Roeg The World is Ever Changing

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-26494-0
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

Nicolas Roeg is one of the most distinctive and influential film-makers of his generation. The generation of film-makers who define contemporary movie-making - Danny Boyle, Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight), James Marsh (Man on Wire), and Guillermo Del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth), all acknowledge their debt to the work of Nicolas Roeg. Roeg began as a cameraman, working for such masters as Francois Truffaut and David Lean. His explosive debut as a director with Performance, established an approach to film-making that was unconventional and ever-changing, creating works such as Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell toEarth, Bad Timing, Insignificance, and, more recently, Puffball. Having now reached eighty years of age, Roeg has decided to pass on to the next generations, the wealth of wisdom and experience he has garnered over fifty years of film-making.

Nicolas Roeg has a career in film that has stretched across 50 years. he began as a cameramn working with directors of the calibre of Francois Truffaut and David Lean. Turning to directing, he has produced works of profound originality such as Perormance, Walkabout, Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bad Timing, Eureka, and, most recently, Puffball.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Roeg, Nicolas

Leseproben

Where was I born? I was born at home. It was in 1928 – 15 August, quite a good day, Napoleon’s birthday, but I like to think Napoleon was born on my birthday. And at quite an apposite name for a place – Circus Road. 31 Circus Road, St John’s Wood, London.

Then everything suddenly went downhill for the family and we moved to Brighton and Hove when I was . . . I must have been about three or four maybe. I went to school there in Hove and then moved up to London at a curious time – 1940, just before the Blitz started! All through the war I went to school in London, until I was seventeen, when I volunteered to go into the forces.

All through my boyhood I’d wanted to go into the Air Force. I wanted to fly. But then the war ended and they weren’t taking any more trainee pilots. They had enough, so I went into the army and joined the Airborne, served my time with the 16th Independent Parachute Brigade.

Dressed as a hussar for a wedding

When I left the army, it was too late to go to university. At first I got a job in Marylebone Studios. They were opposite the flat I was living in and I kind of knew the son of the owner. It was fascinating. I knew nothing about movies. I knew I liked them, but I had no idea about them at all. I was completely innocent. Today, it’s very difficult for anybody to be completely innocent about the idea of the retained image. But, then, there weren’t any film schools and, of course, there weren’t any sort of ‘media studies’ courses at all as far as film was concerned. It was more like apprenticeships. They drew directors mainly from the theatre. And, certainly in England, theatre was the dramatic medium at the time, not cinema – film was thought rather less of. There was a snobbish attitude in England. The actors were, ‘Yes, I’m doing a film, but I’m expecting to do a play in a month’s time – I just thought it would be amusing to do a film.’ There was a sense that film actors were looked down on. Gradually, England, as well as France, became more film-conscious, though not as much as in America. Curiously enough, Britain has still kept the great tradition of the theatre.

Technically, things are changing so swiftly now that thanks to the computer, young people can make films much more easily; their dealings in the exchange of images with each other is much greater than it ever was before. But when I was young I had no idea how film was put together nor what it did. The very first film I remember – or the very first shot – was in a Laurel and Hardy film. I think it was Babes in Toyland. They were both lying in bed – in the same bed, a double bed. No comment was ever made about that . . . two men in nightshirts lying next to each other in bed – it was great, it was totally accepted then, before ‘political correctness’ happened. Anyway, a feather came down on Ollie’s nose, and he blew it. It was a rather marvellous little effect shot, this feather going up and coming down and landing on the other’s nose. Then it went to one of them – I think it was Stan – who swallowed it and started laughing.

I really liked going to the cinema. I went with my sister. She liked going to the movies, or going to ‘the pictures’ – in England, it wasn’t called ‘the movies’ then. There was a continuous performance, and she used to make me sit through it: ‘Let’s sit through the next showing till it comes round again.’ And we’d sit through it and she’d say, ‘Oh, I loved that scene.’ That must have been about the time I first became seduced by the cinema. My fate was sealed.

My first job was at Marylebone Studios where I made the tea and did general errands – and watched films. They did a lot of films for the Ministry of Information, but they were never shown in the cinemas. Then I moved on to a cutting room run by a friend of the owner of Marylebone Studios, a man called Major De Lane Lea. He’d been in British intelligence in France and he ran a French dubbing studio in Wardour Street called Lingua Synchrome, which became De Lane Lea, which then became quite a famous place for post-production. He’s dead now – tragically committed suicide, for unknown reasons. They worked on films that were already made – mainly dubbing French films into English. I saw a lot of French films, obviously, and was very impressed by a film directed by Marcel Carné – Les Enfants du Paradis. I think it was made in 1945, just at the end of the war. I’d never seen anything like it.

People always ask what film has influenced me – well, everything in life influences you. Somehow we’re all feasting off each other in some way and twisting it to our own devices and intentions, but Les Enfants du Paradis was full of things that constantly enchanted me. The film has many stories – all the characters have different stories and they’re all joined together. All things are connected in life, but we all have our different stories – our friends, our relations, our husbands and wives – and connected with this is the sense of time passing. It’s a form I’ve always been drawn to – the individual and their part in society. You have your own personal story, as well as being connected to someone else’s.

And how close does one get to someone else? It comes down to the question I’ve asked many times: ‘What are you thinking, darling?’ The answer given is nearly always different from what they are really thinking. I think the performances in Puffball are extraordinary for that reason. There are four women, at four different ages – and with four very different attitudes towards sex. The characters all have different reasons for their behaviour, attitudes, hopes and dreams, different reasons for what they want to do. They seem to be part of a family, but the joy of Miranda Richardson’s character at the end of the film is completely unconnected to the other characters’ endings in the story. She’s happy, whereas the husband of Kelly Reilly is not. But each of them have been truthful to their inner souls.

When we were shooting it, people would say to me, ‘I don’t know where we are in the story, Nic. That doesn’t connect with what’s happening to the other characters.’ But it does connect – they’re all the same character, but in a different position. It’s a joint story – a joint story within a shell inhabited by all these different people. They all come to this one location for different reasons. Similarly with Les Enfants du Paradis – three very different individuals who are connected to each other and the society around them.

The odd thing about that – I only realised it much later – is that Marcel Carné entered the film business in 1928, the year I was born. He was born in 1909, on 18 August, and curiously enough, he began as a camera assistant as well. I mean, coincidence is coincidence, but I find these coincidences of film-making rather marvellous.

The Editola (Courtesy of North West Film Archive
at Manchester Metropolitan University)

Initially, when I went to De Lane Lea, I was just getting the tea and writing down the translations. De Lane Lea had a special system for dubbing, using a machine called an Editola. It looked rather like a big television set. There were two reels of film going through the machine. One went over the picture head and the other went over the sound head. And there was a handle in the middle so that as you turned it, the film could go forwards or backwards – you could shift the speed around, you could slow it down or speed it up. Just seeing a character going forwards and backwards, up and down, expanded my thoughts about what you could do with images. I couldn’t wait to get on the Editola.

I was in a very lowly position, just marking up places on the tape where labials came up – the m’s and b’s and p’s – so that they could then try to fit ‘my’ with ‘moi’ and ‘bag’ with ‘package’. But during lunch hour and after work I’d stay on and ask the chief editor to lace up something on the Editola so I could have a look at it, and she’d always say yes. She was a very nice woman – Gladys Bremson. Running it backwards and forwards fascinated me – life passing and then returning, passing and returning; someone gets shot and then gets back up again. I realised that there was another way of telling stories, of passing on information – not on the page, but through the retention of the image, the moving image. This is such an extraordinary thing. We’re used to it now, but it still excites me because this whole idea of connecting film with our minds is still unexplored. In the novel you can write ‘he thought’, as in ‘“My God, what a beautiful pair of legs she has,” he thought.’ In a film it’s called a flashback – but it comes from the book form. The only difference being in a movie it is ‘said’ with an image and in a book it is ‘said’ with a word. But in film we can play with images and the retention of the image in an extraordinary way. In life we have a clash of realities that is quite magnificent: as I’m dictating to the camera now, I’m also looking out of the window and thinking, and then remembering when that tree outside was a little tree, when it was planted, which in turn prompts other thoughts. One can do that with film (I must stop calling it ‘film’. My grandchildren won’t even know what the word means and it will take too long to explain it.) in a way that you can’t really do with anything else. You can’t put it as effectively on the page; you can’t capture it in any other way. Film has nothing to do...