The director Jack Nicholson calls “the master”
Having worked with many of the greatest directors the industry has ever seen, Jack Nicholson knows what it takes to master the profession. So much so, in fact, that he bestowed particularly high praise on one of the most influential filmmakers of the modern era for doing just that.
After first rising to stardom, Nicholson embarked on a remarkable run of form throughout the 1970s that saw him deliver a string of unforgettable performances in projects as diverse as Five Easy Pieces, Chinatown, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, firmly establishing himself as one of the finest performers his generation had to offer.
That was no mean feat, considering the decade also saw the likes of Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Dustin Hoffman, to name but three, begin to stamp their indelible mark on cinema. It wasn’t long before the best directors in the business were falling over themselves to try and secure Nicholson for their latest feature.
One of the many who succeeded was Michelangelo Antonioni, who helmed 1975’s The Passenger, which starred the actor as a journalist sent to cover a conflict in Africa before assuming the identity of a dead man who looks eerily like him after stumbling upon the body. Unfortunately for Nicholson’s David Locke, his doppelgänger is an arms dealer, placing him in the crosshairs of the authorities and criminal element alike.
After being released in cinemas by MGM, a fallout with the studio over a planned star vehicle that never ended up happening saw him end up with the rights to The Passenger. Such was the level of his dissatisfaction with the studio, though, Nicholson ended up removing the film from circulation for over three decades before it was finally made available on DVD in 2006.
Despite that curious footnote to its existence, Nicholson couldn’t have been happier to headline the cast at the time, explaining to BFI in an interview ahead of its initial run on the big screen that the riskiness of The Passenger was part of what drew him to it in the first place.
“The risk of this one is that the strength is in the structure of the film. There is a narrative, but it’s fragmented in a particular way which makes still a second or third narrative point,” he said. “The basic theme of The Passenger is an identity change: it deals with the area of fantasy and the subconscious in a man who says ‘Why don’t I just walk out of my life and become someone new tomorrow?’ It deals with the releasing of all the super-psychic energy which is locked around that fantasy, and makes the comments about why you can and why you can’t do this, how far it’s real and how far it’s a fantasy.”
Ruminating on whether or not it had the potential to be a hit, Nicholson mused on how “its success depends on whether it can express a very high-flown and esoteric theme compellingly,” comparing it to the archetypal chase film, albeit with its own spin that “tries to reach out and capture an audience by shaping itself fundamentally as a very long and elaborate and elusive chase.”
From Nicholson’s perspective, it required “tremendous discipline” and “very hard work” to collaborate with Antonioni, who he described as “always very much the master” of his productions. There were occasional tensions on set, but the star’s professional admiration always shone through.
