Mark Peploe: Morocco without Sunglasses

John Kobal: Adapting The Sheltering Sky to the screen seems like a fairly daunting task, given the nature of the book. Can this be turned into a film audiences will want to see?

Mark Peploe: The movie is more optimistic than the book. I mean, from the beginning, apart from the rules of movie production, and even apart from [what] Bernardo [wanted], I'm not the pessimist Paul Bowles obviously is. He is a pessimist.

JK: How did you approach the story?

MP: I would call it a love story. Maybe a "strange love story" in which people are not having an easy time. It's not about "falling in love." It's about how difficult it is to love. But, that they do love each other is revealed. Kit and Port tend to be tough on each other. Not mean, but they have a sort of ironic relationship. Underneath there is nothing to keep this couple together except for the fact that they do love each other. They have no family, no friends. But neither can conceive of life without the other. They're locked into each other--the way people get. And it's a sad story because they never really get their chance to reconfirm their love. Luck goes against them.

JK: I understand you altered the end of the book somewhat, as a way of making it more acceptable for the screen. Was this what Bertolucci wanted all along?

MP: Absolutely. Right from the start. It was one of the requirements. There's got to be a way out. I mean, everyone feels that if you're going to make a film of this book, you can't...it's not interesting if the story leads nowhere. Bowles's story isn't like Morocco, for instance, in which Marlene Dietrich walks ... Ah, it isn't.

JK: How did Paul Bowles respond to the change?

MP: Typically, he nodded his head and said, "If that's the way you see it, that's alright." Of course, the [reworking of the ending] is done subtly. It isn't a "happy ending," but it isn't a despairing one. There's ambiguity around it. The fact is that when you read this book, it's full of so much beauty, and so much appreciation of beautiful things and places. It's so intense. It's a work of art. And this contradicts the nihilism of it. When I read it, it doesn't depress me. It's much too strong, much too intense, much too definite and violent to be depressing. I find it harrowing, appalling, terrifying, but it's also exhilarating. The actual beauty of the paragraphs ... that's something you have to get into the film as well. I mean, if I just described the story to you, if it were left just as a series of facts, it would be utterly depressing, and that is not the truth of my experience of reading the book. I think that was something that Bowles himself understood.

JK: What were the larger challenges in adapting Bowles's novel? How did this compare with The Last Emperor?

MP: The problem of The Last Emperor was history. I studied history at university, but I discovered to my shock that I knew nothing about China. I wanted to sue my teachers. I had to learn about China. The question was how to find a 'story' that was both followable and informative. The problem of the story was that it was so huge, and the thing was to condense it into something that wasn't a lie. The Sheltering Sky was a different problem altogether. It's a difficult, oddball work of art. And again, there is a problem in condensing, because there's no great story line. It's about atmosphere and relationships. And it's incredibly internal, so the problem was how to externalize it. Nearly always, the people are thinking something different from what they're saying.

JK: So much of the novel is about complicated and very subtle psychological shifts and perceptions. How did you go about making that visible on screen?

MP: From the start I tried to do it like a Hitchcock thriller. In the beginning you don't even know what the relationships between the people are. You don't know who's married to whom. Or why. And you're intrigued. You realize there is something you've got to find out. And they're talking to each other in "that way." Someone is in this room, and someone is in that room, and slowly you discover, "Oh yes, that's the relationship, this is the way it is." The film is not a thriller, but I tried to get a kind of thriller structure into it, in which you learn as you go along. We show people behaving in a way that contradicts what they say to each other.

JK: Doesn't that tend to get confusing? Were you confident these characters would be understandable?

MP: I worked on so many drafts, four or five, and it was my feeling in the end that there were a few things that could not be explained without narration. I have nothing against narration. Bernardo had a kind of ideological [objection]. He was against it as a technique. Like zoom lenses, which on the whole I don't like, but everyone has to use them sometimes and everyone does. They're all techniques that work or don't work according to how they're used. So I haven't got an ideological thing against narration. I wasn't in favor of lots of it, but there are three or four moments when I thought, you've got to understand something about these people that you can't get by just watching them. And the book has three voices--Kit's "interior" voice, Port's "interior" voice, and the voice of the narrator who relates the events and occasionally talks about the characters from the outside. But Bernardo was furious and said that we must no longer talk about it. And then, just before we shot, he decided, "Yes, okay. There can be just a bit of narration." And he had a very good idea--asking Paul Bowles to be the narrator. I think this gives the film a very interesting situation. He's in the film at the beginning and the end. He's sort of a hook. Essentially, in the subtext, Kit and Port, his characters, go away from him and then come back to him.

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