Insight: John Walsh on Nic Roeg

 I’d asked if he’d ever had a terrible shock in his childhood. “No,” he said, “unless you count that business with my father.” His father had fought in the First World War and his face was partially disfigured. To young Nic (born in 1928) it was just his dad, and his face took on a kind of skewed beauty. Then one afternoon, he invited a schoolfriend home for tea. Afterwards, in the garden, the friend asked, “How long’s your dad been like that?” Like what? said Nic. “You know,” said the friend, “hideously disfigured like that.” Nic looked at his father’s face again, and was shocked by what he saw. And of course that moment - in which a loved and familiar face is horribly transformed - recurs in Roeg’s films: when the killer turns round in Don’t Look Now, when David Bowie shows his featureless face to Candy Clark in The Man Who Fell to Earth, when Mick Jagger is re- styled as a vicious greaser in Performance, when David Gulpilil’s trusted, protecting face is transformed by warpaint for a pubertal dance in Walkabout, when Theresa Russell (Mrs Roeg) is made over as King Zog in Aria and Amanda Donohoe’s gorgeous physiognomy gets progressively wasted in Castaway. Maybe all this doesn’t get us all that far in understanding the great visionary’s work. But I pass it on to the thunderstruck Film Crit world for what it’s worth. If ever there was an illustration of Wordsworth’s line about the child being father of the man …

John Walsh on Monday: The soul of Britain on a summer night
Independent, The (London), Jun 28, 1999 by John Walsh

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