Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  Faith, a certain kind of faith, is a dangerous thing. If you take faith to heart and it affects in a positive way the way you treat people around you, that’s great. The question of faith also brought me to make Kundun—about the Dalai Lama—the idea of a man or a woman leading a life of spirituality, what that is. The moment I went into preparatory seminary, I was only fifteen or so, I was determined. It was one way of escaping the hard world I was born into, to separate myself, to not have to deal with the moral issues of the streets and what I was involved in there.

  But I shocked myself. I couldn’t even take the first minor step toward the spiritual life that I had in mind. I was very disappointed in myself about not being able to take that step.

  Jesus lived in the world. He wasn’t in a temple. He wasn’t in church. He was in the world. He was on the street. The picture I wanted to make was about Jesus on Eighth Avenue, something like Pasolini’s Accattone [about a pimp attempting to reform, with tragic consequence]. The pimp represents all of us. He’s our mortal condition. He dies. It’s like Jesus when he dies, in a sense.

  Marty’s sketches for Jesus’s entrance into the Temple in The Last Temptation of Christ, a film he had obsessed over making since the beginning of his career.

  RS: I think there’s something of Pasolini’s Saint Matthew Passion movie in your film, too.

  MS: Oh, there certainly is. I loved that film. Pasolini’s Saint Matthew is absolute poetry—the idea of an engaging Christ who provokes and is tough. You know, I’ve come to bring a sword, I’ve come to set father against son and mother against daughter-in-law. It’s a very strong piece and completely surprising, and has an immediacy you really feel.

  But to go back to my idea of a modern-day Christ film: It would be black-and-white, and we were going to set his crucifixion on the New York docks. The images would have been good—in the tenement hallways with people in black and white suits, and the immigrants carrying Jesus under the West Side Highway. In cinema verité style. Then, of course, I saw the Pasolini, and that was the top of the line. He understood it—faith versus a spiritual change that you have to undergo in yourself, whether there is or is not a God.

  RS: To me there’s something breathtaking about the film’s basic conflict. I know it’s not your idea.

  MS: It’s [Nikos] Kazantzakis’s—the whole thing. Kazantzakis’s idea, a beautiful one, is that the gift of life is a gift from God, so he is tempted—the ultimate temptation—to become us, just to live a normal life. The idea, of course, is that Jesus is all God and all man. That is the dogma, and that’s the way I approached the film. I thought that if God is removed from us, is on a piece of wood somewhere, on a stained-glass window, a lot of people misunderstand those images. We don’t, as Catholics, worship them. They’re representations of the suffering.

  And this is what Kazantzakis was dealing with, I think: If Christ is God, and man, too, then where’s the sacrifice? When is the moment when he says, I’ve caused trouble everywhere, and now I’m going to have to be scourged and crucified, and I don’t want that to happen. God could easily say, Well, there’s not going to be a problem. I know what happens after death, and I know what happens with pain. But as a human being alone, Christ would have had to make the decision.

  Marty of Arabia: The director on a Moroccan location for Last Temptation. It was, he says, the most physically arduous picture he ever made.

  RS: I think that moment occurs in the scene with Harvey Keitel as Judas, where Christ asks what good his martyrdom is going to accomplish. I think it’s a fabulous scene.

  MS: That is the wonderful scene for me, when Jesus and Judas are in a granary and Jesus turns to him and says, “Isaiah came to me last night.” “What did he say?” Judas asks. Which in itself is kind of funny, that they’re living in a world where Isaiah could actually come to them at night. Or Jacob could struggle with the angel. And Jesus says, “I’m to be the Lamb, to be sacrificed. I’m to be crucified.” And Judas, who has been following Jesus all along, thinking he was going to make a revolution, looks at him and says, “What good is that going to do?” He literally says that. What good is your being killed going to do for us?

  RS: It strikes me as a very good question.

  MS: Exactly. So Judas is speaking for all of us. What does that sacrifice ultimately mean? These were things that were just delicious to work with. It’s the only word I can think of. If I had been allowed to edit it a little longer, maybe I’d have trimmed it down a bit … But, being so close to it, I’m more negative than other people might be.

  I loved the idea. I’m not saying I did justice to that idea in the film. But I understood that it had to work by way of a style so different from the biblical epics of the fifties and early sixties. Sometimes, I’d say, Oh, I wish I had three extra days, or I wish I had $2 million more. But we had to keep it small scale.

  RS: Getting back to that crucial scene between Jesus and Judas—

  MS: There’s no doubt that was the key. That’s why I thought it was so interesting in Kazantzakis’s book that Judas is almost the hero. The whole concept was that the betrayer, Judas, was the key player, because if there is to be a sacrifice, and if there’s to be this extraordinary redemption, then everybody around Jesus is part of a plan. Nobody’s to be blamed, nobody’s to be cursed, it’s all got to happen. And by the way, Judas, you’re the one who’s going to have to be the fall guy. He’s the only one Jesus can trust, so he’s got to betray Jesus. And make him understand that he would be damned for the rest of eternity as the worst person in the world.

  RS: Betrayal is one of your great overarching themes—maybe the most important of them.

  MS: Remember that they called Bob Dylan Judas. [Laughs.] I mean, that word has power. That’s one of the reasons I made the Dylan film [No Direction Home, his documentary about the singer-songwriter]—I heard him called Judas. I wondered what the nature of his betrayal was. My father, the stories of betrayal from the Old World, they helped shape me. These things obsessed me. And so, finally, in The Departed, it’s all betrayal.

  Then there’s the whole question of the crucifixion, which implies a sort of acceptance of death. Well, yes, he was God. So there was no suffering, there was no problem. But if he’s man as well, man suffers, is afraid of death. How does one deal with that issue? If you have the body of a man, how do you deal with the urges and feelings of a man?

  RS: Certainly in the early passages of the film, he’s very reluctantly embracing the notion that he’s anything but a man, isn’t he?

  MS: Exactly. I thought that was interesting, too, and another Kazantzakis idea, that slowly the plan is revealed to him by God. Now, one could look at that and say, Well, that’s a person slowly losing his mind.

  RS: Indeed.

  MS: I get fascinated by certain side issues, like imagery, in this case the fashioning of the crown of thorns, which wasn’t in the book. The Passion Week, though, was something that had to lead to the real story, the temptation on the cross. I wanted to get past Passion Week as quickly as possible. But I couldn’t, or I should say I wouldn’t. I had to show him being presented to the crowd. We had to see the scourging. The viewer had to see the beating by the soldiers, all that suffering leading up to the crucifixion. I think that’s all right. There are a lot of things I would have done differently now, but that was done with a real passion. I think that’s why I embraced the story, why I was burning to make it. Keitel was burning for it, too. So was Barbara Hershey, who had given me the book when we were making Boxcar Bertha. In fact, the code name for the film was “Passion” when we were shooting and editing it.

  RS: Surely, of all the pictures you’ve ever made, that’s got to have been the hardest one to walk into a studio boss’s office and say, Here’s what I want to do.

  MS: I had to learn to accept the fact that I could not get bigger, more expansive films made, the way I got them made in the seventies. I tried in 1983 with The Last Temptation of Christ. I pushed the studio to the limit, and the studi
o backed out on Thanksgiving Day. Right then I started thinking about what else I could do in life. Brian De Palma and I were talking about it one night. He had just shown Scarface and the Hollywood audience didn’t like it. He said, “What are we doing here? What could we do, become teachers maybe?” I said, “I don’t know. What the hell are we going to do? We can’t go on like this. They don’t want to make pictures that we want to make.” We were in Hugo’s restaurant on Santa Monica.

  RS: I know it well.

  MS: Then I realized I honestly didn’t know exactly what else I could do. I wished I had learned to write music. I wished I could express myself in language and literature. Or that I painted. I took some time, went to China, did a symposium there in 1984. I found the script of After Hours and realized I had to teach myself how to do lower-budget pictures, and try to finally get Last Temptation made for a lower budget.

  RS: What else could you do?

  MS: Barry Diller asked why I wanted to make the film. We were in a hotel in New York. I said, “Because I want to get to know Jesus better.” He smiled, then said, Okay. He went with it for a while. Then, at a certain point, he told me, Marty, the reality is that U.A. theaters wouldn’t show the picture. I’m sorry, I’m going to have to pull the plug on it, because if we spend $18–19 million on a movie, it has to be showing someplace.

  I became friends with Jeff Katzenberg and Michael Eisner. They had left Paramount at that point and had formed Touchstone. After I did After Hours, I got a deal at Touchstone. We did Color of Money, New York Stories. They felt Last Temptation was unfeasible. So I realized, Okay, you can’t do it for $19 million, you’ve got to do it for five. I don’t know how to put it in a nice way, but if they’re fighting you, you have to fight back another way, you’ve got to be a guerrilla, come in under the radar.

  If you look at the crucifixion scene in Last Temptation, you’ll see that every shot is cut from one to the other as designed on paper. It was part of shooting so low-budget, so fast, that I had to actually visualize the whole picture in my head, like Boxcar and Mean Streets.

  Another example: When Jesus is in the desert, I said that because of the outgoing scene, for the incoming scene he should be coming in screen left. I knew that would work, because I saw it in my head. If you’re pressed for time you’ve got to get it immediately.

  I tried to be very specific in lighting. I had some scenes that, unfortunately, I had planned for night. I had to shoot them in daytime. I didn’t see any rushes—there were no projectors. Michael Ballhaus [the cinematographer] was so depressed sometimes—but he kept our spirits up.

  But Thelma Schoonmaker was calling us up—it wasn’t easy for us to make phone calls from Morocco, where we were filming. I’d ask, What does it look like? Does this or that happen in the scene? She’d offer her opinions. I did the film blind.

  RS: I’m interested, of course, in the firestorm that blew up when the picture went into release. You probably thought it would be a controversial movie. But were you at all prepared for the outburst? I remember going to the movie and seeing grim Catholics marching around, carrying crucifixes and hateful placards.

  MS: I had no idea. I thought there would be some people who would be set against it completely. But I also thought it would open up a healthy discussion.

  Crucifixion: Willem Dafoe was a powerful Jesus in this alternative to The Greatest Story Ever Told. But the film’s sober virtues were buried by the controversy it engendered.

  RS: Really? Something as polite as that.

  MS: Let’s think about the nature of Jesus and what Jesus represents in our lives and the world and what the essence of Christianity is. I don’t know what the answer is, but let’s talk about it, and look inside ourselves to how we live.

  I think that was something Rossellini hit upon in Europa ’51. I’ve been told it was based on Simone Weil. He had made the film about Saint Francis of Assisi, from the medieval period. He asked, What if there was a modern saint? And was led to her.

  She ultimately comes to the realization that it’s a question of one step at a time, and that literally the person next to you may be the one in need. That’s what she’s there for. That’s what we must do. I thought we could discuss that. I thought we could do that without making it the center of a media circus. Yet some people said that I was just aiming for box office because of the controversial nature of the picture.

  RS: If I ever saw a movie that had no box office written on it …

  MS: I thought it would get enough people interested to break even. That was it. I was in debt for years after that. I only came out of debt by doing Cape Fear. I put everything into it we had. The same thing happened with Gangs of New York. I overcame those debts after making The Departed. It took that long. But that’s the gamble I take—everything goes!

  RS: Did you really think you were going to get your money back on either of those?

  MS: Of course not. Paul Schrader [who wrote the screenplay] knew we would have trouble. He was much more prescient that way. I’m always very much of the moment. He said people would be upset. I didn’t think so.

  RS: I suspect it had something to do with the fact that everybody knew you were raised Catholic. So for you to poke your head up and say, You know, let’s consider this whole matter in a nontheological, or, rather, a nonideological way—I think they were lying in wait for you. The church has a keen eye for apostates. Surely you had some hint that you were going to get a reaction.

  MS: I was hoping to get some ideological reaction, but I didn’t make the film for money. I was just burning to make it.

  RS: I know that.

  MS: I expected some controversy. But I expected it to be intelligent. I expected discussion and dialogue.

  RS: Not in America, pal.

  MS: It was amazing.

  RS: You were at the beginning of the period we’re in now. The fundamentalists, both Catholic and Protestant, were already feeling their oats at that moment.

  MS: It was, of course, condemned by the church from the pulpit, and they sent out their army, so to speak.

  RS: But I certainly saw some very cretinous people picketing it outside the theaters.

  MS: I know.

  RS: So, all that came as a considerable shock to you?

  MS: Very much so. By the time I appeared on Nightline on TV, where I was supposed to confront our critics, I had thrown the towel in. I couldn’t fight them anymore. I was just satisfied that the picture had been made.

  RS: It’s quite a good picture; I was almost surprised that I felt that way.

  MS: I hope so. I think it could have been cut more. We didn’t have enough time, Thelma and I, because we had to release it pretty early. But I was satisfied. We had gone through an experimental process successfully. And it became a religious experience for all of us. I really mean that.

  It was the worst shoot; you can’t imagine. Joe Reidy, the assistant director, could tell you. Harvey Keitel could tell you, Willem Dafoe, Barbara Hershey, Michael Ballhaus, all the actors. We had a very low budget, so we were stuck all the time. There were weather problems, too.

  By the time I finished editing the film, I didn’t know quite what they expected to make of the experience. Was it, as I told Barry Diller, that I want to get to know Jesus better? But after The King of Comedy, I wanted to go back to my own interests. I wanted to look into the development of the Gospels. The reality was that they chose which books were going to stay and which weren’t. Why were those books written? How did some books go into the New Testament, and others not? The Gospel of Judas has only recently been found—but it was mentioned in other Gnostic gospels. A lot of these books were written eighty, ninety, a hundred years after the events they describe.

  RS: That has always bothered me, too.

  MS: With God, yes, you’re talking about revelation and that’s what we have to deal with. But we wanted to talk about those other things—about Jesus, Judas, Mary, too. At the end of The South Bank Show, when Melvyn Bragg asked, “What did
you think they’d be most concerned about?” Paul Schrader said, “The dirty parts.” Funny.

  RS: What dirty parts?

  MS: Well, the concept that Jesus would have sexual feelings.

  RS: Oh, that.

  MS: This was the big issue. That’s what the critics claim it was.

  RS: But this character is, for better or worse, half man and half God.

  MS: Oh, no, he’s full man and full God. You have to be careful, Christologically speaking.

  RS: Whatever.

  MS: That’s the beauty of it. Let’s accept him as completely God and completely man, and therefore he’s going to feel everything a man feels.

  RS: Of course.

  MS: As I said earlier, some people would say, “Well, he’s God, therefore he’s on the cross and he’ll get through death all right.” But the point is he’s going to be afraid of death because he’s a man.

  RS: And if he’s a man, that particular death is going to hurt.

  MS: Of course. That’s why I directed as I did the scene when he raises Lazarus, and Lazarus takes his hand and pulls him into the tomb, and he’s afraid to go in. Lazarus has said, This is where you’re going. You’re coming with me. Do you want to go through this? Jesus doesn’t know what his role is until it’s revealed to him slowly.

  I think the key to it, as I also said earlier, was the relationship of Jesus and Judas. Why did he do what he did? For thirty pieces of silver? Thirty pieces of silver is nothing. It’s not for the money. Something else had to have gone down, was going on. And then it goes back to this issue of loyalty and friendship.