Morocco’s Movies and Shakers

Thanks in no small part to Morocco’s warm welcome to international filmmakers, celluloid dreams are alive and well in the kasbah, reports Adam Dawtrey

Tourists visiting the whitewashed medina of Essaouira like to imagine that they are encountering a more authentic Morocco than the medieval theme park of Marrakech, three hours inland to the east. So it comes as something of a jolt to wander through the town’s ancient Lion Gate towards the windswept beach and stumble upon a square proudly entitled Place du Fontaine du film Kingdom of Heaven. The fountain is a legacy of the weeks that Ridley

Scott spent shooting his crusader yarn there in 2004, and a reminder that Morocco is really one giant film set, jerry-built for the amusement of Westerners.

How apt, then, that its young king, Mohammed VI, is such a movie buff. The Marrakech International Film Festival is his plaything. Given the sketchy nature of the country’s own film industry, the best way for a starstruck young Moroccan to break into the movies is to join the army, whose main job seems to be to provide extras for the Hollywood productions that flock to take advantage of the country’s spectacular deserts and mountains, its kasbahs and fortresses, its limpid light, its proximity to Europe and its exceptionally accommodating attitude to visiting filmmakers.

Morocco is one of the world’s great locations. Its celluloid tradition stretches all the way back to Louis Lumière, regarded by some (well, the French) as the inventor of cinema. He visited in 1897 to shoot Le Chevrier Marocain. Yet the irony is that in the century since then, Morocco has rarely appeared on the big screen as itself. In Kingdom of Heaven, it doubled for the Holy Land – just as it did in Jesus of Nazareth and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Scott, who used it previously for Somalia (Black Hawk Down) and ancient Algeria (Gladiator), returned this year to shoot Body of Lies, which is set in Jordan. He actually wanted to filmin Dubai, but the authorities there were nervous of the storyline about a CIA agent, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, working with Jordan’s intelligence chief to thwart a rumoured attack on America.

Morocco, by contrast, is blasé about such political sensitivities. It has profited happily from the waves of Western filmmakers looking to address the hot topic of US policy in the Middle East. “Everything is permitted here, at very good prices and there are no restrictions at all,” Ismail Farih of the Ouarzazate studio complex told Variety magazine last year, adding, “except for XXX movies.” By which he means porno, rather than anything starring Vin Diesel.

Gavin Hood used Morocco to reconstruct the Guantanamo Bay prison camp for Rendition. Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon, who first came to Morocco for The Bourne Ultimatum, just finished shooting Green Zone there, a thriller set in Baghdad about the inept attempts of America’s neo-cons to rebuild Iraq after the fall of Saddam.

The country stood in for Iraq again in In the Valley of Elah; for both Jordan and Iraq in the upcoming German film The Baader-Meinhof Complex; and Russian-occupied Afghanistan in Charlie Wilson’s War.

But Morocco’s popularity as a location predates current political fashions. Going back through the decades, it served as Ancient Persia in Oliver Stone’s Alexander, Egypt in Asterix and Obelix: Mission Cleopatra, and The Mummy, Tibet in Scorsese’s Kundun, India’s north-west frontier in The Man Who Would Be King, Saudi Arabia in Lawrence of Arabia, and Cyprus in Orson Welles’ Othello. Welles shot in Essaouira back in 1948, where there’s also a square named in his honour, right next to the Kingdom of Heaven fountain.

It’s tempting to suggest that Morocco is so happy to welcome foreign filmmakers precisely because their movies don’t risk reflecting a negative image back upon the country. But that understates the extent of the country’s liberality. Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu filmed part of Babel there, a rare instance where the action was actually set in Morocco. And it’s hard to imagine a worse advertisement for the country’s tourist industry than seeing Cate Blanchett picked off in her tour bus by a young goatherd with a stolen rifle. The movie even depicts the Moroccan authorities obstructing American attempts to get an air ambulance to the remote village where Blanchett is bleeding in the arms of Brad Pitt. In reality, relations with the West are so vital to Morocco that the entire armed forces would have been redeployed from their jobs playing Saracen soldiers, Iraqi insurgents or Somali rebels in whatever epic was currently shooting to scour every inch of desert for the distressed tourists.

This is a country that simply can’t do enough to make the cameras roll smoothly, just so long as the money flows in. When the detailed budget for the 2005 action movie Sahara was leaked to the Los Angeles Times, it revealed payments for $23,250 for “political/mayoral support” in Erfoud, and $40,688 “to stop a river improvement project” in Azemmour. The budget even included line items for “local bribes”, although the producers later claimed that this money was never spent. But to put that into some kind of context, this baksheesh pales next to the $72,800 paid to Matthew McConaughey’s hair colourist for the duration of the shoot.

Which brings us neatly to the issue of vanity. There’s something about Morocco’s dramatic landscapes which panders to the more grandiose and self-indulgent tendencies of foreign filmmakers, inviting and encouraging epic follies. Where else, for instance, could Oliver Stone have restaged the Battle of Guagamela?

When it works, as with Lawrence of Arabia or Gladiator, it can be magnificent. But when it fails… Scorsese’s Kundun and Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky are among the least loved movies by those auteurs. Sahara and Alexander were financial disasters. And that’s not to mention Ishtar, the ne plus ultra of sand-blasted celluloid catastrophes.

Financial Times critic Nigel Andrews has a theory about this. “Morocco in Western cinema is a place of the mind,” he writes. “It is a place that film buffs love to the point of folly, which explains why folly – heedless,
blithe, almost wilful – distinguishes so much of the foreign moviemaker’s pers-pective on the country.” He also suggests that audiences prefer the fabricated versions of Morocco constructed on Hollywood backlots to the real thing.

Bogey and Bergman in Casablanca; Dietrich and Cooper in the 1930 melodrama Morocco; Hope and Crosby in The Road to Morocco – none of them ever got within a thousand miles of Africa. The real Casablanca is a bustling commercial port, the country’s economic powerhouse, and a grave disappointment to Western visitors searching for the site of Rick’s Café Americain.

In truth, the celluloid Morocco is a fantasy so potent that it overpowers any reality we find there. Any quest for authenticity is doomed. Perhaps that’s why Western filmmakers prefer to use Morocco to stand in for somewhere else. The country is simply no good at playing itself. After all, most Moroccan audiences choose to watch Bollywood movies instead of their own few local films.

– Adam Dawtrey

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