On Friday March 27 BAFTA will host a tribute evening to Nic Roeg under the banner 'The Magician With A Movie Camera.' And I will have the privilege and fun of being emcee for the night. Here as a refresher is the piece I wrote on the maestro last year for Film In Focus. And the BAFTA site trailers the event with the following text (in which you may note the prominent and valued endorsement of Danny Boyle, a director currently enjoying the best of times):"Visionary director Nicolas Roeg has created some classics of modern cinema as well as inspiring several generations of world-class filmmakers by virtue of his poetic eye and iconoclastic approach to storytelling. Danny Boyle considers Roeg to be as important as David Lean in the history of British cinema, and it's impossible to keep track of the number of contemporary filmmakers who cite Don't Look Now as among their key influences. With Performance, Bad Timing, The Man Who Fell To Earth and Walkabout, Roeg cemented his place in the modernist canon - but his influence owes as much to his uncompromising approach as to the detail of his personal creative vision. Join us for this evening where some extraordinarily special filmmakers pay tribute to a cinematic hero."
Hero, indeed. Join us, indeed. (The photo of Roeg above is by Dave Sidaway for the Montreal Gazette.)
