The Criterion Collection

On the occasion of BFI Southbank’s major retrospective on Nicolas Roeg’s more than forty-year career, the Guardian’s Ryan Gilbey sat down with the director for a chat at his London home. Gilbey’s conversation with the eighty-two-year-old Roeg has something in common with Roeg’s time-juggling movies: it’s an entertainingly nonlinear mix of philosophy and self-referentiality—as the journalist explains, “A conversation with him is a dot-to-dot puzzle in verbal form.” But, as one might feel about, say, Performance or Don’t Look Now or Bad Timing, “an internal logic persists, even if it’s not immediately accessible to the conscious mind.” The article features interesting tidbits, both from Roeg (he’s been doing installation art—anonymously) and from Gilbey: did you know that Christopher Nolan has cited Roeg’s Insignificance as a major influence on Inception?