In the original edited footage (which was more than two hours long) the sex scene between Peter Weller and Chiara Caselli was longer and showed the actor performing an explicit cunnilingus to the actress. It was Wim Wenders who asked Michelangelo Antonioni to cut that part. "The scene starts off well, but becomes unbearable when it doesn't end and at the end it heavily touches the limit of pornography," he said.
In the Peter Weller's diary of working with Michelangelo Antonioni (included in Projections 12 book), the actor recalls how the director asked him in that scene to kiss Caselli's naked body from her breasts to below her navel, ordering him to continue further down, even when assistant director Beatrice Banfi and Antonioni's wife had intervened to prevent the scene from becoming pornographic. The 'cut' was yelled only after Weller put his mouth on the actress' crotch and kissed it for 15 seconds. At that time Weller was simultaneously filming Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite (1995) and thus had the opportunity to tell the New York director about the erotic-sexual performance that Antonioni had asked of him. "Woody looked at me rapt and wouldn't stop asking me for details. I don't know how many times he got the story repeated," Weller said.
In order to obtain the covering insurance needed to put the film into production, Michelangelo Antonioni (who was still recovering from a severely debilitating stroke) had to agree to have a secondary director on staff, ready to take over from him at any time. His choice, Wim Wenders, even provided the prologue and epilogue for the film.
The opening fogbound scenes are a reminder of a similar passage in Antonioni's own Identification of a Woman (1982).
One of the segments reunites Marcello Mastroianni with Jeanne Moreau who appeared together in Antonioni's La Notte (1961).
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content
