After
seven years of preparation, when the time drew near to shoot Passion in the Desert director Lavinia Currier was certain of one
thing: If it was to work, the film would require a commitment to match her own from actors and crew. By shooting in the Jordanian desert and the lost city of Petra — after Currier scouted locations in Egypt, Morocco, Namibia and Tunisia — cast and crew were subjected to physical hardship. More unusual, though, was the subject matter of a relationship between a man and a leopard. It posed an immense acting challenge as well as unprecedented danger.
While in most films with wild cats the actors and animals appear together on screen, they never make physical contact. In Passion in the Desert, however, not only do man and beast touch, but the animal involved is the least predictable of all the big cats, with a short attention span, a deadly burst of speed and great sensitivity to change. As the film’s animal trainer Rick Glassey states, "We didn’t hold back on the information that leopards can do major damage and the fact that they don’t care whether or not you’re afraid of them. In the wrong circumstances, they’ll kill you anyway."
Currier’s best chance was to use animals who had been raised for the job from birth, so in 1992 she selected veteran animal handler Glassey to buy suitable cubs, raise them and train them. By the time shooting began, twin three-year-olds Mowgli and Bagheera, along with younger sister Akela, were as accustomed to their human companions as could be hoped for. The next challenge was to find a lead actor with whom at least one of the cats could feel at ease.
A series of auditions in three countries
convinced Currier it would be impossible to find a Frenchman with the linguistic skills to play the lead in an English-speaking film, so the
search for Augustin ended in Great Britain. By choosing blond-haired, blue-eyed Ben Daniels for Balzac’s swarthy Provençal
soldier, Currier cast against type. The results were gratifying. "With his sense of movement," she says, "Ben was a natural
with the animals. He has a feline face and a very strong physical presence on the screen."Mowgli, the male leopard who played Simoom in the movie’s main scenes, earned top billing among the cats for two reasons. More amenable by nature than his sisters, Mowgli took a liking to Daniels when the two were introduced, allowing the human to stroke his fur and feed him. "The second time we met," Daniels recalls, "Mowgli nipped me. He wasn’t being aggressive, but there were teeth marks on my arm after he was pulled off. An essential part of my education was discovering more about leopards’ moods."
Daniels, who claims an affinity for animals, had already undergone close encounters with a wild puma and a full-grown tiger as part of his preparation for the role of Augustin. He also developed some of the acute sensory awareness of desert dwellers by spending several days with a Bedouin family in the Wadi Rum, often sleeping outside at night. All day he would climb the desolate rock formations, "watching and listening. When a boy spotted sheep, at first I couldn’t see a thing. Then gradually my eyes and ears became more focused. The feeling was spiritual, even Biblical."
Internationally renowned screen actor Michel Piccoli recalls a similar sensation during his tour-de-force performance in the scene where Venture commits suicide. "Venture goes mad in the desert," says Piccoli, "but it is a happy madness touched with euphoria, not a madness that comes out of fear." Piccoli did the scene in one long improvised take, which was followed by a spontaneous outburst of applause from the crew.
Scenes in close quarters with a leopard were Daniels’ province, and on one occasion he discovered how perilous it could be. They were filming the scene in which Augustin wakes up and sees the leopard crouched in the back of the cave. "I saw his eyes go as he read my expression," Daniels recalls. "I looked frightened, which meant I looked like prey. Then he leaped for me, but the trainer pulled him off. If he’d gotten me from the back of the neck and snapped it, that would have been it. People think I’m insane but I think it’s all the more exciting because it’s so dangerous."
Poised to intervene at any moment, Glassey describes Mowgli’s relative passivity as a plus, although "the downside is that he is more frightened than the other leopards and therefore more aggressive when conditions aren’t right." Mowgli’s good nature did allow actor and leopard to interact in ways that could not have been planned, adding stunning authenticity to the film.
Shooting conditions contributed as well. The
predominantly British, Spanish and Jordanian crew toiled in tough conditions during a chilly four-week shoot in the autumn of 1994 and a
broiling ten-week one in the spring of 1995. The latter proved too risky for the leopards, though, and photography was completed in the Utah
desert.To Currier, the natural elements only enhanced the film’s message. "I was interested in the way Balzac expressed the reaction of human beings to nature," she says, "the way they romanticize it until it becomes dangerous or powerful, and then suppress or subdue it." While she did not want to make an "ecological" film, Currier hopes that the beauty of wild animals filmed in a natural habitat will resonate for people, reminding us how many species today face extinction.
"If you have a story that you are desperate to tell, the hunger stays with you," she says. "I feel this way about Passion in the Desert."