Still on the road to faith
Martin Scorsese tells Horatia Harrod how his battle with religion led to his film ‘Silence’
ALMOST 30 years ago, Martin Scorsese invited a group of the faithful to an early screening of his new film, The Last Temptation of Christ.
In the course of his career Scorsese, perhaps the greatest living American director, has amassed his own flock of true believers, but this particular audience was not made up of cineastes: these were the real thing, a crowd of Christians of all denominations.
Most of them already knew about the film and what they’d heard, they didn’t like.
The book upon which it was based had resulted in the near-excommunication of its author, Nikos Kazantzakis, and long before the cameras had started rolling, factions of the religious right had begun to militate against it, threatening boycotts against anyone who might dare to get involved.
Both in the US and abroad, clerics successfully put pressure on those who intended to fund the film, and it was only after nearly 10 years of setbacks that the movie was finally ready, in the summer of 1988.
“It was on 23rd Street in New York in August,” says Scorsese, whose prodigious powers of recall extend beyond an encyclopedic knowledge of cinema to people, places, dates, sights, smells – everything.
“Afterwards we were planning a little dinner at a hotel; we’d meet there with a few people who wanted to continue the discussion.” He pauses for a beat. “It didn’t go well.” The discussion? “Well, no, the screening,” he says, breaking into wheezing laughter. “And there was no discussion!”
His audience was horrified by what they saw – a Jesus Christ in whom the human is as apparent as the divine, a man who is capable of imagining a sexual encounter with Mary Magdalene as he struggles in his final moments on the cross.
There was, however, a notable exception. Among the attendees was the then-bishop of New York, Paul Moore. Despite his high station, Moore was decidedly unorthodox, a representative of a dynamic, questioning sort of faith.
“He was quite a man,” says Scorsese, thoughtfully. “I never met him again, never spoke to him again. Just this one meeting, where we spent about three or four hours talking, battling back and forth. And at the end of it he said, I’m going to send you a book; it’s called Silence, and it’s about everything we’ve been talking about.”
A few days later the book arrived, setting in train the protracted sequence of events which have brought Scorsese to Rome and, a few hours before we meet, to an audience with Pope Francis.
First published in 1966, Shusaku Endo’s Silence is a novel which, like The Last Temptation of Christ, looks at the struggle between faith and lived experience, and the moral ambiguity of a God who, as Endo writes, “has chosen not to eliminate suffering, but to suffer with humanity”.
It has long been a favoured text for Jesuits, concerning as it does the travails of two missionaries of their order in 17th-century Japan. These two young men – played in the film by Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver – are sent to keep the flame of belief alive in a time of intense religious persecution, and to discover the whereabouts of an older Jesuit (Liam Neeson), who is reported to have apostatised – that is, renounced his faith.
Scorsese is sitting in a hotel room at the summit of the Spanish Steps, a vantage point from which you can make out the dome of St Peter’s.
Here, in the cradle of Catholicism, the director had just premiered his adaptation of Silence to an invited audience of 300 Jesuit priests. “It was very exciting,” he says. “The questions afterwards were tough and strong but I’m a layman. I know religion in the everyday world; I can’t argue the theology.”
Scorsese’s own belief perhaps comes closer to that expressed in the opening voice-over of his breakthrough film, Mean Streets (1973): “You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is b******* and you know it.”
Although Pope Francis – himself a Jesuit – has not yet seen the film, he told Scorsese that he had read and reread the novel.
As for Scorsese, “I finished reading the book in Japan,” he says, “when I was shooting Dreams [a short 1990 film on which he was employed as an actor rather than a director]. I felt I really wanted to do it as a film, but I didn’t know how. I just didn’t know how.”
Over the decades, he and his cowriter Jay Cocks worked on draft after draft of the script.
The final 10 pages alone took several years to write, Scorsese says. What they ended up with is rigorously faithful to the novel, a dogged, two-and-a-half-hour-long examination of faith.
When the shogun’s soldiers torture and execute the members of a hidden sect of Christians, the questions the film poses are profound: is it ethical to proselytise in a country that already has its own, deep-rooted religious tradition?
Should a good Christian renounce his faith in public to save his own life, or is it better to die a martyr? And what, above all, does it mean when God is silent in the face of suffering?
These are sobering questions, and I expect to find Scorsese in reflective, elder statesman mode. Almost the opposite is true: he fairly crackles with neurotic, screwball energy. He talks fast, although the unremitting flow of his answers is briefly slowed by a minor asthma attack that leaves him gulping for air. Every so often he leaps from his seat, as if propelled by the sheer momentum of his thoughts.
No doubt it was a longed-for thing, to be welcomed back into the Catholic fold after the hostile reception afforded to The Last Temptation.
Once upon a time Scorsese had planned to become a priest himself. During his formative years in New York’s Little Italy, a young priest had taken him to the movies, and from that time on, faith and film were forever entwined in his mind. (Not that he was a saint – Scorsese is five times married, and particularly in the Seventies he lived large, his consumption of cocaine only curtailed when a bad batch of the drug landed him in hospital with massive internal bleeding.)
“Certain films – Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, a little bit of The Colour of Money – very specifically had to do with those religious themes,” he says. “I can’t help it. I tried to think differently. I became interested in many different things. But the comfort or, I should say, the questions, really, come back to this.”
Scorsese’s struggles over the script partly explain why it’s taken him so long to make Silence. But there has also been a protracted tussle over who actually owns the rights to the book.
The directors of the Italian company Cecchi Gori Pictures, which originally bought the rights and hired Scorsese and Cocks to write a screenplay, fell out in 2008 and fought each other over ownership of the rights. The company then sued Scorsese in 2012 for his failure to make the film.
Only when Scorsese and Cecchi Gori settled out of court in 2014 was the way clear for the film to be made, at which point a Mexican producer, Gaston Pavlovich, agreed to put up roughly half the financing.
Pavlovich slashed the budget from around R1.1-billion to a figure closer to R627-million. Scorsese and his cast all worked for scale – that is, for Hollywood’s minimum wage – and they found a cheaper stand-in for Japan in the shape of Taiwan.
The shoot was gruelling – both Driver and Garfield lost significant amounts of weight to play their parts, and the 82-year-old actor Yoshi Oida was pummelled by a wave machine while lashed to a cross, in a scene of an at-sea crucifixion.
Meanwhile Stuart Ford, the CEO of Silence’s other key producer, IM Global, took Scorsese to pitch the film at Cannes.
“Maybe that’s a sign of the times, that a filmmaker of his substance effectively has to sing for his supper to get a movie like this made,” says Ford. “It’s fair to say that he’s a guy who’s good at pitching a movie.
“But it’s not a film that the major studios would have been willing to back; it’s no secret that their output is increasingly dominated by branded, tent-pole films.”
For Ford, the gamble was worth taking: “Obviously when you step into a film like this, a heavyweight drama based on a seminal novel, the best-case scenario is that it becomes an awards-calibre film.” (Although the film was a surprise omission at the Golden Globe nominations last week, it is still expected to pick up Oscar nominations.)
The studios’ timidity comes at a time, oddly enough, when Scorsese’s stock has never been higher.
His last film, The Wolf of Wall Street, was the most successful he’s ever made, raking in $392-million (R5.4-billion) worldwide. But that film’s digitally enhanced overindulgence is a stark contrast to the austere rigours of Silence, which makes for punishing viewing. You wouldn’t necessarily pair the two in a double bill.
“Well, no, it’s meant for a different audience,” says Scorsese, before immediately overruling himself.
“Actually, it’s meant for the same audience, if they could allow themselves to say, ‘OK, let’s just stop for a second and think about life in a different way.’ I don’t want to say what I thought that film was about or why it was made, but there were certain meanings in the picture.
“Yes, there was sex and drugs and humour, a lot of humour, but it’s all very, very dark humour. And it’s a humour that has now come true!” He laughs.
“Silence has taken me on a deeper road than my previous films,” he says.
“I didn’t know how deep it was, and maybe I still don’t, quite honestly. I haven’t experienced a conversion on the road to Damascus; I’m still on the road. You stop a little here, stop a little there. And eventually, it’s only going to one place.” — The Daily Telegraph
● ‘Silence’ is scheduled for release in South Africa in April next year