More Roegery. The recent BBC documentary about Nicolas Roeg has yet to appear on YouTube but this Guardian Lecture appeared there a few days ago. Roeg was in the news in 1983 following the release of Eureka, a film with a solid reputation today but one which the distributors weren’t happy with at the time. There’s no mention of these problems in this 37-minute interview with the late Philip Strick which ranges throughout Roeg’s career, and even includes some mention of his ill-fated plan to direct Flash Gordon for Dino De Laurentiis. It’s too short, of course, as these things always are, and Roeg has always been a somewhat rambling interviewee, but for Roeg-philes it’s worth a watch. The documentary I’d really like to see again is Nothing As It Seems: The Films of Nicolas Roeg, made the year before by Paul Joyce, and featuring contributions from two key collaborators: Donald Cammell and Paul Mayersberg.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Beyond the Fragile Geometry of Space
• Canal view
Have not seen Eureka but want to. When working on my forthcoming Coil book, I was told that John Balance once said that if Coil was a film it would be Eureka (or something like that). So I would like to see.
Eureka is a great film but its unconventional structure often throws people off, hence the distributor problems. It’s also the one Roeg film with any overt occultism: Jack McCann has a kind of magic stone that dates from his gold strike; Rutger Hauer’s character wears a shirt with a Kabbalistic pattern, and takes part in a voodoo ceremony; Paul Mayersberg discussed the idea of alchemical gold when interviewed about the screenplay. Coil referenced Performance in Further Back And Faster so it’s no surprise they’d like Eureka.