The Performing Arts

"Even the bathwater is dirty!" That was the infamous reaction of a Warner's executive to an early screening of scenes from Performance, one of the most important films of the 1970s, and which gets a much deserved UK theatrical re-release next month. The surreal tale of a low-life gangster and a bohemian pop star whose apparently diverse personalities meld and blur startlingly when the two are holed up in a London house, Performance was appropriately co-directed by writer Donald Cammell and cinematographer Nic Roeg, who somehow fused into one mighty filmmaking force. "It was as if Donald and I had become one person," Roeg told me in the late 1990s. "In relation to that film, we were of a single mind."

Yet while Roeg and Cammell may have enjoyed an impeccably harmonious union on Performance, everything else about the creation of this cult classic was a hot-bed of division and conflict, with both studios and censors reacting to the movie with a mixture of fear and loathing, and doing their level best either to suppress or destroy its extraordinary power.

According to legend, problems on Performance began a month into the shoot in the autumn of 1968, when Warner executives first demanded to see assemblies of what had been shot so far. Having apparently agreed to finance the film on the basis of sexy leading man Mick Jagger's youth caché, the suits were reportedly shocked to see scenes which implied some form of psychosexual intrigue between Jagger and co-star James Fox. Worrying too were sequences that depicted female leads Anita Pallenberg and Michèlle Breton merrily sharing a bath with Mick in a manner that implied that they were not entirely heterosexual. "Are they all bi?" demanded one outraged financier, to which Cammell and Roeg innocently replied "Are they all bi-what?" The tone of the screening was tense to say the least, with producer Sandy Lieberson prophetically concluding "I knew we were definitely in trouble".