Beyond the Clouds

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.

There are two slightly different versions of the movie, the difference ocurring at the end. The US version of 'Beyond The Clouds' (Al di là delle nuvole, 1995) lacks the complete voice-over narration by John Malkovich's character at the end of the movie, from the moment he enters the hotel until the last image, before going to credits. The only line heard is: 'The director's profession is very peculiar...'; whereas the European cut of the movie contains a longer narration, also starting with the same line, but expanding until the last image before fading to credits. The voice-over talks about how the director's profession is to find images, only to discover another image beneath the previous one which is more faithful to the truth, and then another, and another, until you reach the one which equals reality, the one no one will ever see. Both versions are equally powerful in their own right, though it's interesting to note such a minor difference was made in the first place. Both versions are available, the US version was released in DVD, and the European version is available in VHS only.

Featured in To Make a Film Is to Be Alive (1995)