Some vintage Jack

IT’S hard to imagine a film that’s been written about more and seen less than “The Passenger.” One of the enigmatic masterworks of modern cinema, the 1975 Michelangelo Antonioni movie has been out of circulation for years -- it’s never been on DVD and was only briefly available on video in the mid-1980s. But thanks to Sony Pictures Classics, the film opens Nov. 4 for a weeklong run at the Nuart, with a DVD release to follow early next year.

Actually, the real thanks go to Jack Nicholson, who not only stars in the film but is its longtime owner, having acquired the picture from MGM in a settlement with the studio after a film Nicholson had been hired to star in fell apart. He had kept “The Passenger” off the market until Sony persuaded him that they would give it a classy send-off. For years, critics have swooned over the film, writing themselves into knots grappling with the movie’s portrayal of a man’s struggle with spiritual ennui. But having spent months making the film in a variety of locations, notably Barcelona, London and the remote desert of Algeria, 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, waiting for a baseball playoff game to begin. “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.”

Nicholson makes it sound more like an adventure than arduous work. “It only takes a day to get used to the flies on your nose,” he said, lighting the first of three 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 couldn’t be bothered with doing interviews when he was up for an Academy Award for “About Schmidt,” 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.”

It seems eerie that the man whose films are filled with examples of our inability to communicate with each other has largely lost his own power of speech. Now 93, Antonioni is confined to a wheelchair and largely mute, the result of a stroke some years ago. Still the filmmaker continues to work and flew to Los Angeles last month for a showing of “The Passenger,” which has six minutes of footage cut from the original U.S. release. The day after the screening, Nicholson had the director up to his house, a visit that illustrated how, even in old age, Antonioni has lost little of his playful spirit.

Knowing that Nicholson is an avid art collector, Antonioni asked to see his new paintings. “He’d say, ‘What’s upstairs?’ so I’d go up and down the stairs, bringing all the art down for him to look at,” Nicholson recalls. “Then, after I’d lugged everything downstairs, he said, ‘OK, let’s go upstairs.’ ” Nicholson laughs. “I knew if I challenged him, he’d say, ‘It would be good exercise for you.’ ”

“The Passenger” was the third film in a three-picture deal Antonioni had with MGM. The deal started with a bang, with “Blow-Up,” the director’s biggest hit, but his next film, “Zabriskie Point,” was a huge bust. Having Nicholson, who’d just appeared in “Chinatown,” starring in his next project surely helped Antonioni protect his artistic independence.

In the film, Nicholson plays a burned-out TV journalist trying to locate a band of guerrilla fighters in North Africa. When a man at his hotel suddenly dies, Nicholson’s character assumes his identity, journeying across Europe after discovering that the man had been supplying guns to the guerrillas. The storyline is reminiscent of a Graham Greene novel, but in Antonioni’s hands, it is less a thriller than an existential-style mediation on identity and alienation. When Nicholson’s character meets a beautiful stranger, played by Maria Schneider, she asks who he is. “I used to be somebody else,” he says. “But I traded him in.” The film concludes with a dazzling seven-minute shot that, in its way, is as much a bravura piece of filmmaking as the opening sequence in Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil.”

To Antonioni, actors were simply pieces in his aesthetic jigsaw puzzle. As he once said: “Actors are like cows. You have to lead them through a fence.” He offered a more diplomatic explanation to Nicholson. “He told me, ‘Acting is not the most important thing to me, so don’t get upset if you’re not the center of attention.’ He never said much in terms of giving direction. He had his images picked out and he really didn’t want his actors interfering with his visual tone poems.”

Schneider was clearly cast more for her sex appeal than her acting ability. I couldn’t resist asking Nicholson, of course only for the purpose of the historical record, whether he was as involved with Schneider off-screen as he was on-screen. He hemmed and hawed before finally offering this answer: “Let’s just say she’d stayed at the house and everything.”

Famous largely for her sex scenes with Marlon Brando in “Last Tango in Paris,” Schneider was quite the free spirit during filming. “She didn’t want to be typed as the sexy broad with butter up her [behind],” Nicholson recalls. “But there she was having a discussion one night with this very ascetic director, and she was loaded and half nude, with her bathrobe open. I thought Michelangelo was going to die. I remember in one scene we did, she was so unconscious that I had to hold the back of her head up when I delivered my lines.”

The film was highly praised on its release, though it did little to expand Antonioni’s audience. Seen today, it is a poignant reminder of the glory days of European art films, when from the late 1950s to the mid 1970s, the continent produced an unbroken parade of daring artistic leaps. For young moviegoers like Nicholson, who had little interest in staid Hollywood product, it was a cinematic renaissance.

“My friends and I would go to the art houses expecting to see a masterpiece every week -- and we did,” he recalls. “Whether it was Antonioni, Kurosawa, Godard, Fellini, Satyajit Ray, Truffaut or Bergman, we knew we were in good hands.” Asked why those films spoke to his generation, Nicholson explained: “Because they took risks -- it was the breaking of the form that excited us. Today we have cheap, smart indie movies, but it’s not the same thing. Antonioni didn’t feel that he needed to get every single point across right away. Today we’re just slaves to melodrama.”

Nicholson haunted a variety of now defunct art houses, including the Lido and the Sunset, bringing along his filmmaker pals, who included Monte Hellman, Bob Rafelson and Warren Beatty (“I remember taking Warren to see ‘Il Posto’ when we barely knew each other”). In those days, a hit art film could play forever. Bob Laemmle, who owns the Laemmle theater chain, recalls booking “A Man and a Woman” at the Regent in Westwood after it played eight weeks at the Lido. “We got it because they had a commitment for a Christmas film, and when we put it in the Regent it was such a hit we ran it for two years.”

By the 1980s, audience tastes began to change and foreign films lost their cool. As the gods of art cinema grew old, many of their heirs chose to work in America. “Whether it’s Lasse Halstrom, Paul Verhoeven or Milos Forman, the best and brightest of the foreign filmmakers were seduced by Hollywood,” says Laemmle. “As soon as a director did something fresh or creative, they got a studio job.”

In recent years, the creative energy has shifted to Asia, but many of the region’s top filmmakers are also being wooed by Hollywood or having their style absorbed by American filmmakers, notably Quentin Tarantino and the Wachowski brothers. Nobody has managed to copy Antonioni. Like Kubrick, another Nicholson favorite, he is an original. You could watch any reel of “The Passenger” and not have a problem guessing who created such a mysterious, unsettling universe.

After making a movie with him, Jeanne Moreau said, “You can’t argue with Antonioni. He never replies.” When I reminded Nicholson of her remark, he lifted those famous eyebrows and, in a low, gruff voice, answered: “I wasn’t much in the mood to argue with him. I was in the mood to find him.”

“The Big Picture” appears Tuesdays in Calendar. Comments and criticism can be sent to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.