‘When I was 12 years old,’ Nicolas Roeg said once - or maybe more than once? - ‘my
father said the most extraordinary thing to me. “The day you’re born is your
only chance to really have tomorrow, because by the day after you’ve got
yesterday.” At the time it completely confused me, but gradually it began to
make a little sense…’
Saying this to my tape-recorder, as it happened, Nic looked rather wry: however sad the
sentiment, he surely knew that it constituted a little statement on the major
theme of his art. For if cinema is – as art schools define it – a ‘time-based
medium’, then he ranked high among those filmmakers who have articulated and
poeticized our sense that time is really in the eye of the beholder. In Nic’s work
the past, present and future seem to co-exist in the same fleeting instant.
Nic (who died yesterday, aged 90) was – is – a filmmaker’s
filmmaker, in the sense that you’re better to measure his brilliance by the influence
he exerted than on his box-office takings. He was so original and questing in
his work that directors were bound to follow him, and to pay him that great tribute
(hommage!) of stealing from his store
of magic.
It’s analogous to how the best writing on Hitchcock is
Hitchcock’s famous set of dialogues with Truffaut, and the best critical
response to his Vertigo is the number
of loving emulations of that movie by other filmmakers, rather than the stacks
of academic monographs rehashing ‘reception theory.’ Nic’s personal testament, The World is Ever Changing, published by
Walter Donohue at Faber in 2013, is the best thing you can read about him.
It might have been better for Nic’s career if all such debts
had been repaid him in cash, but he always seemed – how should we say? –
philosophical about it. The first time I talked to him at any length he remembered an early pre-release screening of The Man
Who Fell to Earth after which his producer Michael Deeley enthused to him
that, however the film might fare commercially, his peers would be ripping him
off in no time.
I remember the day of that discussion really well. Finding his address in Notting
Hill, just a few streets away from Powis Square. Climbing the stairs to his
study, passing the framed Hockney Polaroid-collage of Theresa Russell as
Marilyn Monroe, custom-made for Insignificance.
The study itself, dressed from corner to corner with piles of books and objets d’art. I
remember every encounter I count myself lucky to have had with a man who I basically hero-worshipped
from boyhood.
The first being-in-the-same-room magic - round about now, only 33 years ago - involved my
getting his autograph after a screening of Insignificance and a Q&A
at the Queen's Film Theatre, Belfast. Theresa Russell was at his side; and had
Jesus Christ chosen Belfast that night as the site of his Second Coming I really couldn't have been more impressed
In March 2009 BAFTA hosted a tribute evening to Nic as a
means of bestowing their Fellowship upon him, and the banner they chose was 'The
Magician With A Movie Camera.' BAFTA has a reel of highlights here. Danny Boyle
and Duncan Kenworthy curated the evening and enlisted a great array of
speakers, which I, by an immense stroke of good luck, was invited to join - to speak, I thought, on behalf of the fans in the stalls. So it was a
very special and memorable evening - for the honouree, I’m sure, and for all
attendees, I hope. Certainly for me.
Nic was – is – as brilliant a filmmaker as Britain has ever
produced, the golden era of his work (roughly the 20 years from 1966-1985) standing
comparison to the best of anybody else's
ever. It’s true that many fans rated the later work less glowingly, and I think
that disappointed Nic, as it would any artist. ‘It began to annoy Welles,’ he
told me. ‘The Magnificent Ambersons
is a huge movie, but all people would say of it was that it wasn’t Citizen Kane.’
Anyone who ever 'interviewed' Nic had a similar sort of experience: you
didn’t quiz him, you just listened, and tried to follow his associative leaps.
John Huston, very different but also a bit of a magician, seemed to crop up in his conversation a fair bit; Nic especially
liked to use Huston’s analogy of making movies as:
‘rather like being the mayor of a mining town – everybody’s working long days to the same end, there’s fun to be had. Then the mine closes, the population leaves, the town is deserted and the director is the last person left. Huston said, ‘Taken all in all it’s a rather melancholy affair.’ It is a loss, curiously, the end of a film – because your life has been in it. Your personal life is put aside. It’s a cliché but the films are like children. I don’t have a favourite, they’re all of a time and that time has gone by.’
He was quite enthralled by the i-Phone and ever-evolving
possibilities of image capture, while being truly perplexed by the extent to
which people persisted in putting movies together by the same old ways. ‘The
weird thing,’ I recall him musing, ‘is that one’s grandchildren will say, ‘I
don’t get it, what is a ‘film’? Why was it ever called ‘film’?’ You can start
explaining about celluloid and light and they’ll say, ‘Oh…’’
Already I’ve had such
conversations with my children – time's like that – but Nic’s films
are going to endure. The pictures he made were just so strong and vivid and
irreducibly part of him, right up to the point where they crossed over and
became part of us.
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