When a filmmaker dies, it is very easy to write about the breaking of his films, and how advanced was your time. But in the case of Nicolas Roeg, who has died today at the age of 90 as he has confirmed to the BBC his family, was absolutely true. During the seventies and early eighties, formed a body of lyrics creative, different, that has marked the works of filmmakers later on, such as Paul Thomas Anderson or Christopher Nolan, who directed the visual over the narrative -the influence of his previous work as director of photography, which influenced the sex, the terror or madness, and that led to clashes passionate between detractors and fans of his work. As a curious note, in his films acted by musicians like Art Garfunkel, Mick Jagger and David Bowie.

Roeg was born in 1928 in London. On the other side of their street there was a film studio, and there began in 1947, after military service, working as a boy for everything. In its scale in the cinema was for the camera operator to director of photography. In these labors he participated in the Crossing of fates, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Fahrenheit 451, The venus of the ira, Far from the madding crowd, Petulia, or even a Bond: Casino Royale.

But Roeg wanted to direct. Is coaligó with another film maker, Donald Cammell, to lift Performance, starring Mick Jagger in a high moment of fame singer… what did not prevent that the film was unused for two years, to 1968, when it was filmed, 1970. The script Cammell, which describes the encounter between a rock star and a gangster ultraviolento (played by James Fox), and the visual style of Roeg bog down the film in any store. Yes, when it opened, it became a title-bearer of the counterculture English. “The movies are not scripts, the movies are movies,” he told in an interview in The Guardian in 2006, and defended that principle all his life.

In 1971 released his next work, a thriller developed in Australia, Walkabout, which increased his fame in tight circles, but found no audience. Finally, with his third film, Roeg gave the bell: the Threat in the shade (Don’t Look Now, with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, a film psychological thriller based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier. Was rated X in the Uk, although on this occasion at least let him show the sex he wanted on the screen; in Performance, a laboratory technician, scandalized, threw it in the trash sequences of greater erotic content. Thus came his best work: The man who fell to Earth (1976) -with David Bowie on his career as a more pop-, Syncopation (1980) -another erotic thriller with a musician, in this case Art Garfunkel and Theresa Russell. Russell is married years later with Roeg and together they made six films.

expand photo Nicolas Roeg and David Bowie, in the filming of ‘The man who fell to Earth’.

Her career continued with Eureka (1983), with Gene Hackman; Insignificance (1985), in which four icons of the fifties meet in a hotel room -for legal reasons could not be appointed, but Russell, for example, embodied Marilyn Monroe, and decayed with Robinson Crusoe for a year (1986). On Route 29 (1988) brought to the screen a script by Dennis Potter with Russell and Gary Oldman.

Much more rare is in their filmography The curse of the witches (1995), which gave a version of a story of Roald Dahl creatures created by Jim Henson. The rest of their work ended up being a lot of high erotic content but little substance, and movies for television, among which highlights its adaptation to the canonical heart of darkness, by Joseph Conrad, with Tim Roth and John Malkovich. In 2007 came his latest film, Puffball, a history of witchcraft in rural Ireland.