Thursday 16 July 2009

Nicolas Roeg in Conversation + Don't Look Now: Somerset House, Wednesday August 5 2009

"The eerie atmosphere of misty Venice creeps across the courtyard of Somerset House as Nicolas Roeg's 1973 masterpiece casts its sinister spell..." So goes the siren's call for the Film4 Summer Screen open-air showing of Don't Look Now scheduled for 9.15pm Wednesday August 5. Beforehand (and indoors, I believe) at 6.30pm I'll be in conversation with Nic, under the aegis of BAFTA, on the subject of Don't Look Now and, I imagine, other things, some of those including films. The maestro will also take questions from the audience. All the needful information and advance ticketing stuff can be accessed here.
There's also a really good page over at BAFTA, devoted to their Roeg tribute evening of March 27 earlier this year. There you can watch and hear all the speakers from that evening, whether they were live or on tape, including Danny Boyle, Kevin Macdonald, Stephen Frears, James Marsh, Christopher Nolan, Terry Gilliam, Guillermo del Toro, Seamus McGarvey, Paul Greengrass, Mike Figgis, Sam Taylor-Wood... and, er, me, the one who hasn't directed a masterpiece box-office smash... But I was honoured to be in that line-up, and also in the team photo taken at the end, #14 in the Photo Gallery, wherein James Fox is at my side - a big moment for a Performance fan such as I.

2 comments:

Wolfgang said...

It is great to see Nicolas Roeg back in vogue - you can't turn for Nic Roeg interviews and BAFTA tributes these days. It certainly wasn't like this ten years ago, when to all intents and purposes he had been forgotten.

Richard T Kelly said...

Wolfgang, thanks for posting. I suspect that the renewed coverage has a lot to do with Nic having made a feature film in 2006 (his first since the mid-1990s) and doing plenty to promote it, as well as the naturally occurring DVD reissues of his earlier work. I've been writing about film for 20years now and, while critical fashions come and go, Nic's status as the great director of multiple masterpiece-movies has never been seriously questioned in that time.