Martin Scorsese names his most challenging production: “It was a nightmare”
Martin Scorsese hasn’t gotten to where he is today by making things easy for himself. The legendary filmmaker has tackled some of the biggest subjects, broken the biggest taboos, and challenged all sorts of cinematic norms on his way to becoming a legend within his own lifetime. His refusal to conform is one of the many reasons why he is worshipped by cinephiles and why his body of work stands as one of the most impressive in film history.
You only have to look at The Last Temptation of Christ for proof. An adaptation of the Nikos Kazantzakis novel of the same name, the film is retelling of the life of Jesus Christ with several key details changed. Christ (Willem Dafoe) is more fallible in this version, corrupted by dreams of power and sex and full of self-doubt. As well as its controversial subject matter, the movie also made some nutty casting choices, including Harvey Keitel and Judas Iscariot and David Bowie as Pontius Pilate.
As you can imagine, the film drew considerable backlash from religious groups. Scorsese was public enemy number one among certain Christian communities, even though he tried to explain that his work was based on a work of fiction and not actual scripture. Even so, the movie took its toll on the director, as he revealed many years later.
As part of a roundtable discussion for The Hollywood Reporter, Scorsese was asked what the most testing moment of his career was, to which he replied, “Last Temptation, definitely.” He spoke about being condemned by certain conservative branches of the Christian faith, which affected him due to his own religious views. “ I am Roman Catholic, it’s a different thing,” he continued. “And even the hierarchy of the church condemned it without seeing it. It was a nightmare. And I really, really, truly believed in it. And still do. But in a funny way, something happened. About a week before it opened, when I was watching all this stuff go on, I realised the film isn’t even important. It’s not important. It’s about what’s happening now. And it saddened me but made me realise, maybe art is important, but there is something beyond that.”
One of the other directors at the roundtable was Todd Phillips, who made Joker. The Joaquin Phoenix vehicle owes more than a little to Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, right down to the inclusion of Robert de Niro. Scorsese was originally going to produce Phillips’ movie, but, as he explained, he had his grounds for pulling out.
“Personal reasons, scheduling,” he said. “And quite honestly, Taxi Driver and King of Comedy and Last Temptation of Christ. Those were my fights. We went and did King of Comedy and we were attacked for that and the film was considered the flop of the year at Entertainment Tonight. [But by then] the whole of Hollywood had turned against that kind of filmmaking.”
King of Comedy and Last Temptation were both 1980s releases, but felt more akin to the work Scorsese and other New Hollywood directors had been doing the decade prior. That era was brought to a close in part thanks to the failure of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, which Scorsese believes had an impact on his projects. “That point in time, Heaven’s Gate opens up. That was the end. They had enough of these crazed auteurs,” he theorised. “I tried to do Last Temptation of Christ and six weeks before shooting started, it was canceled. At which point, I said, “I think I should leave [the business].”
