Roeg Element

Nic Roeg has never deliberately courted controversy. It just seems to find him. His first film performance was shelved for two years while the suits at Warner Bos figured out what to do with a psychosexual gangster meltdown. Walkabout’s nude shots of a barely legal Jenny Agutter sent the censors into a flap. Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland’s glorious rutting in Don’t Look Now brought them out in hives. Then came Bad Timing, a romance so raw that its own distributor railed against it. Now, after a long spell in made-for-tv wilderness, the 79-year-old is back with Puffball. And, discovers ben cobb, he's up to his old tricks again

“The American distributor of Bad Timing said to me:
‘I have to buy it but I hate this film’. He took the film on a tour of US colleges. After one showing he argued with the audience members that liked it. And he was the distributor!”

It is not that Nicolas Roeg is deliberately slippery. He has an open face: he’s friendly, gentle to a fault and quick to laugh. It’s just that he cannot answer a straight question with a straight answer. His brain is simply not wired that way. You don’t ‘interview’ Roeg - he hates the term. Instead, you ‘chat’. He chats, or rather he starts one train of thought, abandons it, starts another, then scraps that. It is a nightmare to follow. But his conversation is full of random and often dazzling observations. And somehow you get slithers of insight into one of cinema’s most adventurous talents.

Performance. Walkabout. The Man Who Fell To Earth. Don’t Look Now. Bad Timing. All are widely regarded as cinema greats. But none could be described as ‘easy’, another term Roeg surely dislikes. Roeg is turned on by the big themes: identity, fate, chaos, dislocation. He is also the filmmaker’s filmmaker. All his films are masterclasses in bravura editing. His previous life as director of photography on movies like Francois Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 and John Schlesinger’s Far From The Madding Crowd inform his own striking style. And yet scriptwriting guru Robert McKee has him under ‘What not to do’ in Story, his how-to screenplay bible. Somehow Roeg just doesn’t quite fit in.

“You’d better move that closer,” he says, pointing to the dictaphone. “I mumble.” Mumbling isn’t the only obstacle. The phone never stops ringing in Roeg’s Notting Hill house. “Harriet! Can you get that?” he yells repeatedly from his study. An increasingly flustered Harriet Harper, actress and the director’s partner since 2004, rushes past on her way to grab the other line. Roeg is sat at his messy desk, around him walls of books. A quick glance yields a tome on Freud, Confessions of Aleister Crowley and an old, dog-eared copy of Halliwell’s Film Guide.

Turning back to the unassuming Roeg, a line from Don’t Look Now springs to mind: “Nothing is what it seems.” He might have an endearingly bumbling manner. But this is the man who has given cinema some of its most erotic encounters. Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland’s lovemaking in supernatural thriller Don’t Look Now never fails to score in the top 10 of ‘The 100 Greatest Sex Scenes’ polls. Roeg captures such an intense intimacy between the couple that for years the ‘Did they-Didn’t they?’ rumours abounded. For the record, they didn’t. However, during the drug-addled shoot of Performance (Roeg’s 1970 debut, co-directed with Donald Cammell), Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg did. Their method approach to under the sheets acting caused uproar - not least with Jagger’s fellow Rolling Stone Keith Richards, who was Pallenberg’s boyfriend at the time.

Even scandal veteran Roeg was surprised by the reaction to 1980’s Bad Timing, billed as “a terrifying love story” and set in Cold-War Vienna. The harrowing and abusive onscreen relationship between Art Garfunkel and Theresa Russell, the director’s second wife, led the UK distributor Rank to proclaim it “a sick film made by sick people for sick people”. The resultant shoddy cinema release still rankles with Roeg. But he is not unamused. “The American distributor of Bad Timing said to me: ‘I have to buy it but I hate this film’,” he laughs, shaking his head. “He took the film on a tour of US colleges. He was at Dartmouth University and after the showing he argued with the audience members that liked it. And he was the distributor! He tried to talk them out of it.” Psychiatrist R. D. Laing summed up the mood, telling Roeg: “You have made something that people are frightened to share with somebody they are intimate with.” The director agrees: “There are truths in there. It is rather like lending your favourite book to someone you love. You are nervous in case they don’t like it and it will separate you. When Theresa first saw Bad Timing she said, ‘I’m glad I made this film but they’re not going to eat it because you’ve scratched too deep beneath the surface.’”

His next film suffered a similar fate. Eureka, a cautionary tale starring Gene Hackman as real-life gold prospector Sir Harry Oakes, was criminally mishandled by its backer MGM. “I had all kinds of problems with it,” he sighs. “It came out at the same time as Wall Street. My film was the exact opposite of the ‘greed is good’ message of the period. It just didn’t make sense at that moment. Now, of course, it is much better understood.” Bad timing, indeed.

Anachronism is something Roeg had already experienced, to a lesser degree, with his sci-fi fable The Man Who Fell To Earth. At one point the film’s star David Bowie develops a throwaway automatic camera, a wholly alien concept in 1976. “When we put that in the film, people were saying: ‘That’s ridiculous. How does it do that? Impossible!’” explains Roeg. “Within three years, I was at LAX airport and Fuji had done it. Now of course we’re way beyond that. It’s all about speed. Orson Welles said, ‘The thing that changes life more than anything is speed’. I don’t think we’re quite used to that.”

After Eureka’s mish-andling, Roeg hit back the following year with Insignificance, an imagined meeting of icons Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Joe DiMaggio and Joseph McCarthy. Other high points included the wonderfully debauched Castaway, with Oliver Reed and Amanda Donohoe marooned on a desert island, and the kid’s fantasy The Witches, adapted from the Roald Dahl story with Angelica Huston headlining. The Dennis Potter-scripted Track 29 featured an uneven but compelling performance from Gary Oldman. The 1990s were less kind to Roeg. He almost slipped into obscurity with disappointing efforts like Cold Heaven and Two Deaths and didn’t do himself any favours with a slew of made-for-TV fodder, including an episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, the softcore folly Full Body Massage and Samson and Delilah with Elizabeth Hurley. Until this year, Roeg’s last credit was an 18-minute film on Claudia Schiffer.

You might think that after a long spell of bad luck and misfires, Roeg would play it safe. If Puffball is anything to go by, he isn’t having any of it. It’s his first theatrical feature in 12 years and he hasn’t lost any of his challenging vision. Based on Fay Weldon’s book, it is the story of a young architect, played by Kelly Reilly, who gets mixed up with Norse mythology, fertility rites and voodoo magic whilst renovating a cottage in rural Ireland. Alongside its 30-year-old star, Puffball boasts some more mature heavyweights: Miranda Richardson, Rita Tushingham and Donald Sutherland, reuniting with Roeg after 34 years.

True to form, it contains some frank and surprisingly detailed sex acts: penetration close-ups; internal ejaculation shots; and another scene worthy of top billing in any cinema’s raunchiest list, this time a rough barn romp between Reilly and a farmer. But Puffball isn’t just an exercise in eroticism. It is a difficult film, and one that divided early audiences. Roeg loves the fact that people disagree over it.

He has just returned from Transylvania where Puffball screened at the Kluge Film Festival. “It was absolutely mad,” he splutters excitedly. “The exit was fantastic because it split people. Some were laughing, some were talking to each other and others were silent. In the press conference afterwards somebody asked, ‘What is the message here Mr. Roeg?’ I replied, ‘What was the message you got?’... How should I know what the fucking thing means?”

Roeg has not mellowed with age. He is not interested in telling people what to think. For him film is less about entertainment and more about pushing the audience’s buttons. No matter how uncomfortable it makes them. “I know that in Puffball I’ve explored things that have concerned people. They don’t want to look at it,” he says. “It doesn’t have a genre of any kind. If you know what you’re going to see, if it’s a genre, you prepare to look at certain things. But if it is a reflection of life, then there is no genre. Everybody’s life begins and ends the same way. The bits in the middle are different genres. I like not knowing which bit is going to come.”

Things that seem normal have always amazed Roeg. “I am fascinated by the surrealist idea of making familiar things look strange,” he admits. “I am obsessed by the expression ‘well, I’m damned!’ I love that sensation of surprise. I suppose that has gone more and more into my work: the unexpected of simple things. You have to use cinema to make some sort of understanding of your own life.” So, have his films helped him make any sense of the world? At this, Roeg does an immediate volte face, hating to be pinned down: “They’ve just made me more puzzled,” he grins.

“If you know what you’re going to see, if it’s a genre, you prepare to look at certain things. But if it is a reflection of life, then there is no genre. Everybody’s life begins and ends in the same way. I like not knowing which bit is going to come...”

Roeg gets out of his chair. The chat is over. “How you’ll sort all that out, I don’t know,” he guffaws, gesturing at the tape recorder. We walk down the stairs, past a giant Polaroid collage of Roeg’s ex-wife and muse Theresa Russell in all her naked glory. At the front door, he puts his hand on my shoulder and mumbles: “I wonder where you’re going now?” It sounds like a simple question but it feels strangely meaningful. Pure Roeg.

Puffball is released later this year.