He was an American film producer. Working with Jeremy Thomas at London's Recorded Picture Company for much of his later career, he was an associate producer on The Dreamers and Sexy Beast, and the co-producer of Blood and Wine. Formerly Bellville acted as Roman Polanski's assistant director on many films, working with the director in a creative capacity for over a decade. Bellville was an associate producer on Polanski's The Tenant, and it is his hands that come through the wall to menace Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion. Bellville, meanwhile, had made only television commercials for Martini. The director was struck by his first encounter with Bellville, recalling "a thin, gangling young man in a brown velvet jacket and bright pink tiee_SLps very keen to break into film-making. I was so taken with his obvious enthusiasm, and his unlikely-sounding name, that I hired him on the spot, though his lack of a union card meant he could be employed only as a runner." In the film itself, it was Bellville's long, bony, tapering fingers which came through the walls to menace Catherine Deneuve in the nightmare sequence. For the next 14 years Bellville worked with Polanski and the producer Andrew Braunsberg, as second unit director on The Tragedy of Macbeth (1971), What? (1972), The Tenant (1976) and Tess (1979), for which he shot one of the sequences. In 1975 Bellville's work as assistant director to Antonioni on The Passenger was the start of a close association with the actor Jack Nicholson that continued in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) and Blood and Wine (1996). During the early 1980s Bellville lived in Los Angeles, where he worked on Being There (1979), starring Peter Sellers, and co-produced Strangers Kiss (1983). Bellville joined Jeremy Thomas's Recorded Picture Company in 1984, when Thomas was making The Last Emperor (1985) with Bernardo Bertolucci. Over the next quarter of a century Bellville was Thomas's assistant and right-hand man, and eventually became a director of his company. Bellville's more recent projects included Sexy Beast (2000), directed by Jonathan Glazer, and The Dreamers (2003), also directed by Bertolucci.
Filmography:
The Dreamers (2003)
Sexy Beast (2000)
All the Little Animals (1998)
Blood and Wine (1996)
Strangers Kiss (1983)
The Tenant (1976)