Visual maximalist Bernardo Bertolucci has brought literary minimalist Paul Bowles's Sahara classic The Sheltering Sky to the screen. The film's screenwriter, Mark Peploe, Oscar-winner for Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, explains how this meeting of masters stands out in blinding relief from the desert romances of the past.
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There's a reason why The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles's cult classic of abandoned souls in the Sahara, has been pursued by obsessed filmmakers for decades without ever making it to the screen--until now. It's one of the most ecstatically nihilistic, profoundly internalized masterpieces of modern literature. That a director like Nicolas Roeg, who strategically placed a copy of The Sheltering Sky face down on his suicidal heroine's lap by john kobai in his none-too-cheerful Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession back in 1980, should have long ago wanted desperately to adapt this shattering novel cannot surprise us. But especially now in the '90s, with signs that the most harebrained romances may be the next big cinematic trend, Are we ready for the desert wanderings of a spiritually shell-shocked husband and wife with nothing but time on their hands?
You have to give Warner Brothers credit for sheer guts. It's hard enough to make a good, commercially viable movie when you start out with a clear, attention-grabbing storyline, appealing characters, accessible psychological content (if, indeed, there's any), and a happy ending. The Sheltering Sky offered none of the above, and that's why we consider this $23 million production the hands-down winner as the highest-risk roll-of-the-dice in this year's Christmas box office crapshoot. Sure, the director at work here is Bernardo Bertolucci, the Oscar-bedecked creator of The Last Emperor, and the cinematic genius behind such classics as Last Tango in Paris and The Conformist. And the screenwriter is, again, Bertolucci's brother-in-law, Mark Peploe, also an Oscar winner for Emperor. And yes, Debra Winger stars-- she may not have had a hit lately, but she's a powerful actress who's always worth watching. But still. This is The Sheltering Sky.
We asked writer John Kobal to talk with Mark Peploe about the challenge of adapting Paul Bowles's austere tragedy into screen entertainment. Peploe is himself one of the individuals who, years ago, tried unsuccessfully to wrest the film rights from director Robert Aldrich, who'd acquired them and held on like a pit bull without being able to get the film version made. Peploe ended up, in a roundabout way he describes as "magical," having The Sheltering Sky eventually come to him through Bertolucci, only after he had co-written another existential desert drama of the slow-spinning ceiling fan variety, Antonioni's The Passenger.
Here's the gist of the story Peploe had to work with in The Sheltering Sky. It's North Africa, 1948, not a place for tourists. But our protagonists, Kit (Winger) and Port (John Malkovich), are not tourists anyway. They're "travelers", people with no home in their heads to return to. They've brought with them, as buffer or distraction, the clueless Tunner (Campbell Scott), an ineffectual third wheel who understands nothing of the complex shadowdance--of need, desire, and hopelessness--that his married companions engage in. And they themselves are not fully aware of the larger outlines their relationship is assuming as they drive, hellbent and goal-less at the same time, deeper into the Sahara, toward the promise of a reunion at first, and then toward catastrophe.
Von Sternberg's 1930 masterpiece Morocco, which introduced Marlenc Dietrich to American audiences, was an early example of the desert romance genre, and a high point in the tradition, too. In movies of this kind, the characters have left their own families, cultures, and constraints behind, usually out of desperation, real or imagined. But because it is the movies, some romantic shading is granted, even in the desert. We're relieved from the psychological equivalent of stark desert light by the metaphorical equivalent of oasis palm shadows. At the end of Morocco, Dietrich, wearing a cocktail dress and high heels, rushes off into the desert to follow her soulmate, legionnaire Gary Cooper, in a delirious reaffirmation of the power of love.
Paul Bowles is not a writer who offers up any delirious reaffirmations. The novel The Sheltering Sky, written some years after Morocco hit the screen, could be thought of as Morocco Without Sunglasses. It's a bracing experience. Mark Peploe tells John Kobal how he, working with Bertolucci, approached the task of turning the literary experience of The Sheltering Sky into a cinematic experience that would conform to the necessities of the big screen and not compromise the heart of Paul Bowles's big vision.
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.
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.
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.