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Note:  This article translated from the French by myself with the aid of a machine translator.  This is not a professional job, but you'll get the gist.  Ginny

The afterglow of the sun radiates the red stones of the desert that spread to the East of Ouarzazate. It is here, very close to a lake that appeared like a mirage at the heart of a limestone sea, that Gérard Depardieu will live these next four months. The rest of the team of Astérix and Obélix in the service of Cleopatra - Monica Bellucci, Claude Rich, Edouard Baer - established their residences in the Meridian Berber Luxury hotel. Depardieu preferred the solitude of a villa built on the model of the "ksour", those Berber walled villages with walls of mud, adobe and raw bricks. 

A gigantic villa with four towers, a swimming pool, terrace and basin of bamboos, in an unfinished plot surrounding an unlikely golf course watered with big reinforcements of imported water... 

"It is a luxury," Depardieu expressed an opinion. "It is a luxury, even though it is not mine. . . " He dreams of the steepness of Agdz that dominates the valley of the Draa that he browsed that morning with his great friend and accomplice, Christian Clavier. "These biblical landscapes where time seems to have stopped." Or does he again savor the honey of dates offered by a Berber bee-keeper? He is quiet, rather soft, a little on his guard, or then again merely tired by his long road in the dust and sun...

The mop of hair is ruffled in short golden curls, a silhouette freed of about twenty kilograms, and this perfume - a delicate water of orange tree flower in which he bathed before receiving his guests... 
 
In any case, the vivid Gallic ogre, the Hercules capable of strangling snakes since the cradle, the Depardieu of legend with the appetites of Gargantua is not at our appointment. To drink?  A glass or two of good rosy Moroccan. To eat? Some pistachios, nibbled while chatting. To laugh? How can you raise the voice in this moonless night, under these stars so near that one would be able to burn oneself on them?

"I have always been attracted to the desert. . . I already knew it from filming Fort Saganne here, fifteen years ago.  Here, one gets back to the essentials. Things take on their true meaning.  It is the place that dictates the way you must be. Whereas in the tropics one doesn't stop drinking, here, eating becomes less important, because there is hardly any water, so it is necessary to pay attention to everything. One can really concentrate. I always have read immensely in the desert. All Balzac. Proust.  At the moment, it is Napoléon... And then here, the sky is so big... That gives one a desire for spirituality. There is not another word. Yes, for spirituality..."

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