GUARDIAN NEWS SERVICE

By Geoffrey Macnab

Who says film is a young man's game? Three of this season's most intriguing movies are by directors well past 70. Geoffrey Macnab on how they do it - and why others failed.

We are often told that cinema is a young person's medium. The majority of cinemagoers are in their teens. Orson Welles made Citizen Kane when in his mid-20s. Film-makers tend to be at their most creative and energetic at the outset of their careers - when, paradoxically, financiers are least willing to support them.

But the next few months sees the release of three films by directors we can, without wishing to be rude, safely assume to be in the twilight of their careers. Nicolas Roeg, whose comedy Puffball is in cinemas this Friday, turns 80 in August; the 88-year-old French auteur Eric Rohmer and the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, now in his 100th year, both have new films out in September. Together, these three men have a combined age of 268.

Such long careers are a rarity: very few directors have been able to make meaningful work beyond their 60s. Film history is littered with stories of once-great directors falling into oblivion. Georges Melies, the great French magician of early silent cinema, ended up selling toys at the Gare Montparnasse. The elderly Nick Ray, director of Rebel Without a Cause, was arrested in Hollywood because he couldn't afford to pay for a cup of coffee in a diner. In Britain, Michael Powell was shunned after the release of Peeping Tom in 1960.

The director David Puttnam, who effectively left the film industry in his mid-50s, says he met many of his heroes while boss of Columbia Pictures: Billy Wilder, Stanley Kramer, John Huston, Fred Zinnemann and George Stevens. "What I realised, Puttnam says, "and I don't particularly enjoy saying this, in that I obviously knew them all toward the end of their careers, is what angry men they were. When I made the decision to be out [of the film business] at 55, it was because I realised that the last 15 years of their lives, they were not happy guys. The closest to a nice man was Mickey Powell, who seemed reconciled."

Orson Welles famously likened the experience of directing Citizen Kane to being put in charge of the greatest train set a kid could have. When that train set is removed, and when the studio bosses stop returning calls, directors tend to react like spurned kids. "Every single one of them feels the toy set has been taken away too early," says Puttnam. At least Welles was philosophical about his dwindling opportunities. Puttnam worked briefly with him in the early 1970s on an advertisement: "I'd talk to him often about doing a movie, but what I came to realise was that he loved talking about his next project but he had no intention of making another film."

But film-makers who continue working into their 70s and 80s are often ready to experiment in a more wilful and adventurous way than younger directors. Rohmer's new film, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, is determinedly eccentric: a yarn about the romantic intrigues of photogenic, curly-haired young shepherds and shepherdesses in ancient Gaul. The pacing is on the leisurely side and the dialogue is self-consciously arch, but you'd have to go a very long way to find a movie as odd and quaint.

Rohmer lives in an apartment in a fashionable district of Paris (in the hallway there is a mailbox for the 77-year-old Jean Luc Godard, who no longer lives in the building but still gets mail). He agrees that his latest film, a story about misunderstandings between young lovers, has affinities with his earliest work. "This is a story which is set before I was born, but there is still this opposition running through the film between fidelity and infidelity. It was because I recognised these themes that I decided to make it."

Rohmer says he takes as much pleasure in the process of making films now as when he made his debut feature, The Sign of Leo, in 1959 - almost 50 years ago. "If not, I wouldn't have made the film." He says he still enjoys almost every aspect of the process, apart from talking about the film afterwards. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he prefers not to travel the film festival circuit. "I see many of my fellow directors trotting round the world. They go from one big festival to another and they don't have much knowledge of what is a normal life."

You can't help but notice that Rohmer's films are still invariably populated by a host of gorgeous young actresses; Astrea and Celadon, full of shapely young nymphs, is no exception. As David Thomson notes in his Biographical Dictionary of Film: "I wonder if, after the destruction of the rest of the world, Rohmer might not still be making his fourth six-part series on love at different times of day with holograms of yet more slender, lovely girls and torrents of misunderstanding." This seems somewhat unfair, as Rohmer's fascination with young beauty was there from the start: witness his wonderful The Baker of Monceau (1963), the first of his six "moral tales", in which a young man approaches a beautiful young woman on the street and then begins to lurk outside her apartment.

In July last year, Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni died on the same day, and it seemed the European auteur was about to become an extinct breed. Rohmer doesn't dismiss the possibility altogether. Thirty years ago, his films regularly found distribution in the US; this is no longer the case, even if one of his films, Chloe in the Afternoon, was recently remade by the comedian Chris Rock as I Think I Love My Wife. ("I am not troubled by that," Rohmer says. "I hope people prefer mine to this new one.")

Even in France, he says, auteur films are being pushed out of the mainstream, as a new generation of directors tries to compete with Hollywood blockbusters. In the past, he says, auteur films would reach a general public, but "that rarely happens now".

Manoel de Oliveira only really hit his stride as a film-maker in his 80s and 90s. His work clearly benefits from experience: it's hard to imagine a younger director dreaming up a film like his magical, Proustian documentary Porto of My Childhood (2001). Born in 1908, Oliveira was there at the birth of cinema, and can remember a time before movie theatres; in his childhood, films were shown in old sheds. Fast-living and irreverent in his private life, Oliveira is making movies with increasingly slow tempos. Dialogue and ideas are privileged at the expense of flashy editing; characters discuss aesthetics, philosophy and religion for minutes on end. He doesn't care for the shorthand of mobile phones, texting and laptops. "People are becoming dehumanised, increasingly mechanised," he says. "They're there as physical presences, but their minds are elsewhere. We're developing a more artificial lifestyle."

At 99, Oliveira is old enough and mischievous enough to get away with his new film, Belle Toujours, a "sequel" to Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour. Sequels are, of course, a Hollywood commonplace, but it is virtually unheard of for one auteur to pick up the threads left by another 40 years earlier. A younger director would have been accused of extreme presumption. Not so Oliveira.

What of Roeg's latest film? Few would argue that it comes anywhere near his earlier masterpieces, such as Performance or The Man Who Fell to Earth, but it has considerable curiosity value, as well as a number of echoes with his earlier work. Set in rural Ireland, the story touches on sex, bereavement, coincidence, the uncanny and the inability of couples to communicate. It even features a cameo from Donald Sutherland, last seen in a Roeg movie being stabbed by a dwarf in a red anorak.

Puffball, Belle Toujours and The Romance of Astrea and Celadon don't fit tidily into current distributor notions about what the public wants; it is a small miracle they are being released in this country at all. But it's a sign of a robust and diverse film culture that there is still a place for old devils like Roeg, Rohmer and Oliveira. Their new work may be quirky and uneven, but 268 years' worth of experience counts for something.