Nicolas Roeg: Fear is the key

Nicolas Roeg exposes our deepest secrets in his films, but his refusal to compromise made him enemies. As Roeg says, everything comes with a price

Talking to Nicolas Roeg is like listening to the BBC World Service during an electromagnetic storm. Just as he's telling you something fascinating – a story about how The Man Who Fell to Earth drove its distributor to the psychiatrist, perhaps, or how the American censor hallucinated pubic hair into Don't Look Now – he tunes out, his sentences shifting somewhere beyond the range of the human ear. The odd comprehensible phrase surfaces on a sea of indecipherable burbling: "The drowning scene in Don't Look Now – little girl put on her red mac – swam for her school – Euurgh! ... Donald reaching out – No good at all – farmer's daughter – Bleurrghhh! – but when it came to it – the weeds, you know."

I'm with Roeg because two of his most celebrated works, Don't Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth, are now available on DVD. A few minutes into our interview, another Roeg male – his teenage son, Max – passes the door of the study, accompanied by a girlfriend. It's a hot afternoon; they're going out for a walk. Roeg stops him on the landing, and reminds him, in a vague, uninsistent way, that he ought to be revising for his history GCSE. Then he concludes his story about that pond, Donald Sutherland, and those little girls who wouldn't drown properly. "Three girls are in that shot!" he exclaims. "But I'd rather you didn't write that fact." It doesn't seem a particularly contentious anecdote, so I ask why not. "Oh!" he exclaims, caving in immediately. "Maybe. It's too late now." If Max does skive the whole afternoon, I don't think his father will be sending him to bed without any pudding.

Sitting in his comfortable, book-lined study, decanting a bottle of Guinness into a glass, Roeg seems more like a loveable, rather mischievous don than an epoch-defining film director – the last person on earth you'd expect to find shouting at anybody through a megaphone. He possesses an air of passivity rare among members of his profession, and common among the protagonists of Nicolas Roeg films. And yet, his back catalogue, dominated by that quartet of masterpieces and near-masterpieces, Performance (1970), Walkabout (1970), Don't Look Now (1973) and The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) – attests to his ability to force actors to embark upon punishing emotional journeys; to expose what wriggles beneath the skin of everyday life.

His portrait of a marriage in Don't Look Now, for example. I first saw it on TV when I was 12: much more terrifying than the famously shocking conclusion was the way in which the film adumbrated a world of inaccessibly grown-up emotions, feelings as deep and murky as Venetian canal water. "A good friend of mine lost a child," Roeg recalls, "and they'd been told to try for another. That very often happens. And we [Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie] talked about that. I think that's why people have made so much of what is usually called the "love scene" in the movie. Most love scenes are seduction scenes. 'You look beautiful!' But these two are in love. They have kids and they're happily married. And this awful thing happens to them, and it's more than they can bear."

The film, he says, was a difficult pitch: studio executives were nervous about the "relentless downward plunge" of the narrative. "There was no trace of that arc that people always go on about these days." He's sceptical about such studio boardroom bafflegab, but Roeg's work has often benefited from the tension between experiment and commerce.

He is, at heart, a mainstream director: the films upon which his reputation stands were all financed by major studios. Sure, his backers sometimes tried to sue him for unprofessional conduct after seeing the results, but until Bad Timing (1980), that never really mattered much.

Bad Timing was a watershed in Roeg's career. The film – the story of the relationship between a suicidal American and a psychology professor – was condemned by Variety as "degenerate" and by its own distributors as "a sick film made by sick people for sick people". A psychiatrist, notes Roeg, was commissioned to write a report on the movie for its producers. "He said that it was one of those works that you can only enjoy alone, that you don't want to share. It has a separating effect. You can tell people to go and see it on their own, but not together. I knew what he meant." Roeg remembers being cold-shouldered after preview screenings of Bad Timing, audience members quitting their seats halfway through the film, and the words of its star, Theresa Russell: "I'm glad I'm doing this, but I don't think they'll eat it." She was right, and she had the courage of her convictions: shortly afterwards, the actress married her director, and until their recent separation, was his regular female lead.

"Most of our work," says Roeg, "is dictated by fear. I think. And doubt. Doubt and fear. Fear of executives and doubt of yourself. Executives go on courses at Harvard Business school to learn how to test people. They ask for changes, but you don't know whether they really want them, or whether they're just trying to see how you respond." He pours the last of his Guinness into the glass, where it foams and sputters.

After the débâcle over Bad Timing, Roeg became more difficult to employ. With the exception of Eureka (1983) and The Witches (1990), his subsequent movies have been for television audiences or the arthouse crowd. Some, like Cold Heaven (1983) didn't make it to the cinema.

But this current marginality, I think, is not really Roeg's fault. It has been his misfortune to be a mainstream director around whom mainstream cinema has regressed. Can you imagine one of today's large-scale, Hollywood-backed films accommodating Roeg's freewheeling approach to narrative, or his unflinching gaze upon the messy details of human life?

That glowing, post-coital friendliness that follows the tumultuous sex between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in Don't Look Now, and briefly illuminates the film's darkness; that moment in Walkabout when the hunter slices open the throat of a gunned-down animal, and lets the blood surge on to the orange earth; that delicate moment in The Man Who Fell to Earth in which Candy Clark peels off one of her rose-pink artificial nails, the better to dry a vodka glass, considers her one-sided relationship with David Bowie's alien and murmurs, "you don't need me...." What director currently employed by Warner Bros would be capable of such things?

"Everything has a price," reflects Roeg. "Is it the right price? I don't know. It depends what you want in life. I've never been rich and I've always done okay. The price I've paid is that I haven't been able to do all the pictures I'd have liked to do. That's the price. Maybe I've stuck with things too long that haven't been made, and the thing has exhausted itself or the idea has been done by somebody else. Sometimes people say to me, 'oh whatever happened to that old thing you were working on?' and I've dug it out, and found that its time has gone." This, he says, without a mumbled word, or single odd ellipsis.

'Don't Look Now' and 'The Man Who Fell to Earth' are available from Warner Home Entertainment