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Few filmmakers have generated as great a body of lurid gossip, myth and speculation as Donald Cammell. He was the creator and driving force behind Performance, one of fhe most startling and innovative British cult classics. The film starred Mick Jagger and James Fox and is a psychedelic document of wild times and, in many ways, the closest thing to a biography of Cammell.
The director is reputed to have had connections with occultist Aleister Crowley, a voracious appetite for drink, drugs and sex and a long list of bizarre eccentricities. The excesses and accounts of Cammell's nervous breakdown and psychosis on the set of Performance are legendary.
Friend and confidant of The Rolling Stones, Marlon Brando (his greatest admirer), ruthless London gangsters, the Kray Brothers, and a bevy of models, artists and English aristocracy; Cammell disappeared for almost 30 years after Performance, reclusive until his extraordinary and dramatic suicide in 1996. Cammeil made oniy two more films, Demon Seed (1977) and White ot Ihe Eye (1986), both disturbing curiosities that reflected Cammell's perverse psychology and dark passions.