French Thriller "The Wages of Fear" Remake Surges on Netflix After Morocco Shoot

"The Wages of Fear" is an adaptation of the film of the same name by Henri-Georges Clouzot, released in 1953. It was filmed in Ouarzazate, Morocco. Directed by Julien Leclercq (Sentinel, Robbers...), the film has been enhanced by a high-level cast. Ana Girardot, Alban Lenoir, Franck Gastambide and Sofiane Zermani, well-known actors in French cinema, played the main roles in this film.

The feature film tells the story of the rescue of hundreds of refugees in a camp located in the middle of the desert, near an oil well that has caught fire. The authorities had to find two people to entrust them with the "impossible mission" of transporting tons of nitroglycerin to the heart of the oil well and make them explode to avoid the worst. A lone mercenary and his sister, a doctor, accepted this suicide mission.

The 1950s version is "undoubtedly a classic, but some of the messages it conveys no longer pass today," admits Ana Girardot. "I know that it was not Julien Leclercq’s intention to pay tribute to this film, but rather to wink at it, to do something more current, with new characters," Sofiane Zermani explained in an interview with Divertio.

During the three months of filming in the desert, the four main actors lived a bit in self-sufficiency. "We spent hours in trucks, talking about the world, with conversations about our generation, on all current topics..." Ana Girardot confided. The four learned to maneuver the trucks. "We had to drive them on sometimes ultra-thin walls, on the edge of cliffs, and it was really not easy," she added.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRrqa3nD2YY