‘Sheltering Sky’ Cast Endured Real Dust, Flies

Bernardo Bertolucci admits putting his cast and crew through an ordeal to make “The Sheltering Sky,” a film about an American couple seeking to revive their marriage deep in the Sahara.

The film will have a gala premiere tonight at the year-old Opera-Bastille.

Based on Paul Bowles’ best-selling novel by the same name, the film stars Debra Winger and John Malkovich as Kit and Port Moresby, sophisticated New York artists who go into the African desert to save their failing marriage.

It is due to open in the United States in mid-December.

Bertolucci told reporters after an advance screening Wednesday that the cast and crew of 120 battled desert heat and flooding caused by the first rains in the region in two years.

The storms swept away roads and bridges, stranding equipment trucks, the cast, crew and even Bertolucci himself.

“It was a hard movie to make. The sweat isn’t makeup; it’s real sweat,” he said. “The dust is real dust, and the flies are real flies.”

Winger said filming on location in the desert added a special quality to the movie.

“I had always felt a pull to the desert, whether in the southwestern United States or the Negev,” Winger said. “But the Sahara was really something different; it was much rougher than I expected.”

She said she was unable to return to the United States when filming ended last January. Instead, she put a pack on her back and traveled through Niger for three weeks.

“Only then could I face coming home. I had the desert inside of me,” she said.

Bertolucci said he was attracted to “The Sheltering Sky,” which became something of a cult book when published in 1949, because “after ‘The Last Emperor,’ I was really interested in doing something that didn’t have a lot of actors and a lot of costumes.”