Fact #151344

EYE WITNESS FEATURE BY JOHNNY BLACK FOR Q MAGAZINE

Candy Clark (actress) : I agreed to do the movie some time before Bowie became involved. I had known the director, Nic Roeg, quite well for some while.

David Bowie : He had Peter O’Toole cast but he couldn’t do the film.

Candy Clark : It was a lady called Arlene Sellers, a producer and a good friend of Nic’s, who suggested that Bowie would be good for the leading role, Thomas Jerome Newton, an alien who becomes stranded on earth.

David Bowie : I believe the editor of the film advised Nic to watch the documentary about me, Cracked Actor, that was on the BBC. Nic watched it …

Nic Roeg : I’d seen a programme on the BBC about David which I thought was rather good and very well done, although nothing patently to do with the story I was involved with. At the time, I was thinking of using, not an actor for the part, but rather a curiousity, a multi-talented human being. I liked David’s work, but it wasn’t that at the time that drew me to him. It was his attitude inside the programme. I liked the way he moved, the way he answered people…

David Bowie : …and I guess it was my attachment to Ziggy, the alter ego, that captured his interest and imagination. And my looks helped too. Roeg wanted a definite pointedly, stark face – which I had been endowed with.

February 1975 : Roeg visits Bowie in New York.
David Bowie : Nicolas Roeg came to my house a number of weeks after he’d sent the script. He arrived on time and I was out. After eight hours or so, I remembered our appointment. I turned up nine hours late, thinking, of course, that he’d gone. He was sitting in the kitchen. He’d been sitting there for hours and hours and wouldn’t go upstairs, wouldn’t go into my room. He stayed in the kitchen. God, I was so embarrassed. I thought I would be embarrassed into doing the film. He said, "Well, David, what do you think of the script?" I said, "It's a bit corny; isn't it?" His face just fucking fell off. Then he started talking. Two or three hours later, I was convinced the man was a genius.

Nic Roeg : By the end of the evening – I only had a couple of days in New York and had to finalize things – I was virtually leaving, when he said, ‘I’m going to do it. You tell me when it is and I’ll do it.’

David Bowie : I'd been offered a lot of scripts but I chose this one because it was the only one where I didn't have to sing or look like David Bowie.

Nic Roeg : I remember I was asked by the first company (interested in funding the film) ‘Can he act?’ To which I replied, ‘What do you mean, can he act? Anyone who holds 60,000 people on their own in a hall – that is an act.’ Their act is, in fact, acting and that is enough.

Candy Clark : A couple of weeks after David agreed to do the film, Nic Roeg took me over to meet with him at a house he was renting in Los Angeles, California, USA.

David Bowie : That was the wipeout period. I was totally washed up emotionally and psychically, completely screwed up. I was fed up hallucinating twenty-four hours a day.

Candy Clark : He made a vow that day to Nic that he would not take drugs during the making of The Man Who Fell To Earth, and I certainly never saw any evidence of him doing drugs. I can imagine that maybe the withdrawal was giving him a hard time, but he was usually upbeat, very approachable. He was very, very thin, but he didn’t seem unwell. He was at the peak of his beauty.

June 1975 : Bowie travels to New Mexico on the Santa Fe Super Chief railway.
Candy Clark : He would never fly, so he came down on the train. Virtually all of the film was shot on location in New Mexico. We stayed mostly in a hotel in Albuquerque, but we filmed at the White Sands Missile Range in Alamogordo, and at Roswell.

Paul Mayersberg (scriptwriter) : You could look up into the sky and see strange things. You could see something odd, lights flashing, every day.

July 1975 : Filming begins.
Candy Clark : Making that film was one of the best working experiences of my career. We all had a great working relationship, very upbeat and I felt that David was absolutely perfectly cast as The Man Who Fell To Earth.

Paul Mayersberg : His demeanour, his remoteness – he didn’t look desperately unhappy but he looked disconcerted. That fitted the part exactly.

David Bowie : I acted or non-acted as best as I could in that film. It required non-acting because the character of Newton that I played is a very cold, unexpressive person. The thing he learns on earth is emotion, which comes hard to him and reduces him to an alcoholic.

Candy Clark : David turned out to be an ideal working partner for me, because I like to rehearse lines over and over until I’m word perfect, and he was very happy to do that too. He never got bored with that. Maybe, being a musician, he was used to lots of rehearsal.

Paul Mayersberg : His role, word for word, was what was written. He was word perfect. I don’t remember seeing a fluff. It was unnerving in some ways.

Candy Clark : There was a scene right at the start, where we first meet, and I’ve brought a bottle of gin, and it falls and David catches it…

Paul Mayersberg : We did that three or four times and every time he caught it in exactly the same way. Hard things to do – but he was absolutely immaculate.

Candy Clark : David and I both had to endure lengthy and extremely boring make-up sessions, I had to be turned into an old woman, and he had to become an alien.

David Bowie :  The skin of my character in The Man Who Fell To Earth was some concoction, a spermatozoon of an alien nature that was obscene and weird-looking. I think it was put together with the whites of eggs, food colouring and flour. Nic does revolting stuff that creates such challenging vignettes!

Candy Clark : I tallied up the hours I spent in the make-up chair, having bits of rubber glued to my face with spirit gum, and it came out at ninety two and a half hours – which is two forty hour working weeks. And that’s not counting the time it took to remove. You can’t move, you can’t even smile for fear of cracking it around your mouth. The only food I could have was a milk shake for lunch, through a straw.

Nic Roeg : We asked ourselves 'How would Mister Newton make money?'. Would he go into armaments? And then we thought 'Why don't we have him doing software?' He could slide in unnoticed - there are two ways to approach power, either from the outside, battering it, or slyly, from the inside.

And so we had him creating patents. And we said 'What can he invent?' What about a disposable camera, where you buy it, use the film and chuck the camera away? I promise you this wasn't in the air when we were shooting it. I thought it would take 25 years. Within five years I was at LA airport and Fuji were there - buy the camera, throw it away. Some guys in Japan were obviously imagining it too. I like to think that they'd watched The Man Who Fell to Earth!

Candy Clark : We did a little side trip one day to the Carlsbad Caves, but it wasn’t for filming, it was just for fun.

David Bowie : It was completely dark except for one hole in the top. Suddenly, there was a whistling sound like rats screaming. Thousands of bats flew out of the rocks and up through the hole. They return every morning at 4.00am.

Candy Clark : The house we were working in, the house on the lake with the banks of tv sets, had supposedly been built on some sort of Aztec burial ground. I never even found out if that was true, but someone told David about it, and he was telling everyone else and he was, at that time, I guess, a little more superstitious.

One day, he wanted some milk, and when he got it, he noticed something in the bottom of his glass…

David Bowie : …some gold liquid swimming around in tiny swirls inside the glass…

Candy Clark : … and maybe he attributed it to where we were working.

David Bowie : Six people saw this eerie mess in the milk, so I know I’m not crazy.

Candy Clark : But, anyway, he became sick, like he was poisoned or drank something bad, and couldn’t work for a day or so. So that scene where I’m knocking on the door and going, “Tommy, are you in there?” and when he opens the door, I see him as a creature from another world for the first time and I’m shocked and I throw myself against the wall … he wasn’t there. You see someone else’s hand in a rubber glove, and I had to use my imagination to come up with the horrified reaction.

Nic Roeg : With The Man Who Fell to Earth I wanted to get rid of any sense of time, because it's surprising how often we mention it in our lives. One thing got by me until the cutting - I suddenly heard someone saying 'I've been here three months already.' I thought, 'How did that get in?' I had to dub it. It slips by you.

September 75 – filming in New Mexico ends. Bowie goes to Los Angeles to start work on his next album, Station To Station.

Candy Clark : I played several characters in the film. I was Mary-Lou on earth, I was his wife on the other planet, and I even played his part. After the main body of the filming was finished in New Mexico, we had to shoot a scene in New York. At that time, because he had his aversion to flying, there was a scene where David is supposed to be exiting the World Enterprise Building in New York City, but it’s really me in a red wig and his clothes. I had my hand up to my chin to cover my jawline, which isn’t the same as David’s. They had barriers set up, and I could hear people saying, ‘There’s David Bowie!’, so I didn’t disillusion them.

That was about it, except that we shot the scenes where David has become an alcoholic in a park in downtown Echo Park. We felt at the end that we had made a great movie from a great script that we all got very involved in.

There was one major problem when it was released. You saw the full-length version in the UK, beautifully edited by Nic Roeg, but the distribution company that brought it out in the US wanted a shorter film. They wanted two hours, so that it would conveniently fit the time slots in the cinemas. So they brought in a guy who edited commercials, and he hacked twenty minutes out of it almost at random, virtually destroying the plot line that Nic had worked for six months to get exactly right. I was so upset by that, I refused to do any promotion for the film in America.

David Bowie : One thing that Nick Roeg is good at doing is seducing people into a role, and he seduced me completely: He told me after we'd finished it would take me a long time to get out of the role and he was dead right. After four months playing the role I was Newton for six months afterwards.