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The Guide Book to Film Locations Morocco |
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Les Jardins de la Koutoubia and the Koutoubia Mosque, Marrakech |
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My visit to Marrakech is brief. I'd like to spend more time feeling my way about the city. It seems oddly unfocused, with no single centre and, despite a city wall, liable to peter out suddenly. But maybe that's my unfamiliarity with the place. For a place that seems to have been on the hippie trail since forever, there seems to be little English spoken, so I get by on my rusty schooldays French. For a while, the city became notorious for hassling tourists, but there are now scarily strict tourist police ready to clamp down on street vendors at a moment's notice. I realise I've changed more money than I'm going to need, so I'm pleased not to have to keep counting the cost. Sitting at a terrace restaurant with a fresh orange juice, a young man with a roughly-made wooden box offers to clean my shoes. I'm happy to offload two more dirham, but he doesn't seem to understand that I don't want to haggle. I've never had my shoes cleaned by anyone before and I'm uncomfortable with his, necessarily, grovelling posture. But there are some posh hotel bars to explore and I don't have shoe polish with me, so it suits us all. But not the tourist police. Two guys on a scooter appear from nowhere and grtab my shiner. I try to explain I was happy for the service, that I asked him to clean my shoes, that I was willing to pay for the service, but they have a job to do and there's no arguing. This seems to be zero-tolerance. The man's box is confiscated and he's carted away. I look down. He'd finished polishing my boots. I feel really guilty. By one of life's great coincidences, I find there's someone in the city I know and I get the chance to visit the set of Oliver Stone's Alexander, with Colin Farrell, Angelina Jolie, Val Kilmer and Anthony Hopkins.The sets are about an hour's drive outside Marrakech, in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains. The road passes through increasingly smaller villages. Boys stand by the roadside holding out what appear to be baskets of red berries for sale.As we climb higher, sudden unexpected gorges appear. The day is dull and overcast and the tops of the mountains are shrouded in grey mist. From behind, as we arrive, the sets are vast structures of scaffolding and wood, but from the front are utterly convincing. They are not what I expected. I'm no expert on the period or the geography of the film, but the whole look is unfamiliar. It's not like anything I've seen on screen before. I don't want to give too much away, but the scale is epic and it leaves me aching to see the finished movie.
I was brought up on historical epics, my favourite genre when I was a kid. More togas! More swords! More blood! And if you get a great conflagration at the end, well, that's even better. I was too young to get in to see Sodom and Gomorrah, then touted as a debauched sex movie, and had to content myself with the lurid, tie-in paperback. I collected all the publicity material I could find, and in art class, when everyone else was painting pictures of the beach and the 'what I did on my holidays' stuff, I was producing apocalyptic images of Biblical cities in flames. I had no idea at the time that the strange walls and towers I copied were Ait Benhaddou. Now, here, standing on the set in Morocco, it feels like I've come full circle. I should be cool about this but, in truth, I'm more excited than I have any right to be. God, I love the movies. |
