Nicolas Roeg, the director who shattered film time and paid for it

Nicolas Roeg

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Born	August 15, 1928 St John's Wood, London, England
Died	November 23, 2018 (90)
Occupation	Film director and cinematographer
Known for	The Witches, Don't Look Now, Walkabout
Awards	BFI Fellowship · Commander of the Order of the British Empire · Cannes Film Festival Technical Grand Prize

A small figure in a red coat slips down a Venetian alley, and a grieving father follows it to his death. A man and a woman make love while the film keeps cutting forward to the same pair dressing for dinner afterwards, as if the evening were already a memory. Nicolas Roeg built a body of work on images that arrive before the explanation does, and on the conviction that an audience could be trusted to sort out the order of events for itself. Christopher Nolan has said Memento would have been “pretty unthinkable” without him. The British industry that trained Roeg was slower to agree. After a run of films that critics still place among the best the country has produced, he spent much of his last three decades watching projects drift to television or straight to video.

He came to directing late, and through the camera rather than the script. The son of a family of Dutch descent, he grew up in St John’s Wood, north London, went to the Mercers’ School and did his national service as an army projectionist. Out of uniform, he walked into Marylebone Studios as a tea boy. Britain had no film schools then. The apprenticeship was the studio floor itself, from clapper-loader to camera operator, and later a spell at Elstree assisting Jack Hildyard and Ted Moore.

The break came fifteen years after that first studio job, on the second unit of Lawrence of Arabia, under Freddie Young. David Lean liked what he saw and hired Roeg to photograph Doctor Zhivago, then discovered that his new cameraman had no patience for his laborious methods; Roeg was let go, Young took over and won the Oscar. Roeg lit the saturated chambers of Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death, shot Fahrenheit 451 for François Truffaut and earned a BAFTA nomination for John Schlesinger’s Far from the Madding Crowd. His last job purely as cinematographer, Richard Lester’s Petulia, already told its San Francisco love story out of order. In hindsight it reads as a rehearsal.

His first credit as director was shared, and nearly buried. Performance, co-directed with the painter Donald Cammell, put James Fox’s London gangster in hiding inside the house of a reclusive rock star played by Mick Jagger, and it so alarmed Warner Bros. that the studio sat on it for two years, re-edited it and released it in 1970 with an X rating. It went from failure to cult object without ever passing through success. Walkabout, his solo debut a year later, looked gentler: Jenny Agutter and Roeg’s own son Luc as two English children stranded in the Australian outback, guided by an Aboriginal boy, played by David Gulpilil, on his rite of passage. Roeg photographed it himself from a screenplay by Edward Bond and took it to competition at Cannes.

Don’t Look Now, in 1973, is the film that makes the case for him. Adapted from a Daphne du Maurier story, with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland as parents who travel to Venice after their daughter drowns, it turns grief into a puzzle of glimpses and premonitions, and its intercut love scene drew scrutiny for how much it showed. It brought Roeg a BAFTA nomination for direction, and in 1999 a British Film Institute poll ranked it the eighth-greatest British film ever made. Then came the musicians. David Bowie played a stranded alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth, which divided critics, competed in Berlin and was cut for its American release. Art Garfunkel and Theresa Russell played the obsessive couple of Bad Timing, set in Vienna; its distributor, the Rank Organisation, reportedly dismissed it as “a sick film made by sick people for sick people” and asked for its logo to be removed.

That verdict sits at the uncomfortable centre of Roeg’s story. The fragmented cutting that later directors would wear as a signature was received, in the moment, as cruelty or affectation, and Bad Timing pushed it furthest, with a woman’s lingering overdose watched through the eyes of the psychoanalyst who loves her. Afterwards the money thinned. The Guardian’s obituary blamed a British antipathy to experiment and a director with no taste for self-promotion who, in his own phrase, “refused to join the club”. The harder judgement is that the method did not always find a subject that justified it. Eureka, with Gene Hackman as a gold prospector turned millionaire, languished before reaching television; Castaway and the Dennis Potter-scripted Track 29 are usually filed as minor work. The exception was Insignificance, which brought Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Joe DiMaggio and Joseph McCarthy together in a hotel room in 1950s New York and won the Technical Grand Prize at Cannes in 1985.

In 1986 the British government asked him to direct its public health campaign “AIDS: Don’t Die of Ignorance”. His last major studio picture arrived in 1990, when Jim Henson’s company hired him to adapt Roald Dahl’s The Witches, and critics welcomed it. After that the features came further apart: Cold Heaven, Two Deaths, a television Heart of Darkness and, finally, Puffball in 2007. He published a memoir, The World Is Ever Changing, in 2013, and two years later the BBC’s Arena strand portrayed him in David Thompson’s documentary It’s About Time, in which he seemed happier reading poetry than explaining his films. The British Film Institute had already given him its Fellowship in 1994, and he was made a CBE in the 1996 New Year Honours.

Roeg, born on 15 August 1928, married three times. With the actor Susan Stephen, from 1957 until their divorce in 1977, he had four sons, among them Luc, the boy of Walkabout. He married Theresa Russell, the lead of Bad Timing and Insignificance, in 1982; they had two sons, Max and Statten, before divorcing. His third wife, the actor Harriet Harper, was with him from 2005 until the end. He had been living with dementia when he died in London on 23 November 2018, at 90.

Donald Sutherland, who named one of his sons after him, called him a fearless visionary. The more exact tribute is how ordinary his grammar now looks. Steven Soderbergh modelled the love scene of Out of Sight on the one in Don’t Look Now, and Nolan has pointed to the finale of Insignificance as a seed of Inception. Anyone who follows a prestige series built on flash-forwards and withheld information is reading a language Roeg was penalised for speaking. His films still ask the viewer to do the editing in their own head. The industry that once treated that request as a reason to stop financing him now sells it back as sophistication.