contemptuous of Turner, who himself attempts to return the rent paid in advance, but they start influencing each other. Pherber and Turner understand his conflict, and want to understand what makes him function so well within his world. To speed up the process, Pherber tricks him by feeding him a psychedelic mushroom, and Chas accuses her and Turner of poisoning him. He soon accepts it, and in his hallucinogenic state, he experiments with clothing and identity, including the wearing of feminine clothes. Chas opens up, and he begins a caring relationship with Lucy. Before all this, he phones Tony (a trusted friend who refers to Chas as 'Uncle') to help him get out of the country. Flowers and his henchmen use Tony to track Chas to Turner's flat. They allow him to go and collect his things upstairs. Chas tells Turner and Pherber he is leaving, then shoots and kills Turner before being escorted into Flowers' car. As the car is driving away, Chas still wears his feminine clothes and wig, but his face is identical to Turner's. Cast Production Development Performance was initially conceived by Donald Cammell as "The Performers", and was to be a light-hearted swinging '60s romp. At one stage, Cammell's friend Marlon Brando (with whom he later collaborated on the posthumously published novel Fan Tan) was to play the gangster role of 'Chas'. At that stage, the story involved an American gangster hiding out in London. James Fox, previously cast in rather upper crust roles, eventually took the place of Brando, and spent several months in South London among the criminal underworld, researching his role. As the project evolved, the story became significantly darker. Cammell was influenced by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (whose portrait, on a book cover, can be seen at a crucial moment in the film), as he re-drafted the script to create an intense, intellectual film dealing with an identity crisis. The theories put forward by Antonin Artaud, on the links between performing and madness, also influenced Cammell, who—along with co-director Nicolas Roeg, mainly responsible for the 'look' of the film—also benefited from a lack of interference from studio executives at Warner Bros., who believed they were getting a Rolling Stones equivalent of The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night (1964). Instead, Cammell and Roeg delivered a dark, experimental film which included graphic depictions of violence, sex and drug use. It was