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BAD TIMING SKIN
At the film’s half-way point, when Russell vengefully demands sex with Garfunkel on the stairs, and he looks up at what’s on offer like a naughty schoolboy, fearfully grabbing her, her skin mottling and flushing, the old claims that there was real penetration on the set of Performance seem small beer: here, psyches are stripped.
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The actors’ immersion into their parts became painful. I felt all right about pushing them further and further.’ It’s a maze, but there is an end to it.” We had some Martinis, and they agreed. I must ask you to trust that I know where I’m going. We’re in a city none of us knows, an empty landscape. We’re shooting fragments of scenes there’s nothing to rehearse. I told them, “This isn’t like another movie. I’m glad you feel that way.” Then I asked Art in. To be in a place with so many strange rules and so many dangers, so many police and spies - all that was in the film.’įour days into the shoot his two tyro stars begged Roeg to let them leave, and he knew he was on the right track. ‘It was an unstable city, a border city, only just handed back from the Russians. You cannot intellectualise yourself out of obsession. ‘It was about the fact that you cannot intellectualise your genes, which make aspects of your life inevitable. There are some around.’ Bad Timing began with a favourite Italian paperback of the producer Carlo Ponti, a story of sexual obsession that neither Roeg nor his screenwriter, Yale Udoff, read. “‘Did you pirate it?’ Roeg asks when we meet to discuss it. Harlan Kennedy in conversation with Nicolas Roeg 1 It’s actually something in that other, public manner that makes you understand that they have those moments of lyrical love.’” When one’s in love, the moments of lyrical love are to me implicit in people’s behavior. ‘The ground that makes me nervous in Bad Timing,’ says Roeg, ‘the thought that makes me tremble, is that I don’t want to see in this love affair that sentimental middle area that I think we all know. The plot, like that of Don’t Look Now, has a tinge of the pulp-fictional, but the point of Roeg’s work – and its glory – is that there is nothing simple about even simple plots.
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Taking them down two by two, Roeg placed them on the Steenbeck, which spun the reels simultaneously, providing synchronized sound and picture.īad Timing takes Roeg’s visual sleight of hand and jigsaw crosscutting to a new peak of ingenuity and associative meaning. Some contained reels of celluloid, others the matching sound tapes. Against the wall neatly filed cans were ranged on shelves, all bearing the legend Bad Timing. It’s one of the basic concepts of living that stories are one great story of which all stories partake.’įrom Roeg’s office we walked to his editing room and drew up two stools before a Steenbeck editing machine. But before that, in the oral tradition, stories could continue forever. Printing confined a story within a binding and imposed artificial limits. Before the whole Gutenberg galaxy thing, storytelling was more intimate, more immediate – like film. Faced with that, I’d rather stay at home and read. I actively prefer to be in the cinema, but not the cinema of literature, which is like Victorian picture books. I’ve always wanted to get my thoughts over in film visually, without the intermediary of literature. But pretty well everyone over the age of twenty-five, I guess, maybe twenty-eight, is rooted in the literary tradition. “‘Young people are only just beginning to read film – they know the grammar, They come from a visual generation, and film is a visual medium.