role, and would come to be viewed as a science fiction classic in which an innocent alien space man who is marooned on earth is corrupted by civilisation and alcohol.
But when cuts were made for U.S. release, roeg spoke of sabotage.
He continued to make movies, most notably the Witches in 1990, based on a roald Dahl book and starring Anjelica Huston, and castaway in 1986, with oliver reed and Amanda Donohoe as two people who agree to be abandoned on a desert island in Lucy irvine’s true story.
But increasingly there seemed to be little new ground for roeg, a true original, to break.
Always amazed that film schools now exist to teach young people how to make films, he learned the grammar of film on the job.
And when he had the chance, he changed some of that grammar to suit and portray a moment of rapidly shifting attitudes in relation to sex, drugs and life in general.
After a gloriously long life, he is survived by his third wife, Harriet Harper, and his six children. His films will also live on, for Nicolas roeg was a man who created movies as memorable and unsettling as they were beautiful.
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