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June 19, 2006
The Road to Antonioni and The Passenger
In a long piece at Time Out London, Mark Peploe recalls the production of The Passenger as being "one hell of a ride": "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... 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... 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... 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... 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." [Eventually, he does get around to talking about The Passenger, with many names and events dropped along the way.]
Posted by Ray Pride at June 19, 2006 04:30 AM
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