‘Value and worth in any of the arts has always been about timing,’ writes British director Nicolas Roeg at the age of 84. Few directors understand this better — this matter of good and bad ‘timing’ — than the maker of Performance, Roeg’s debut film of 1970. Even starring Mick Jagger — then the centrefold of popularity — the film stunned critics by its experimental otherness: they hated it. By now, though, opinions have changed and Performance — once, out of its time — is upheld, along with Roeg’s other works, as among the greatest and boldest examples of British cinema. Roeg, however, has only ever been consistent in his commitment to pushing the boundaries of accepted practice in his medium. ‘There is nothing more dating,’ he says, ‘than “We always do it that way”.’
This is the Roeg of The World is Ever Changing, his first book: forward-looking, curious, and still animatedly debating the nature of time and its interplay with memory and imagination. Time and all its indexes (ageing; dreams) are the common theme of Roeg’s some 15 films: be it reversing film tape in Walkabout to bring a fallen buffalo back to its feet; anatomising a love affair through flashbacks in Bad Timing (1980); or depositing David Bowie’s red-headed alien down a foxhole of a future time in his 1976 sci-fi, The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Hard, then, to imagine Roeg writing the conventional memoir; arranging his life, A to Z, in anodyne chronology. No — The World is less autobiography than a bombinating mix of experiential advice, memorable encounters, and animate, annotative thinking. Sinuous and talkative, the book is a pleasure to read, and there’s satisfaction in knowing it could not have been written by anyone but Roeg — not even by the most rigorous historian with access to his library desk, photographs of which decorate the book’s themed chapter headings (‘Image’; ‘Editing’; ‘Actors’; ‘Script’) in the enhanced edition for iPad.
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