One hell of a ride

Mark Peploe remembers the journey that led to him working on 'The Passenger'.

Jun 16 2006

'The Passenger' is a thriller and a road movie, dealing with themes of biography, identity, and how we know each other. Jack Nicholson plays David Locke, a television reporter who adopts the dangerous identity of Robertson, a passing acquaintance whom he finds dead in a North African hotel room. The many journeys that were involved in the writing and filming are so inextricably linked with my past and subsequent life that viewing the film again recently after so many years felt like unrolling an antique carpet and discovering a coded diary in its intricate patterns. These are some of the threads…

I was born in Africa in 1942. I grew up in England but most of our holidays were spent in Italy, so I learnt basic Italian early on. Childhood in London soon led to the second hand bookstalls off the Charing Cross Road and their stacks of Boys' Own adventure literature. And from there to cinemas all over town and a passion for Westerns – which often involved journeys through spectacular landscape.

After leaving school I hitch-hiked through Iran to Nepal, and came back through Afghanistan. I met my sister Clare [Peploe, also a filmmaker and married to Bernardo Bertolucci] in the Lebanon and we went to Israel to the trial of Adolf Eichmann – a man who had pretended for years to be someone else.

The first movie-set I ever saw was in the summer of 1962. On a dust road outside a desert town in southern Morocco, a solitary wooden sign was pointing to 'Lawrence of Arabia'. And over the top of a slight rise was an army of tribesmen on camels preparing for battle. We drank tea under a white tarpaulin with a courteous unknown actor called Omar Sharif and watched the camels charging back and forth for David Lean. It was a misleading guide to filmmaking but an inspiring one.

In the 1960s, the arrival of the handheld 16mm Eclair camera and the Nagra sound recorder transformed the possibilities of documentary film – just in time to report on the Vietnam War and associated tragedies. Programmes like 'Panorama' or 'This Week' made the television screen part of the struggle. The fight to control its content, and the issues of objectivity, editing truth, of how we see, and where the boundaries lie – or should lie – between fact and fiction, became a subject of great interest. The assassination of JFK in 1963 and the long term extension of the Cold War that followed established a sympathy in me for a conspiracy view of much of contemporary history.

It was while he was preparing 'Blow-Up' that I first met Michelangelo Antonioni and his screenwriter Tonino Guerra. It was at a party in a basement on Cheyne Walk. I think both my sisters and I and most of the other guests had been gathered up as specimens for their research into '60s London – though my interest was to meet the director of 'L'Avventura', a road movie that had transformed my view of what the cinema could be about.

In the mid '60s I joined the production company Alan King Associates (with Roger Graef, Dick Fontaine, Chris Menges) and worked on documentaries in Canada, France and Brazil. My favourite was a portrait of the Swiss writer Max Frisch who was often concerned with questions of identity. In fiction, of course, the assumption of someone else's identity is a narrative device common if not fundamental to thrillers – where characters are forever hiding who they are or pretending to be someone else. In 'The Passenger' 'who we are' is the central issue – and it turns out nobody knows who anyone is. David Locke wants to change, wants to care, but he doesn't even know who he is trying to become.

In May 1968, I happened to be in Paris finishing a drama-documentary with Melina Mercouri – a protest against the Colonels' dictatorship in Greece in which the ironies of history had thrust the actress into a real-life role. It was the first time I had worked in a studio, but it was a frustrating experience as filming came to an abrupt halt when the technicians joined the rest of the French workforce and shut off the electricity supply. The banks were closing on the Champs Elysée. There was turmoil outside the Cinemathèque. I lost sight of Mercouri in the crowds outside the Sorbonne.

By now I felt documentaries were too vulnerable to the vagaries of chance. I was determined to get into feature films, and one way to start was by writing screenplays. Predictably, perhaps, my first attempt was a Western, which I wrote with my friend Peter Wollen (subsequently the author of 'Signs and Meaning in the Cinema', and the founding father of serious film analysis in England).

While that script began its long trajectory through options and re-writes (a reality I had much to learn about), I was invited to New Orleans to meet the District Attorney Jim Garrison at an unlikely gathering of JFK conspiracy theorists. Someone wanted to finance a documentary about his investigation. It resulted in a very bizarre meeting and my expulsion from the project. So instead I flew west – my first visit to the epic landscapes of John Ford.

My sister Clare was now working with Antonioni on his film 'Zabriskie Point'. I met them in Flagstaff, and Antonioni flew us in a small plane not up but down – deep into the bowels of the Grand Canyon.

I remained with 'Zabriskie Point' to witness the filming of the last spectacular scene, which took days to prepare. Sixteen cameras in concealed concrete bunkers surrounded a large villa in the desert outside Phoenix while it was slowly filled with dynamite and nitro-glycerine. No models for Antonioni – and no room for error. A man came panting down the hill. The high speed cameras were rolling – so fast they only had seconds to run. Antonioni pressed the plunger. The silent moment in which nothing happened made a perfect frame for the incredible eruption that followed, a pyromaniac's dream, which Antonioni later edited into one of his most extraordinary sequences.

Around that time, after the incredible success of 'Easy Rider' had opened things up for new directors, Antonioni and the producer Carlo Ponti wanted to promote some similar trends in Europe and asked me and three others if we had some proposals. My first one was an adaptation of 'The Wild Child' (also about identity) but it turned out that Truffaut was about to start on the same subject. So they agreed to 'The Passenger' instead – a story I had written about a television reporter (which had many other titles before that one).

I asked Peter Wollen to collaborate on the script with me, and in classic road movie fashion we drove to Spain with our girlfriends in search of locations. Barcelona, once capital of the world's only anarchist republic, and home of Gaudi's revolutionary buildings, seemed miraculously appropriate. Around Almeria we visited some abandoned spaghetti Western sets and I then drove on to Morocco – and back to the deserts of the south. It was there that I first read Paul Bowles' 'The Sheltering Sky', an echo of which is in 'The Passenger', and a story which the twists of fortune brought me back to later.

For the next three years I was based in Rome and while I haunted Ponti's office trying to bounce him into action, I was employed with Tonino Guerra to collaborate on Antonioni's screenplay for 'Technically Sweet', set in Sardinia and Brazil.

It was a golden period for Rome and Italian cinema. Apart from Antonioni, there were Rossellini, Fellini, Lattuada, Olmi, Petri, Zefirelli, de Sica, Ferreri, Risi, Leone, Visconti and Pasolini, all at work – with Bellochio and Bertolucci just starting. People even had the luxury of championing one against the other. Tragically, the slow corruption of the state and its manipulation of terrorism and justice gradually strangled the life out of the city, until the murder of Pasolini and Aldo Moro buried it under a tombstone of lies.

But before that, it was my good fortune that Jack Nicholson decided against working for 16 weeks in the Brazilian jungle, and although 'Technically Sweet' was already in preproduction, difficulties in replacing him brought it to a halt. And in the hiatus the wily Ponti pulled 'The Passenger' out of his drawer. And so the film went into production and the caravan set off from Notting Hill to Munich to Barcelona to Almeria to Djanet in the Algerian Sahara and then back to the Hotel de la Gloria.

Many wondrous things happened along the way. On one occasion Antonioni asked me to write a piece of additional dialogue for Maria Schneider. Without reading it, she rolled it into a ball, popped it into her mouth, and ate it.

Another time I was delegated to escort the costume designer to Chad for a weekend to gather 'authentic' rags and props from the market in Fort Lamy. I think it was Antonioni's present to the two of us – and badly repaid by me when draped in a pink djellabah I planted my footprint on the crest of a pristine dune and ruined one of his most carefully nurtured shots – hundreds of years in the making. The enraged shouts with which he anathemised me were repeated through the desert valley by a triple echo, and are still remembered by the surviving crew.

Happily, my work with Antonioni had only just begun and our friendship has never ended. Four years ago there was a retrospective of my mother's paintings at the Pitti in Florence. Antonioni, now aged 93, and partially paralysed, insisted on being driven up from Rome to attend the opening. As his car drew up outside the gallery he pointed with a triumphant smile to one of his eyes, indicating the success of a recent cataract operation.

Hethen had me push his wheelchair round the show until he reached a small landscape which belonged to him – the hillside of a Cycladic island, as bare as the one in 'L'Avventura', which had hung above his bed for 20 years. Fiercely, he indicated that I should lift it out from the wall so that he could check that the label with his name on it was still stuck to the back. 'Mine,' he said, and looked happy.

'The Passenger' opens at the NFT today and is reviewed here. It is released on DVD on July 3.

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