‘I’m not a saint’: Abel Ferrara on his wild career, rehab and nightclubbing with Donald Trump
The last time I met Abel Ferrara, he dozed off in the middle of our interview then woke up and asked me to score him some coke. It was 1996, and he was in the UK promoting his gangster drama The Funeral – which the actor Vincent Gallo alleged Ferrara had been too blitzed on crack to direct properly – and his vampire horror The Addiction. He was on a roll, his reputation fortified by King of New York, starring Christopher Walken as a flamboyant crime boss, and the gruelling Bad Lieutenant, with Harvey Keitel as a bent junkie cop. Ferrara was the scuzzball Scorsese: no matter how celebrated he became, he never shed the patina of grime from his early days as the star and director of porn film The Nine Lives of a Wet Pussy and the infamous “video nasty” The Driller Killer.
“You were the guy I fell asleep with?” he gasps now from his bright, high-ceilinged living room in Rome. He is calling via Zoom, his laptop resting on a shelf so he can pace around as he speaks, drinking from a bottle of San Pellegrino that he clutches by the neck. “You’re the guy? I’m sorry, man! Really, really.” Then he switches tack. “You let me down! You were 24, living in London, and you didn’t know where to score?” He shakes his head in disbelief. “All right. So where could we get some now?” A sandpapery cackle fills the air as he rocks on his heels. His hunched posture and jutting jaw make him the spit of the cartoon dog Muttley. He laughs like him, too.
Ferrara is kidding about the drugs. Now 72, he has been sober for 11 years, roughly half the time he has been in Rome, where he lives with the actor Cristina Chiriac and their eight-year-old daughter. “Look at this, man,” he says in his chewy Bronx accent, carrying his laptop over to the balcony to show off the city’s blue skies, pine trees and terracotta roofs. Ferrara, raised by his Irish mother and Italian father, came here in 2002. “It was just after 9/11. The way independent cinema was going, the way my life was going, I didn’t want to battle any more for the sort of freedom you get as a movie director in Europe. Final cut is the law here. You dig?”
His cinema has grown more eclectic since then, taking in documentaries, meta-dramas and biographical portraits such as Pasolini, starring Willem Dafoe as the murdered gay Marxist auteur, and Welcome to New York, inspired by the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case, with Gérard Depardieu as a predatory politician. His 21st-century films are lesser-seen but actors still flock to work with him (Juliette Binoche, Ethan Hawke, Natasha Lyonne), while fellow directors hold him in high esteem. The Safdie brothers, who regard Ferrara as one of the all-time great chroniclers of New York, cast him in their 2009 film Daddy Longlegs. Quentin Tarantino has likened him to Sergio Leone.
Ferrara is bringing a new documentary to the Berlin film festival next month, about the war in Ukraine featuring words and music by Patti Smith. His latest narrative feature, though, is Padre Pio, which imagines the events leading up to the priest Pio (Shia LaBeouf ) receiving the stigmata after arriving in San Giovanni Rotondo, in Italy’s Apulia region, at the end of the first world war. (He was canonised in 2002.) Ferrara interweaves this with the oppression of local peasants by landowners, and the slaughter that ensued.
“It was basically the first battle of the second world war,” he says. “It was fascist rule. They turned the guns on their own brothers.” He recalls piecing together the exact timeline: “Wait, that massacre happened in that town at the same time Pio is having his stigmata? Are you kidding me? OK, we’re making that movie!”
In the scenes showing the peasants being encouraged to vote in their first election, Ferrara seems to be sending a message to modern audiences. How has it felt for him observing US politics from Europe in recent years? “My country’s been fucking crazy since the day I was born. It’s business as usual.” Even Trump? “Compared to what?” he scoffs. “Murdering Martin Luther King? Assassinating Kennedy? Killing Malcolm X? Trump is what he is. I happen to know the guy, so what can I tell ya?” How does he know him? “From New York, man. We shot in his buildings, I’d see him in nightclubs. I didn’t ‘know him’ know him but I know intimately what he is and what he’s about. It can drive you crazy when you know the cat.”
Ferrara’s world is not short on contentious figures. Has he been following the news about the rape and sexual assault allegations made against his former leading man Depardieu? “I don’t live under a rock, bro!” he splutters. “I’m on the internet. I got people calling me up going, ‘Did you see your homeboy?’ Look, I only know Gérard from the film we made – which was about that subject. I have three daughters so my relationship to how people treat women is a little different. I think about what I’ve got to do, what I’ve done, and how I can make amends in the future and be more righteous. Harvey Keitel was talking to me once about actresses. He said: ‘You’ve got to treat every woman as if they’re your own daughter.’ That’s great advice.”
Are Ferrara’s sets safe places for women? “Nobody’s gonna abuse anybody there. Can I be abusive, say, verbally? Sure. Do I pull the reins in? I don’t revel in it. But I’m not a saint. I’m a Buddhist. ‘Do no harm,’ that’s my mantra. I wanna do my thing without hurting anybody.”
I wonder how that squares with hiring LaBeouf, who is still facing a lawsuit from his ex-partner, the singer FKA twigs, alleging “relentless abuse”. When Ferrara insists that “the film is as much about Shia as it is about Padre Pio”, he has a point. The voices tormenting Pio for “the countless women you’ve had your narcissistic way with” seem to echo LaBeouf’s public admissions about being “a pleasure-seeking, selfish, self-centred, dishonest, inconsiderate, fearful human being”.
But why not err on the side of caution and cast someone who hasn’t been accused of toxic behaviour? “He’s accepted the lawsuit!” cries Ferrara, though in fact LaBeouf has denied the allegations in the case, which is due to go to trial this year. “You understand? He’s changed. I’m in a brotherhood with the dude. He’s stopped drinking and drugging. He’s found the spiritual life. Am I gonna turn my back on that dude? Absolutely not.”
Such empathy should come as no surprise from someone who spent four months in rehab himself. Was it his own choice, or an intervention? “Who’s gonna intervene? It’s like that Dylan line: ‘Nobody to rescue me / Nobody would dare …’ I wish somebody hadintervened 20 years earlier but you gotta come to the moment yourself. It’s always when you’re at your most insane.”
Our previous meeting, then, was deep in the insanity years. How does he feel now about that version of himself, nodding off in interviews and pestering journalists for drugs? “What do I think about the guy?” he repeats. He stands stock still and stares into the webcam. It is fractionally above eye level, lending him the air of a defendant pleading his case before the judge. “You know, they flew me on Concorde to talk to you. That’s how important that was. They put me in some big hotel because of these movies that we poured a lot of heart and blood and soul into. And then I fucking blow you off.”
He bows his head for a moment, then looks up. “Who is that guy and why’d he do that? That guy was sick.
I had this perception that I needed to do cocaine and heroin to do the interview. It was like a three-card monte game, bro. To talk to you, I was convinced I needed a little bit of heroin, a little coke, some alcohol. If I was gonna direct, it’s another combination. And if I’m gonna have sex, it would be a different combination again. I was like a brilliant chemist! But I was in a deluded state. That’s a sad place to be, homie. Today, we’re having this cool conversation, and I don’t need anything.”
He is springy and agile, his hair a crown of fluffy white curls. I feel genuinely glad to see him looking so well. When I tell him, he laughs – not a cackle this time but a booming, appreciative guffaw. “Me too!” he says. Getting tapped for coke by Abel Ferrara, the Driller Killer himself, was a cool story to tell my friends but I had no idea how much he was suffering. “Now you do,” he says softly. “And I hope this makes up for last time. Although now you’ve got no story to tell: ‘He came on, he did his job, I did mine …’ What a boring fucking time!” He grins, then takes a swig of mineral water. Here’s to boring.
Padre Pio is released in UK and Irish cinemas on 26 January
• This article was amended on 22 January 2024, to correct the suggestion that Abel Ferrara is showing two documentaries at the 2024 Berlin film festival, in fact he is showing one.