MARK COUSINS ON NIC ROEG Main pic: Nicolas Roeg on the set of Don’t Look Now (1973) with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. Inset: Roeg and David Bowie shooting The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
➳ Blues’, Nic, especially the line ‘from her cunt down to her shoes’. What an invitation to the blues your cinema is, Nic. Maybe your glances to the woman on the train are another such invitation. On sex, Nic, it’s as simple as this: you made you made it new in cinema. By using cutting, you and your editors made sex cutting. made sex cutting. And it’s time to talk of time, Nic. In Don’t Look Now and Bad Timing in particular, sex d Bad Timing in particular, sex seemed like a black hole that sucked time in. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie’s bed erland and Julie Christie’s bed was like a time machine – we saw the sex and the getting dressed at the same time – and, in Bad Timing, Art Garfunkel did something in the name of sex that seemed to break the space-time continuum, that fragmented the story into shards. Harvey Keitel came rushing in to the story like Dr Who, all intuition and otherwordliness. The characters in your films – James Fox in Performance, Agutter in Walkabout, Sutherland in Don’t Look Now, Garfunkel in Bad Timing – seem to look at themselves in the mirror and say ‘Candyman’ three times, calling forth their tempest. To say this makes me imagine you on your train, with the landscape, the water, the woman, catching a glimpse of your reflection in the window. What do you think when you, the great artificer, see yourself? Do you think of Rutger Hauer’s Claude Maillot Van Horn character in your film Eureka who, when he sees himself in the mirror, says to his reflection, ‘I thought it might be you’? He’s disappointed, isn’t he? He just can’t escape himself and he longs for the rapture of self-loss. Are you disappointed by what you see, Nic? In your 85th year, you’ve travelled each and every highway. When you glimpse your reflection in the train window as it’s getting into Waverley station, some of us would like to tell you that what you see is someone who means more to us than Charlie Chaplin or Akira Kurosawa. Step off the train knowing that your best movies speeded us through the process of learning about living. When you get to Edinburgh, might you go to the National Gallery? There’s a painting there, Paul Gauguin’s ‘Vision After the Sermon’, in which seven women, behind a tree, look into a red-brown field and see an angel wrestling someone (I think it’s Jacob). Those women are seeing life, Nic, something amazing, in a different realm. We, your fans, are those women. We watch as your movies wrestle with life and art. With best wishes, Mark Cousins The World is Ever Changing is published on Thu 18 Jul by Faber. Roeg was due to visit Edinburgh in August for a discussion of his book but sadly had to cancel.
18 THE LIST 11 Jul–22 Aug 2013