Nicolas Roeg

Born on August 15, 1928 in London, Nicolas Jack Roeg was fascinated with cinema since he was a child, because in front of the house where he lived there were studios, where after finishing military service he asked for a job as a boy for everything. He went on to become a second unit director, on titles like  David Lean ‘s Lawrence of Arabia  . He went on to serve as cinematographer on  Roger  Corman ‘s The Masque of the Red Death and  François Truffaut ‘s  Fahrenheit 451 . He had been in the film industry for 23 years, where he was considered a professional with immense prestige, when he decided to make the leap to directing.

With another director,  Donald Cammell , he signed  Performance , in 1968, starring  Mick Jagger , at the peak of his career as a musician, who played an eccentric rock star in whose mansion a persecuted gangster takes refuge. Due to its avant-garde and psychedelic style, it took two years until it was released, but after that it became a cult title of the counterculture.

Already solo, he shot the thriller  Walkabout in Australia , which went unnoticed, unlike  Menace in the Shadow , with  Donald Sutherland  and  Julie Christie , an adaptation of a story by  Daphne Du Maurier , where he emphasizes eroticism, causing some stir. After  The Man Who Fell to Earth , with another musician,  David Bowie , as an alien, he recruits another of the great pop stars,  Art Garfunkel , for another erotic thriller,  Misadventure , where  Nicolas Roeg  himself fell in love with the lead actress.  Theresa Russell, with which he would repeat in five more films: the dramatic thriller  Eureka , the dramatic comedy  Insignificance , the drama  Route 29 , the romantic drama  Cold Heaven , and a fragment of the collective film  Aria .

Together with this interpreter, the couple had two children. One of them, Maximiliam Roeg, has worked as an interpreter and member of the technical team in titles such as  Match Point . Earlier, Roeg had been divorced from another actress,  Susan Stephen , who had given birth to two other offspring from him.

Nicolas Roeg ‘s films   are distinguished for the most part by presenting scenes and images of the plot in a disorderly manner. The viewer is forced to make an effort to organize them chronologically, although many times they cannot until some detail appears that gives meaning to everything.

He completely changed register with a family film,  The Curse of the Witches , adaptation of a  Roald Dahl story for the Jim Henson  factory  , with a masterful job by  Anjelica Huston  as a sorceress. After a chapter of  The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones , and  Heart of Darkness , a fairly faithful television adaptation of the  Joseph Conrad novel  that had inspired  Apocalypse Now , he said goodbye to the cinema with the little-known fantastic film  Puffball , although he would collaborate in the collective documentary  The Film That Buys the Cinema , from 2014.