Mark Peploe: Morocco without Sunglasses

JK: Was Bowles as philosophical about the overall adaptation as he was about the change in the ending?

MP: I was very nervous. A screenwriter is, of course, in-between. I loved the book and I loved Bernardo's work, and those two things aren't automatically matchable. So I felt that the task was to bring those two worlds together without it turning into a compromise. Of course, nothing Bernardo does turns into compromise. But the film is different from the book in many ways. It's a film in its own right and I don't think anyone needs to know anything about the novel to judge it. I hope it isn't so different that you think, "Why did they bother with the book?" I think it's very faithful to the book. I sent Bowles the last script and he read it and said he liked it very much. He said little else, merely wondered whether the movie would be like the script.

JK: How did you and Bertolucci work together on the script?

MP: Since the story's not plot-driven--it's a journey that begins at the sea in North Africa and ends up on the other side of the Sahara--where and what to cut was a difficult decision. So I did the first draft, then we sat down and talked. [One thing we agreed on] absolutely was to set it in the novel's time, 1948. Robert Aldrich and other people tried to make it a contemporary story. Bernardo and I both wanted it set back when women were just getting the vote in Italy, and there was no such thing as birth control. It was another world. This is a love story set at the beginning of the modern age, and at the end of the past.

JK: Did Bertolucci depart much from the shooting script?

MP: Yeah, there were changes. Some of them happened against my views. That's something you've got to learn about screenwriting--how to fight for what is written but to know enough about movies to know that things do change. The reality is that you have such and such an actor, and such and such a situation. I know that William Hurt and Melanie Griffith were some of the early choices for Port and Kit. John Malkovich and Debra Winger are really quite a different interpretation.

JK: Were any of the changes Bertolucci made related to the casting of the picture?

MP: We were still changing the script when Bernardo cast the movie. I hadn't met the actors. The casting was something he did on his own. Of course, as in any movie, if you bring two stars together, especially in something as intimate as this, and they don't know each other, they're meeting for the first time, there are of course tensions, misunderstandings. But Debra and John are both very good actors, so they can do a fantastic job. The casting does change things, enormously. That's the point, you know. You write a screenplay in one kind of way, and then you have to go with the person that has been cast--[a consideration] that's not necessarily a matter of the screenplay or the book. You're trying to find out "who" it is in the movie that is growing there. You have to read just the compass, sail the boat, and you have to tack in a different way. But you hope you're still going to get to the destination.

JK: How much input did you have after shooting got under way?

MP: Once you start a movie, you have to use what you've got. The reality of the place and the actors. Bernardo is particularly talented at that. So, I wasn't giving up the dialectics, so to speak, and kept talking about why the screenplay was the way it was. But often whole bits were shot that were quite different. It's like having to shoot a scene from every angle. You start with a master shot but you try out endless other angles. So with Bernardo, to try all these other angles is extremely tiring. I love the man, but it isn't easy and no such work can be easy. It doesn't happen without disagreement ... Once filming has begun, all you can be is a kind of compass, because so much interferes in terms of practical problems and pressures. And, of course, a director is at a different stage, in a different place. It never seems to work out, but people ought to try and have screenwriters around. I couldn't have been there throughout, but the times I was there were good, even to disagree with Bernardo. There were times I didn't know what they were shooting. Some of those sections are now out of the movie, because editing takes them out.

JK: Bertolucci's renowned for dealing with provocative sexual material on screen--I was wondering how he dealt with the part of the book in which Kit gets raped.

MP: In the movie, she's not raped, partly because, it turns out, rape is not something that happens [there]--the [people in that area] don't commonly rape. And so this isn't a rape anymore. [Actually] I don't think it's really a rape in the book. Kit is coming from a huge disaster and it's as if she's looking for where the meaning of life begins again. She's in the desert where there's nothing but sand and stars. There's no way of going back, there's no way of going forward. She's given up control of her own destiny. She's letting herself become a raft and she's drifting. It's a kind of rest.

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