Friday, April 09, 2004

"I was flying to Malaga in southern Spain to meet some friends, and then I was returning via Paris to London. I thought I'd like to record the trip in some way, but not in the usual vacation-style movie; instead, why shouldn't I incorporate it into a story of some sort? I had no idea what the story would be, but it seemed to lend itself to a 'chase' theme. So while we were in Spain, I took some footage, I took some footage of them running around various alleyways, mostly in Marbella and a tiny mountian village nearby called Casares. This gave me a clue, the 'MacGuffin' for my movie. The name Casares suggested to me the French actress Maria Casares, and that would be the pivotal clue. So when I went to Paris, I took some shots of my friends there also engaged in a chase with a picture of Maria Casares figuring importantly in the plot. Then on to London, where the final scenes were shot with the same friends in Spain, plus some new ones and the vital link of Casares in the shape of a luggage label falling off a briefcase with this one word printed on it.

When all this footage was assembled in reverse order, it became a chase from London to Paris to Malaga to Marbella to Casares to what? I had no ending. Where were they all running to? What was calling them there? Obviously it had to be something bizarre. It had to be a weird ceremony of some sort. " - Peter de Rome, from his autobiography, The Erotic World of Peter de Rome