Scorsese’s search for meaning

The great director tells Horatia Harrod how his broken faith 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 nearexcommunication 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

‘I can’t help it. The questions always come back to religion’