Mark Peploe: Morocco without Sunglasses

JK: In a way that's true of all characters in "desert movies."

MP: Of course. What was Rick ever doing in Casablanca? Running, escaping from something. Some kind of a past. But you can't escape from the past, because your private relationships reach you, even if you're alone.

JK: What was your initial attraction to The Sheltering Sky? You've been involved with the book for years, haven't you?

MP: When I first read it [in the '60s], The Sheltering Sky was a fairly unknown, rather fascinating modern novel that was also about "place." And I had traveled a lot in North Africa. It was tremendously evocative to me, it's so extraordinarily beautiful. I tried to buy the book. I couldn't because Robert Aldrich owned it and refused to sell it. He had tried to do a screenplay, to make the movie, but hadn't [succeeded]. Ten years later he still didn't want to sell it to anybody. So I gave up. I didn't have a lot of money to bid for it seriously. It just became a kind of a strange dream. And then I noticed that the book was never done. My life went on. Over the next several years I would hear of other people who had fallen in love with the book and tried to do it. Nicolas Roeg, for instance. But Aldrich would never let go of his rights. So it was a kind of magical circle when it came back to me. I was in Los Angeles, and Bernardo had just been given the book by somebody else and he said, "Did you read this book? It's supposed to be rather good." I said very little about it except, "Yes, it's a wonderful book." He read it and more time went by and then he said, "Well maybe I want to do this. Do you want to do it?" So, it came back to me in a very magical way.

JK: When I read The Sheltering Sky, just recently, it reminded me of The Passenger, and then I remembered that you co-wrote that script. Was The Sheltering Sky on your mind when you wrote The Passenger?

MP: Yes, in a way it was. The Sheltering Sky was very much a part of me. It had become one of the influences inside me, especially that kind of landscape, that kind of world, those small hotels and forgotten places. It's been said that the book is an American existential novel, and you could say that of The Passenger too. There is similarity in that the Jack Nicholson character is fleeing from his own past when he finds a dead man in a hotel room and takes over his life.

JK: Films like Morocco were shot on soundstages and in the California desert. Did you think it wasn't necessary to go through the problems and expense of shooting on location?

MP: I was very keen on how important the original locations were to tell the story. At one point the film was going to be shot on sets, in a studio. It was a moment, but it went by the by. Then we went out to visit some of the locations, starting with Casablanca. And that was a strange sensation for me, to be back there in these places I knew so well, being there with Bernardo, who was discovering this for the first time and seeing it in different ways.

JK: I've heard the conditions on location were fairly difficult. What happened?

MP: Most of the time it was winter and the weather should have been wonderful. But there were flash floods--in the middle of the desert. Suddenly a river appeared overnight in the middle of the dunes. God was not always on our side. We had a huge crew, and, of course, we were staying in places ... I mean there was this hotel which had been built after the Algerian War of Independence in 1963 when they thought there were going to be lots of tourists. But the tourists never came and the hotel shrank, from 150 rooms to a surviving 20. There were no waiters, no one to clean rooms, all those people had to be brought in. Everyone in the whole district had to give up servants to help clean this hotel and look after the people. The hotel manager was seen on Algerian television being interviewed--the man was shell-shocked. Twenty years with nothing and suddenly the hotel was full--a flash flood of film people.

JK: What was the general feeling on the shoot?

MP: There were three locations in Morocco and then the main one was deep in the Sahara. All movie sets are in a world of their own. Nothing really happens except people wait around. It's like a Sartre novel. It's a state you can't leave. It's sort of a magic circle. It's a situation full of small, intense relationships, a kind of envelope of life. You know it's false, well, not false, but particular, a special thing. It's like being aware you're having a dream, and you can't pull yourself out of it at the end of the day. By the time you come off the set, you don't really have the energy to go to a cafe and sit with the locals. Not that there's any cafe.

JK: But you think shooting The Sheltering Sky on location was worth it?

MP: I think Paul Bowles says in his memoirs, "There are certain things that can happen only in certain places." I believe that. It would be inconceivable to transfer this story to the jungle. There is something very absolute about the desert. It can be very dangerous, like the sea. It's perfectly safe if you know it, but you need to learn. Then you can sail away forever and become part of the landscape, just stars, sky, time.

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John Kobal is a freelance writer based in London who is the author of more than 30 books, including People Will Talk.

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