Pasolini added a modern-day prologue and epilogue to his own translation of Sophocles's text. The major part of the film is a dreamlike evocation of the Oedipus myth, filmed in Moroccan landscapes and set to music as disparate as Romanian folk tunes and Japanese pieces. As always, Pasolini's choice of native faces, and the rough-hewn costumes and masks, have an almost hyperreal quality. Franco Citti (Accattone, Mamma Roma) and Silvana Mangano are featured as Oedipus and Giocasta. Pasolini stated, “I had two objectives: first, to make a kind of completely metaphoric-and therefore mythicized-autobiography; and second to confront both the problem of psychoanalysis and the problem of myth.” In his approach to the concept of fatality in the original myth, Pasolini emphasizes the innocence of his essentially plebeian Oedipus, who suffers from a universal-and fatal-will to ignorance. “(The) thing in Sophocles that inspired me the most (was) the contrast between total innocence and the obligation to know,” Pasolini said.