Mick Jagger on 'Performance'

Jagger discusses the seminal gangster flick which is playing as part of Time Out London on Screen season.

Aug 30 2006

A late-night screening of Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s 1970 film 'Performance' will open Time Out's month-long 'London on Screen’'season at the Gate Cinema on September 1. The film stars Mick Jagger as Turner, a reclusive rock star who unwittingly offers refuge to James Fox's Chas, an East End gangster who awakens a latent violence in his host. What follows is an edited extract of an interview with Jagger originally published in Time Out in January 1971.

'I think Turner is a projection of Donald [Cammell]'s fantasy or idea of what I am, or how I imagine I am. It's very easy for people to believe that's what I'm like. It was easy to do in a way because it's just another facet of me, if I felt inclined to go that way. But when I look at [the film] now there's so many things I could have done to make it stranger or to make it more real. I think Turner was a bit too much like me in a few ways. But he's not quite hopeless enough.

'I don't think there's many people like [Turner]. I found his intellectual posturing very ridiculous – that's what sort of fucked him up. Too much intellectual posturing in the bath when you're with two women is not a good thing – that's not to be taken too seriously! It made my skin go all funny! I know people like that.

'I've known Donald on and off for several years. But when you work with someone you really get to know them and we had terrible rows because I didn't think he knew what he was doing. He'll probably say that I didn't really either. [Co-director Nicolas] Roeg was the professional doing his thing. He was always reliable and he had his little lighting cameraman job to do as well. But he was doing more than that and I don't know how much of the composition and the rest was due to him. Donald wrote the story and he was the driving force as far as the actors were concerned.

'At the time I couldn't see the film because I was very hung up about it. I'd rather it had come out. [Nervous executives at Warner Bros delayed the film's release for two years.] It should have been out years ago. I still think it's a good film. But it was a better film two years ago.

'I feel I did create something. It was enjoyable as far as that's concerned. That's what made it such hard work. Although you can say it was contributing something creative, it wasn't shot with one camera taking Anita [Pallenberg, who plays Turner's girlfriend] and I out into the middle of nowhere for three days and saying this is the sort of feeling we want you to have. It was shot like a regular movie. You had to know what you were doing before you got on camera. It wasn't a question of improvising for hours and hours. We had to work it all out before, otherwise you just got in a mess. We'd suddenly stop shooting one day because I'd say I wasn't going to say those lines. There were all kinds of situations like that and the regular technicians would go "Blimey, I've never seen anything like it!" and all that.

'There's two important things about the film to Donald. There's the sexual thing – not only physically sexual, but the interrelating of the sexes and the interchanging of roles. And the role of violence and the role of women, vis-à-vis the role of violence of a man. How the two things can balance each other out. And the ritualistic significance of violence. That's one of the main themes.

'I don't understand the connection between music and violence. Donald's always trying to explain it to me and I just blindly carry on. I just know that I get very aroused by music, but it doesn't arouse me violently. I never went to a rock 'n' roll show and wanted to smash the windows or beat anybody up afterwards. I feel more sexual than actually physically violent. I get a sexual feeling and want to fuck as soon as I've been playing. I cool down very quickly. The only time I've felt violent was in some street demonstration and you really get the feeling of being with a crowd which wants to do something and you get really carried along whether they're right or wrong. Whether the policeman is doing his job or whether the cause that you're hitting the policeman for is really right, what's it fucking matter? The point is that the act of violence is more powerful than the intellectual, political act. I never felt that in a crowd with music.'

'Performance' screens at the Gate Cinema at 11.30pm on Sept 1 and 2 and Ciné Lumière at 6.30 pm on Sept 6.

Click here for more Time Out London on Screen details.

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