From David Bowie to derring-do: Nicolas Roeg’s forgotten contribution to ‘Indiana Jones’
Throughout his entire career, Nicolas Roeg was a director who existed on the fringes of the mainstream. Based on his filmography, that was exactly where he wanted to be, which makes it even more curious that he ended up contributing to one of the biggest franchises in Hollywood.
Roeg was established as a talent to watch from the very beginning after he debuted by co-directing the psychedelic cult classic Performance in 1970, a psychological crime story that caught the attention of the wider cinematic world, including a certain Martin Scorsese.
His first solo effort behind the camera, the following year’s survival drama Walkabout, earned him a nomination for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The best was still to come, though, with Roeg’s next two features ultimately becoming the defining pictures of his professional life.
Don’t Look Now was as controversial as it was innovative, merging Roeg’s virtuosity and craftsmanship with taboo-tackling sequences and resonant thematic explorations. He immediately followed it up with The Man Who Fell to Earth, his second consecutive classic that blended surrealism with sci-fi and gave David Bowie an impeccable platform for his first starring role in a movie.
Roeg would gain two more Palme d’Or nominations for 1985’s alt-history drama Insignificance and 1987’s anthology Aria before he scarred an entire generation of children and landed the biggest hit of his directorial career when he weaponised Jim Henson’s practical effects to traumatising effect on Roald Dahl adaptation The Witches.
It’s hardly the back catalogue of an auteur who’d be interested in globetrotting escapism and far-fetched adventures revolving around one of the most iconic characters in pop culture, but George Lucas evidently disagreed when he hand-picked Roeg to helm ‘Demons of Deception’, the 22nd episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.
Created and executive-produced by the franchise’s co-creator, the series was ahead of its time, which contributed to its early demise. These days, expensive episodic projects based on well-known properties are all the rage, but The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles was an outlier in the early 1990s, and Roeg was far from the only high-profile name to take part.
In fact, Roeg’s episode was written by Carrie Fisher and featured Sean Patrick Flanery’s fresh-faced Indy getting caught up with Mata Hari during a detour to Paris at the height of World War I, where he tries to prevent German forces from deploying a heavy-duty weapon known as ‘Big Bertha’ that could potentially turn the tide of the conflict.
The filmmaker responsible for Don’t Look Now wouldn’t immediately jump to mind as somebody perfectly suited to tell a self-contained Indiana Jones story, but Lucas had a different opinion. It was about as mainstream as it ever got for Roeg, and things didn’t get much bigger than Lucas, Spielberg, and the most famous fictional archaeology enthusiast on the planet.
