28 years in the making
Now that it’s finally done, Martin Scorsese hopes to make some noise with religious epic ‘Silence’
After 28 years of trying to bring Silence to the big screen, Martin Scorsese can finally breathe a sigh of relief.
“It’s amazing that with all the things against the film that it got made and it’s going to be shown,” says Scorsese, 74. “There was a lot of sacrifice, a lot of problems, a lot of delays. But this is where I felt I should spend my time.”
The Oscar-winning director is seated in a suite at the Loews Regency hotel on the Upper East Side, where in 1988, he was intro- duced to Archbishop Paul Moore following a screening of The Last
Temptation of Christ. After a long discussion about faith, Moore offered to send Scorsese a copy of Japanese author Shusaku Endo’s 1966 historical novel Silence.
Silence (in theaters Friday in New York and Los Angeles; expands through mid-January) follows two Portuguese Jesuit missionaries (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) in 17th-century Japan searching for their “fallen” mentor (Liam Neeson), who they fear has renounced his religion at the hands of a regime that persecutes Christians.
When Scorsese read the book, “I knew immediately that I wanted to do something with this,” he says. Disappointed by the “great misunderstanding ” and backlash around Last Temptation — which imagined Jesus living a mortal life — he was eager to explore “something different. ( Silence) was getting closer to the very essence and heart of Christianity,” but also the “common nature of what it is to be a human being.”
But when he sat down with cowriter Jay Cocks in 1990 to adapt the screenplay, “I didn’t know how to visualize or structure the story,” particularly the film’s tricky final section, in which Father Rodrigues (Garfield) wrestles with abandoning his faith.
For nearly two decades, Scorsese and Cocks attempted to crack the story. In 2012, Scorsese was sued by an Italian production company for failure to make Si
lence, which he had backburnered for The Wolf of Wall Street. Scorsese shot the film last year on a modest $46.5 million budget in Taiwan, where cast and crew endured extreme heat and typhoons.
The film’s challenges haven’t ended. Though Silence has been well-received by critics, few saw it ahead of last week’s Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Awards nominations, where the project was overlooked. With its subject matter and nearly three-hour run time, the film also faces an uphill battle at the box office.
Both Scorsese and Cocks are glad that Silence came together when it did, as they’ve grown artistically, personally and spiritually over the past three decades.
In that length of time, with “your life changing and maybe your values changing, too, things that are really important all come together,” Scorsese says.
Cocks adds: “There was a certain kind of maturity we didn’t have then that we could bring to this now. ... A certain imperative for faith; a need to believe that maybe we didn’t have when we were a little more footloose 25 years ago. The movie is deeper for that.”