By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Smoking with Jack: get high and look at the sky
Jack Nicholson invites LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein atop Mulholland for a smoke and a yak about The Passenger, the long-unavailable Micheangelo Antonioni picture the actor owns. “Nicholson has vivid memories about the making of the film, especially the weeks he spent in the desert, three days away from the nearest city. “I’ve never been that far from civilization, before or since,” he told me the other day, sitting in the living room of his house… “We lived in thatched huts out in an oasis in the middle of the Sahara desert. It wasn’t unusual to have these huge sandstorms where everything would be covered with this fine pink sand. I can still see Michelangelo walking in the sand, with the wind blowing, picking out shots that he wanted to get.”
…”It only takes a day to get used to the flies on your nose,” he said, lighting the first of 3 cigarettes he has carefully lined up on a coffee table. “The Italian crew was serious about eating, so we’d have good food every night, get high and look up at the sky. The first night felt very eerie, because it was so quiet. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the most vivid filmmaking adventure I’ve ever had.” It’s a sign of Nicholson’s affection for Antonioni that the actor, who [didn’t do] interviews when he was up for an Academy Award for About Schmidt, [and of Goldstein’s affection for himself that he recounts this fact] spent 90 minutes recounting his friendship with the legendary filmmaker. As Nicholson put it, “He’s been like a father figure to me. I worked with him because I wanted to be a film director and I thought I could learn from a master. He’s one of the few people I know that I ever really listened to.”
