Nicolas Roeg on Don't Look Now

The veteran director recalls the making of his terrifying 1973 classic, a film which set the tone for a career marked by mischief and playful unpredictability

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For a stocky but slight 78-year-old, director Nicolas Roeg has a surprisingly strong handshake. But then Roeg, one of the great mavericks of British filmmaking, has always confounded expectations. Take the Mick Jagger-starring Performance, which he co-directed in 1968 with the late Donald Cammell. If a salivating Warner Bros believed they were going to get their very own A Hard Day's Night, they were left reeling by the long dark night of the soul the film finished up as - a real magickal mystery tour sporting unflinching nudity and ultra-violence. Or take Roeg's follow-up, Walkabout. As Big Audio Dynamite sang in their 1985 homage to the director, 'E=MC2', "Man dies first reel, people ask 'What's the deal? This ain't how it's s'posed to be...'"

Making films that aren't how they're supposed to be is Nic Roeg's stock-in-trade. Between 1970 and 1980, he directed a fistful of stylish classics, characterised by a signature non-linear approach, which stand among the best cinema has to offer, including The Man Who Fell To Earth, Bad Timing, and a DVD re-release we're here to talk about today, Don't Look Now.

A dazzling supernatural thriller and a treatise on the nature of time and coincidence, it's often cited as his best work. Adapted from a short story by the Cornish writer Daphne Du Maurier (whose 'Rebecca' and 'The Birds' also translated well to screen), the film concerns a young couple, John and Laura Baxter, played by Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, who are getting over their daughter's death-by-drowning with a sabbatical in a mist-shrouded, off-season Venice. There they encounter a pair of mysterious sisters, one of whom, a blind psychic, informs them that their daughter - who John imagines he glimpses in the city wearing her distinctive red mackintosh - is still with them. But the grieving couple's sanctuary may prove to be their tomb; a serial killer also stalks the labyrinthine canals and alleyways, culminating in a shocking and unexpected climax.

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