Creating a ‘Season’ on Her Own

Because Clare Peploe is married to Academy Award-winning director Bernardo Bertolucci, some people might assume that it was a snap for her to obtain financing for her debut feature film, “High Season,” which opens Friday. (See review on Page 9.) But as Peploe tells it, getting a film on the screen is tough, regardless of who you have breakfast with every morning.

When the figures being bandied about are seven digits, the buddy system tends to fall by the wayside. After co-writing the script for “High Season” in 1983 with her brother Mark Peploe (who co-wrote “The Last Emperor” with Bertolucci), she spent three years struggling to round up the modest $3 million she needed to make her film.

“There’s very little money available to film makers in England and the subject was dismissed as ‘too European’ by American financiers,” Peploe said. “And films are tooexpensive for anyone to be doling out favors, so being married to Bernardo certainly didn’t help me in that respect.

“In fact, I recently realized that many of the problems I encountered had to do with being married to him. I naively assumed that people didn’t care about that sort of thing and just saw me as being me, but I now see there’s a certain envy you encounter, an attitude of ‘she doesn’t need our help--look who she’s married to.’

“I’m sure that will only get worse after the success he’s recently had.” “The Last Emperor” swept the Oscars last month with nine Academy Awards, including best director and best picture.

Peploe has scored something of a success with “High Season,” which is garnering rave reviews. “An elegantly calibrated, superbly cast film with an ingenious plot,” crowed the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, while Siskel and Ebert touted it as “a highly recommended sleeper.”

Set on the idyllic, if tourist-infested, Greek island of Rhodes, “High Season” stars Jacqueline Bisset, James Fox and Irene Papas in an art-house comedy of colliding cultures and generations. Though the film’s sophisticated humor and gorgeous scenery give it a sexy, sparkling veneer, some serious issues lurk behind the trees of this island paradise.

“I used to go to Greece as a child and the idea for the film grew out of a trip I made to Lindos a few years ago, after not having been to Greece for a long time,” said Peploe, an elegant woman of 43.

“I was amazed at how this tiny village had been taken over by what I call the new colonialization. Tourism changes a country more than an occupying army! There wasn’t a word of the Greek language visible anywhere in the village and I found that horrifying.

“At the same time, this village had been extremely poor prior to the tourist trade so I could see the benefits it brought. I had mixed feelings and wanted to make a comedy out of them, with different characters representing varying points of view. The ironic thing, of course, is that my film is like a commercial for a culture I’d like to preserve.”

Many different stories--most of them farcical--unfold simultaneously in “High Season,” with the most complex subplot revolving around an elderly art historian played by Sebastian Shaw.

“While Mark and I were writing our script, an English art historian named Sir Anthony Blunt was exposed as a spy and one of our central characters came to be based on him. Blunt was the curator to the Queen’s paintings so it was quite a scandal when he was revealed to have had dealings with the Communists,” she said.

“We’re in the midst of a highly conservative period, so the idea that anyone’s dabbled in communism--even though many people did during the ‘30s--is considered treasonous.

“People have forgotten that England was initially quite apathetic in regards to Nazism, and the Communists were the first to oppose the Nazis.

“The resonances of our character, whom we named Sharp, will probably be lost on American audiences who have little knowledge of that episode of history. However, I hope that some of the things he says will give people an understanding of the ideas I intend him to represent.”

Peploe grew up all over Europe the eldest of three children born to what she describes as “a pair of aesthetes.” She is unusually knowledgeable about 20th-Century European history and continues to live a peripatetic life, maintaining homes in Rome, London and wherever she or her husband happens to be working.

“I belong to many places,” she said. “I was born in Africa and my first language was Swahili, but I was schooled in England and my mother was Italian, so I spent a lot of time in those two countries. My mother was an artist and my father was an art dealer, so I suppose I had a fairly cultured upbringing.

“We didn’t have a television, and I grew up feeling desperately hungry for tacky pop culture. My mother doesn’t recognize anything after Proust, and I think one of the reasons I was attracted to film was because it’s a very modern art form. I suppose that was how I rebelled.”

Peploe got her foot in the door of the film industry when she was 24 and landed a job as Antonioni’s assistant on the 1969 film “Zabriskie Point.” She then worked as Bertolucci’s assistant on the 1977 film “1900,” married the director in 1979, and made her directorial debut in 1982 with a 30-minute short titled “Couples and Robbers.”

“Over the years Bernardo often asked me to help him with ideas for his films, and I always surprised myself with the cinematic, Bertolucci-like ideas I’d come up with. He had a sort of Svengali effect on me and has been instrumental in helping me come into my own as a film maker.”

Peploe has been downright vigilant in her effort to prevent “High Season” from becoming lost in the movie marketing shuffle.

“There is an audience who’ll support films like mine, but a film must be marketed properly in order to find its audience. Many film companies make their money by selling to the video market so they don’t care how a film opens.

“Basically, there’s no one pushing my film but me, and if I hadn’t gotten a free plane ticket to America because of the Oscars and come here and pressured Hemdale to screen it, no one would have even seen it.”

Speaking of Oscars, what’s it like being married to this year’s conquering hero?

“Oscar talk can be fun for a while; then it becomes excruciatingly boring,” she said. “It’s amazing how much flattery a person can enjoy. If someone comes over smiling and says, ‘It’s great, congratulations,’ it’s very sweet and you respond.

“Bernardo’s pleased that anybody likes the film, but it’s incredibly boring for me. It’s a slight shock, all this Oscar business. I’m accustomed to the fact that Bernardo’s a well-known director who’s highly thought of, but the idea of him becoming a celebrity. . . .”