Few directors have enjoyed consecutive runs as mighty as that of Nicolas Roeg, who died on Friday night. Five perfect and perfectly daring movies straight out of the gate. The innovations in editing and storytelling catch the eye first – these are films in which past, present and future are unravelling at the same time. “Life isn’t linear,” he told me in 2011. “It’s sideways.” But there are also the performances he encouraged, in some cases drawing fresh complexities from established actors (Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland), in others teasing out or distilling an essence (he had a knack for getting great work from pop stars: Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Art Garfunkel). His films are searching, inquisitive, philosophical and perplexing. You might say that he based his career on the pet name his sister gave him during their childhood trips to the flicks: “Come on, Mr Arty-Farty,” she’d say. But that would be to miss the core of his cinema, which is intensely, ineluctably human.
The picture that marked his transition in 1968 from director of photography to director was the psychological thriller Performance, in which a gangster goes to ground in a pop star’s pad in Powis Square. That’s a lot of “p”s. And you can add another – the influence of Bergman’s Persona – as the identities of thug and singer start to merge. Roeg co-directed Performance with Donald Cammell but he was on his own for Walkabout, in which an English brother and sister are stranded in the Outback, having survived their father’s attempts to kill them; Don’t Look Now, about a couple recovering in Venice from the death of their daughter; The Man Who Fell to Earth, starring Bowie as an alien corroded and corrupted by life on earth; and Bad Timing, the remorseless catalogue of a passionate and destructive relationship. Anyone who has seen those films will be on their way to understanding the profound imaginative leaps, the transformative montage, of which cinema is capable.
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