Conversations with Scorsese (32 page)

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 studio 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.