Also at The Telegraph, film director Nicolas Roeg (Performance, Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth) talks to John Preston about his new memoir, The World Is Ever Changing:
Roeg insists that he had no idea what sort of films he wanted to make when he became a director. Instead he fell into directing when Donald Cammell, who’d written the original script for Performance, needed someone with visual flair to collaborate with.
Eventually, the film made legends of Roeg and Cammell, but at the time it almost finished them both. At an early screening, one Warner Bros executive was reportedly so appalled by the sight of Mick Jagger and James Fox exchanging sexual partners, clothes and identities that he threw up. On the film’s release, the critic of Life magazine described Performance as “the most completely worthless film I have ever seen since I began reviewing”.
… Now, of course, the wheel has come full circle and, as Roeg notes drily, he’s lost count of the people who claim to have played a critical role in Performance’s success. Is it a film you look back on with fondness and pride? I wonder. “I don’t look back on any film I’ve done with fondness or pride,” he says promptly. “I look back on my films, and on the past generally…” He shakes his head in a bewildered sort of way. “I can only use the phrase, ‘Well, I’m damned’.”
At the Financial Times, Peter Aspden reviews the book with new books about Orson Welles and Roman Polanski:
The greatest auteurs in cinema have traditionally had a habit of gorging on their favourite subjects, their leading ladies, their studios’ cash registers. Today’s directors are less monstrous, and altogether more respectful of the tiresome fact that cinema is a collaborative art form. Put it down to sharper accountants, blander movie stars, infernally complex technological demands. It is more difficult than ever to be a legend in your own lunchtime, and that’s a shame.
Interestingly, Aspden recommends the interactive iPad edition of Roeg’s memoir, which comes “complete with sequences from his films and grandfatherly accounts of their making, which ramble sweetly into occasional dead ends.” Nice.
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