‘It has the power to destroy souls’: the undervalued Scorsese epic that almost got him killed

As the great director prepares his second film on the life of Jesus Christ, let’s pray it proves much less controversial than the first

The news that cinema’s greatest living director Martin Scorsese has decided to make a film about Jesus as his follow-up to Killers of the Flower Moon has certainly raised eyebrows. This is partly because it is the polar opposite of his last few epic crime films: an 80-minute picture (his shortest since 1985’s After Hours, which ran a compact 97 minutes) that will be based on the 1966 novel A Life of Jesus by Shūsaku Endō, the Japanese author of Silence, which Scorsese adapted into a film in 2016. 
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Scorsese has suggested that the “timeless” film will be set in the present day, and he said that “I’m trying to find a new way to make it more accessible and take away the negative onus of what has been associated with organized religion.”  
The film may be another classic – and given the run of form that Scorsese has been on since 2004’s The Aviator, you certainly wouldn’t bet against him – or it might be, like Silence, an accomplished but esoteric picture that attracts appreciative but limited audiences. Many might have preferred Scorsese to move onto his adaptation of David Grann’s bestselling novel The Wager, which, in its period setting and with his regular star Leonardo DiCaprio expected to take the lead, would have been a more obviously commercial project. 
Yet the main reason why Scorsese’s decision is a potentially controversial one is that we have been here before, with his most divisive film to date, 1988’s Last Temptation of Christ. One of the director’s long-held passion projects, it had a lengthy and tumultuous production process, but that was nothing compared to the outrage that it eventually received after release. 
Nikos Kazantzakis was probably the best-known figure in 20th century Greek literature, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature on multiple occasions before dying in 1957, aged 74. He first came to international prominence in 1946, when his bestselling book Zorba the Greek – later memorably filmed with Anthony Quinn and Alan Bates – was published. But the last novel that he published during his lifetime was The Last Temptation of Christ, which first appeared in Greece in 1955 and in an English translation in 1960. 
The book was met with outrage by conservative religious forces, most notably the Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church, because of its central provocation: that Jesus Christ, dying on the cross, imagines an alternate existence in which he had not been the son of God, but instead led a normal life without the responsibilities and sacrifice that he was called upon to make. 
Kazantzakis’s conclusion was far from sacrilegious. The novel ends with Christ accepting and indeed embracing his destiny, having realised that he was always meant to give his life for the sake of humanity. For anyone of faith and a reasonably broad intellectual outlook, it is a stirring and cathartic ending, rather than a subversive one. Nonetheless, the Greek Orthodox Church were appalled, and attempted to have Kazantzakis’s books banned in Greece, on the grounds that Last Temptation “contains evil slanders against the Godlike person of Jesus Christ. … derived from the inspiration of the theories of Freud and historical materialism, [the book] perverts and hurts the Gospel discernment and the God-man figure of our Lord Jesus Christ in a way coarse, vulgar, and blasphemous.” 
It also attracted outcry in some parts of the US, with the excellently named Citizens Group for Clean Books calling it “blasphemous, obscene and defamatory.” Yet Kazantzakis was a literary author, and so the book’s reach remained relatively limited. 
Scorsese, however, read and responded to the book, which he was given by the actress Barbara Hershey when they made the 1972 film Boxcar Bertha together. A deeply religious man, he had toyed with the idea of making a film about Jesus since childhood, and Kazantzakis’s novel spoke deeply to him. He said in an interview that “It took me six years to finish it! I’d pick it up, put it down, reread it, be enveloped by the beautiful language of it, then realize I couldn’t shoot the language.” When he cracked the idea of filming it in demotic street language rather than the flowery dialogue of Fifties costume epics, it came to fruition. 
By 1978, Scorsese had had a major hit, in the form of Taxi Driver, and an equally notable flop, in the shape of the musical New York, New York. Yet he was still an up-and-coming director, and Taxi Driver’s Palm d’Or meant that he was taken seriously by studios. Reuniting with his Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader, he spent several years on the project, perfecting the script and scouting locations, before Paramount Pictures agreed to a budget of $14 million and a cast that would include Aidan Quinn as Jesus and a range of musicians in supporting roles, including the Kinks’ Ray Davies as Judas Iscariot, model-turned-singer Vanity as Mary Magdalene and Sting as Pontius Pilate. 
It was a reasonable budget for a period epic, but a great deal more than less controversial Paramount projects of the era. The smash hit likes of An Officer and a Gentleman and Terms of Endearment were made for considerably lower costs, and a religious-themed film that needed to be shot in Israel and featuring largely untested performers was not an obvious commercial prospect. Then, of course, there was the near-certainty of controversy, which would garner headlines but wouldn’t necessarily bring in punters.
As Scorsese later sighed: “And then the religious protests started, and a theatre chain said it wouldn’t show the movie. Well, if you have a picture that’s pretty expensive by now, and you’re not sure it’s going to be profitable, and you can’t show it in a lot of theatres, and you’re getting flak from organized groups.” 
Paramount placed the film in “turnaround”, a polite euphemism for development hell, and Scorsese moved onto other projects, including After Hours and his then-biggest commercial hit to date, the Hustler sequel The Colour of Money. When he signed up with super-agent Mike Ovitz following the latter’s success, Ovitz asked Scorsese which project he’d most like to see filmed. The director instantly replied “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Within a few months, Ovitz had set up the project with Universal Studios, which had had a nightmarish experience a couple of years previously with another auteur director, Terry Gilliam, and his masterpiece Brazil; the arguments he’d had with the studio head led to a very public dispute that included Gilliam taking out an advert in the trade press saying “Dear Sid Sheinberg, when are you going to release my film, ‘Brazil’?” 
Scorsese might have imagined that the same fate awaited him, but Sheinberg and his production partner Tom Pollock, conscious of Scorsese’s reputation as a filmmaker, bent over backwards to accommodate his wishes. As he later said, in wonderment, “I never thought I could make a movie like this for a place like Universal. They represented a certain kind of filmmaking. But from the moment I met Tom Pollock and Sid Sheinberg, I felt a new attitude, a new openness. I’ve never felt such support from any studio.” 
There were only two conditions to their largesse. The first was that he would make a straightforwardly commercial film for the studio as a quid pro quo, which he did when he directed the blockbuster thriller Cape Fear in 1991, and the second was that he would make the film on a reduced budget of $7 million. Even allowing for the straitened money, Scorsese used well-known actors including Hershey as Mary Magdalene, his regular collaborator Harvey Keitel as Judas and, in the role of Christ, Willem Dafoe. The company’s biggest name was David Bowie, replacing Sting in the one-scene role of Pontius Pilate; even Scorsese, no stranger to working with A-list talent, described himself as “a little taken aback” to be working with the musician, but later called the three days that they worked together “sheer joy”. 
This was more than could be said for the rest of the production, which was shot in Morocco and returned the director to the near-guerrilla filmmaking of his early pictures. Scorsese recalled that “we worked in a state of emergency”, with little opportunity for error or the elaborate camera set-ups that he had become synonymous with. Still, as his cinematographer Michael Ballhaus would remind him, “That’s the way this picture has to be made.” Appropriately enough, filming finished on December 1987 25. And then the fun began. 
A decade before, ardent Catholic Franco Zeffirelli’s miniseries Jesus of Nazareth, starring Robert Powell, had been broadcast. Although it was notably reverent in its approach, and was endorsed by none other than Pope Paul VI, it still attracted controversy from evangelists such as Bill Bright, who were angered by Zeffirelli’s off-the-cuff description of how the film would show Jesus as “an ordinary man – gentle, fragile, simple.” 
This was absolutely nothing to compared to how Scorsese’s picture would be received. Bright offered to buy the negative of the film from Universal in order to burn it in public, and there were mass protests from everyone from nuns to the evangelical right, who decried the film as blasphemous. 
The controversy that Paramount had seen in microcosm in 1983 now reached full fruition. Mother Angelica, an influential television nun, called the film “a holocaust movie that has the power to destroy souls eternally” and denigrated it as “the most blasphemous ridicule of the Eucharist that’s ever been perpetrated in this world.” It was banned or censored in countries including South Africa, Mexico and – ironically enough – Greece, and remains banned in Singapore to this day. A cinema in Paris showing the film was set on fire in October 1988, injuring 13 people, and Scorsese himself received death threats. 
When interviewing him at the time for Film Comment, the journalist Harlan Jacobson observed that “Two guys, tough guys, sit in the waiting room of Martin Scorsese’s Manhattan offices. Are they auditioning for Scorsese’s forthcoming Mafia movie? Are they a pair of Willem Dafoe’s roustabout apostles? No… they are waiting to see anyone who wants to see Scorsese.” 
The director had to have bodyguards for years, remembering what happened to Pier Paolo Pasolini, another controversial filmmaker who made a film about Christ and who ended up assassinated, albeit for unrelated reasons. And even some of his peers stood against him. When Zeffirelli learnt that Last Temptation was to be shown at the Venice Film Festival, he withdrew his own picture Young Toscanini from the festival, (inaccurately) denigrating Scorsese and his collaborators as “that Jewish cultural scum of Los Angeles which is always spoiling for a chance to attack the Christian world.” 
The filmmaker took the controversy in his stride, but was irritated by claims that he had attempted to make a provocative film for little other than profit or attention-seeking. He released a statement after the film was released. “It is more than just another film project for me,” he said. “It was made with conviction and love and so I believe it is an affirmation of faith, not a denial. Further, I feel strongly that people everywhere will be able to identify with the human side of Jesus as well as his divine side.” 
Scorsese was also annoyed that some critics lambasted the film as unintentionally bathetic in places – such as when Harry Dean Stanton’s Saul, seeing the resurrected Lazarus, mutters “How’re ya feelin?” in a thick Kentucky accent – and suggested that they had misunderstood it. “Some critics called the movie unintentionally funny, but Jay [Cocks, co-screenwriter] and I don’t think so. Sometimes what’s said is serious, sometimes it’s ironic, and sometimes it’s meant to be funny.” 
He and Schrader had tried hard to make the dialogue sound demotic and contemporary, although Scorsese did observe one convention of period epics, and that was to cast British actors as the Romans, and, inevitably, Satan. He later observed that “anyone in authority should have a British accent. It sounds authoritative to American ears” and asked, rhetorically, “Don’t they tend to win the Oscars, just for sounding British?”
The film mostly received critical praise, however, and was a reasonable success at the box office, attracting audiences lured by the controversy. Scorsese himself was nominated for an Oscar for Best Director, losing to Barry Levinson for Rain Man. Ironically, the picture would soon be overshadowed in the director’s canon by Goodfellas, and as an object of controversy by the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, which led to considerably greater violence and uproar. 
Assessed three and a half decades later, Last Temptation of Christ remains a major work in Scorsese’s filmography, and deserves to be reassessed. Not only is it a faithful and intelligent adaptation of Kazantzakis’s novel, but it builds to a moving crescendo, accompanied by a fine Peter Gabriel score, that testifies to the importance of religious belief, as Christ defies Satan’s entreaties and calls out “It is accomplished!” in his final moments on Earth. Compared to the torture porn of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, it is a far more respectable and, dare one say, Christian work: well worth the effort and time that it took to make. 
And it would also lead to Scorsese’s association with the writings of Endō. One of the few clergymen prepared to defend the picture was the Episcopal bishop of New York Paul Moore, who wrote to the New York Times: “As a movie based on a novel, it does not pretend to be an accurate description of the biblical record of the life of Jesus. However, it is a vivid and deeply moving portrait.” He also attacked his fellow clergymen, saying “I hope wiser heads than the ministers who threaten boycott will go to the movie and will be as moved by it as I was. Incidentally, it seems strange that they would be criticizing a movie they have not even seen.”
In gratitude, Scorsese invited him to dinner after the film’s premiere, and Moore handed the filmmaker a copy of Silence during the meal, thereby provoking another lengthy period of soul-searching and another protracted production process, albeit without the controversy on completion. Should the now 81-year-old director manage to make the final part of his so-called “faith trilogy”, we can only hope – for his sake, and ours – that it ends up an altogether easier journey.