MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “I made a couple of terrible movies that year. ‘I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘is Name’ with Oliver Reed in which, appropriately enough, I have the distinction of being the first person to say ‘fuck’ in a legitimate movie. And the soft porn ‘Girl on a Motorcycle.’”
STEPHEN DAVIS: “For her role as a doomed, free-loving bikerette in the erotically charged film, Marianne wore nothing under a skintight black leather suit as she tore through the film on a motorbike, her long blond hair flowing behind her.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “It was a bit like Andrew Oldham and the party all over again, I got the role without having to audition, without anyone checking I could act! I haven’t seen the film in ages. The last time was in Delhi and the audience loved it. It seems to be a real cult thing in India, with all sorts of websites dedicated to it.”
ALAIN DELON: "Marianne is a happening all to herself. She is the type of girl men fought dragons for in mythology, the type that duels have been fought over."
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Alain Delon was the star, and very early on in the film he tried to pull me in the same desultory way that Roy Orbison had. When I turned him down, he became very sullen and nasty and difficult. He was such a pompous ass, in any case, and every time he said that ludicrous line ‘Your body is like a beautiful violin in a velvet case,’ while unzipping my leather suit, I would crack up. It was dozens of takes before I could do it with a straight face.”
MARC SPITZ: “At the time, like Pallenberg, Marianne selected a handful of film roles designed to carve out some kind of submyth within the Stones’ universe, a cinematic identity to afford her some independence and self-respect. ‘Girl on a Motorcycle,’ one of these films, is certainly kitschy – one of those ‘60s fetishes that’s best left to a dorm room wall – but its theme, tone, and script articulated Faithfull’s real-life frustration. It somehow manages to capture Faithfull’s fragile, emotionally hemorrhaging state and flirtation with death.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “During the filming, I was away a lot and Mick visited me on location in Zurich and Heidelberg and the South of France.”
STEPHEN DAVIS: “When Mick found out Marianne was having an affair with the production’s still photographer, he flew over to keep an eye on her.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “After I made ‘Girl on a Motorcycle’ in 1968 I used to get a lot of ‘Dear Miss Faithfull…’ letters from young boys who went into ecstatic reveries about the solitary pleasure I’d given them in my skin-tight leather jumpsuit. Of course I couldn’t ride a motorcycle at all. I was on a trolley with a wind machine, shot against a blue background. It’s a riot because the film swings between endless shots of me on a motorcycle with the wind blowing my hair, stripped-in scenery, and my character’s stream-of-consciousness silliness. It’s kind of Existentialism on a motorcycle with trippy polarized flashbacks. I remember thinking that it looked like a sort of glorified Harley Davidson ad. I was too young and too self-conscious to be able to be aware of any of it, really, but I’m very pleased that I made a film at the age I did, because it preserved me in aspic at one of the periods of my life when I looked really good. I’m doing my best, anyway.”
