Abel Ferrara (Photo: Mauro Maglione)
When it comes to filmmaker biographies, the “print the legend” maxim so frequently misattributed to John Ford has long been the preferred coin of the realm. Tales told out of school, dirty details of deals gone wrong, artistic hubris, on-set disasters — such recountings often obscure the actual realities of a filmmaker’s life and career. For much of cinema’s history, it was rare for directors to speak on their own terms, and with some notable exceptions, more important that a memorable narrative be broadcast posthumously. More oft than not, the more outrageous, the better. When written by the filmmakers themselves, the memoir form can easily lapse into career revisionism or — worse yet — function as self-defense.
Abel Ferrara’s memoir SCENE succumbs to none of these familiar pitfalls. Set deep within the trenches and back alleys of American independent film, Ferrara drills deep into the bedrock, probing fresh wounds and ancient scar tissue alike, emerging with a storied, practically unbelievable career in the pictures. Unbelievable that is, if belonging to anyone other than Abel Ferrara. The director of such masterworks as Bad Lieutenant, Ms. 45, King of New York and Tommaso, Ferrara has seen his fair share of devastating setbacks and miraculous triumphs, and in SCENE, the director chronicles both in equal measure, shying away from neither grit nor glory. The book is a veritable testament to his considerable body of uncompromising, at times devastating work, and even within a career filled with countless sublime moments, SCENE is a singular accomplishment.
A whirlwind and peregrine account of a life devoted to the cinema, replete with hustling and humiliations, rife with regret and hope in equal measure, it is, in the end, a cold hard look at the dreams and struggles of a restless, relentless filmmaker. Throughout, a thoughtful, revelatory vision emerges, even as the work of making movies continues to become more difficult as time goes on. Ferrara turns quandaries and regrets into a cross-examination of his own conscience. The hits keep coming, and though the path gets twisted, in the end Ferrara emerges thoroughly transformed. Nearly a decade sober, and a longtime student of Buddhist teachings, the distance between who the man was and who he has become would seem nearly unfathomable — were it not so nakedly documented herein.
Written with a sense of immediacy, and in a deceptively disarming voice, SCENE stands out from other noteworthy director autobiographies. Absent any of the scurrilous, if not unentertaining mudslinging of memoirs such as The Friedkin Connection, or the at times exceedingly unctuous tone of directorial reflections such as Edward Zwick’s Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions, Ferrara’s mode is that of a streetwise stream of consciousness, a hustler out of Selby or Price beckoning you into a dark corner — more Nelson Algren or Edward Bunker than the rigorous, Conradian first person of Oliver Stone’s coming of age saga, Chasing the Light. Ferrara’s book isn’t concerned with legacy or theory, of which, as one memorable scene has it, the director seemingly has little use: In LA working on Body Snatchers, the third adaptation of Jack Finney’s 1955 novel of Cold War horror, a clueless Warners executive gifts the director and his screenwriter Nicholas St. John with copies of Hitchcock/Truffaut. Ferrara, never one for understatement, responds by burning the book in the lobby fireplace of the Chateau Marmont.
While some omissions might appear glaring at first — films such as Dangerous Game, China Girl, and The Funeral are reduced to mere anecdotal footnotes or mentioned in passing only — the films and stories included in the book are structured in a fluid, quasi-hyperlink structure. Skipping through the years, back and forth between pictures, memories, dependencies, and relationships, Ferrara presents a mélange of personal detail mostly in extreme closeup, with the occasional birds-eye-view. While unflinchingly self-interrogative, the director does not linger upon what meaning, if any, such trials, losses, and victories carry for him in retrospect. Never one to paper over his own imperfections, in SCENE Ferrara allows a ragged, if not unyielding spirit to be lain bare, as he traverses a career spanning his hardcore first feature, 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy to later highlights such as The Addiction, Mary, and Welcome to New York. Along the way, he touches down to illuminate the great many people who shaped him, among them, his father Alfred, his longtime collaborators Ken Kelsch, the aforementioned St. John, and Zoe Lund. Plummeting through the lower depths at breakneck speed, SCENE shines a stark light upon addiction, obsessions, affairs of the heart, and what amounts to a never-ending, long and winding road to redemption. In the process, Ferrara casts a magnetic spell over the reader, making his first published work of prose all but impossible to put down.
Filmmaker spoke with Abel Ferrara twice over the last month, from his home in Rome.
These conversations have been edited and condensed.
Filmmaker: This book is such an incredible document.
Ferrara: Incredible that I could write more than ten pages you mean.
Filmmaker: I mean more to have your side of things, on the record, so to speak.
Ferrara: That’s the thing, You know, if I had made this guy up, then maybe I’d have something… But, I’m not writing a novel.
Filmmaker: I remember you saying, the last time we talked, how much more impactful literature has been for you, especially in recent years. You had just finished Siberia, and two references you repeatedly returned to were Carl Jung’s Red Book and Jack London’s John Barleycorn.
Ferrara: I mean, I’ve always read. I fell in love with reading young, and for a long time, I have read way, way more than I go to the movies. I don’t get that same experience with a film. I’ll see things here and there, but I don’t want to search for something to see. I mean, at one point, we saw everything. These days, I want to see something like the films we talk about in the book, you know? When I saw Salo… I’m still friends with the people I saw that film with. We shared a movie experience 50 years ago. How many times you go to a movie and have that experience?
Filmmaker: Only a handful, even if you’re lucky. Not too many films like Salo. In terms of your writing process with SCENE, how did you get started?
Ferrara: I just jammed. I didn’t worry about punctuation. I didn’t worry about style. I took the events as they came. I gave what I had to writers I respect. Everybody was encouraging, telling me, “Keep jamming, keep going.” Now, people are expecting it — you’re telling everybody you’re doing it, so you gotta finish it. So, I kept jamming at it. The whole time, we’re still making films. Then, I come back to it. Go away, come back. Suddenly, it’s 300 pages. I always knew there’d be a point where I’d need somebody to work with me in the editing stage.
Filmmaker: In the acknowledgements, you mention working with Patrick Ferris [son of Timothy, longtime Rolling Stone editor] on shaping the manuscript. What was that process like?
Ferrara: Well Patrick’s father Timothy is a dear friend of mine, and I’ve known Patrick since he was a kid. He’s super smart. He’s a musician and a songwriter, and that worked for me. Better than I think an editor helping me would have.
Filmmaker: Last time we spoke you mentioned how all your films have started out as songs.
Ferrara: Well, this is like that too. It’s more in a poetic vein.
Filmmaker: There is a lyrical quality to the prose for sure. At times it reads like a Beat-era novel.
Ferrara: Well, we worked it, man. Just like if it was a film. We really worked it. I mean, at a certain point, you know you’ve got something. But having something and getting it right are two different things.
Filmmaker: The non-linear structure is interesting. It jumps around in time a good deal, but it’s not disorienting.
Ferrara: We had a template. You know the Dylan book?
Filmmaker: Chronicles?
Ferrara: Exactly. Alright, so in Chronicles, what does he do? He takes three albums. He’s got 60, right? Okay. He picks three. The first one [Bob Dylan S/T], okay, you could have guessed that one. But what’s next? It’s not Blonde on Blonde. It’s not Blood on the Tracks. It’s New Morning and Oh Mercy. He chose three and went in deep on those three. So, with [SCENE], for some reason, I don’t know why, but I’m writing about these moments, these movies, either consciously or unconsciously, and it’s not about which ones, or why these films fit together in some way, or what my five greatest movies are, or my five worst.
Filmmaker: It is interesting what you ended up including.
Ferrara: I knew there’d be certain things I maybe wouldn’t want to write about, but once it came together, and I knew which [films] I would be [covering], I knew I was gonna be straight up about it, straight up about myself, and my role in these stories, you dig? I don’t know how anyone’s gonna react. But I’m telling the truth, least as far as I can remember. And I mean, what does a director really have but memory?
Filmmaker: The recollections, the scenes you describe, they are all quite vividly detailed. A lot of the vignettes are crystal clear. It’s almost shocking at points.
Ferrara: I’ve always been able to remember situations or dialogue, the way things looked, the way they felt. It’s an emotional recall. And, I mean, come on… What else does the director really have? Trying to get it as clear and lucid as possible, that’s just part of the job.
Filmmaker: It’s still a massive undertaking, even with the timeline as fluid as it is. It definitely makes the approach less of a forensic accounting and more about the films on being germane somehow to a process of creating narrative out of your own memories. Was that selection process difficult, or did some stories just function better in the totality of the project? Certain titles are surprisingly mentioned only briefly.
Ferrara: Like which ones?
Filmmaker: Dangerous Game, for instance.
Ferrara: You could write a whole book about Dangerous Game, right? A book like this, man… I made 35 films. I can’t talk about them all. And I didn’t want to. It ain’t one of these books where they start the day they were born and… I wouldn’t want to write something like that.
Filmmaker: But before Tommaso, for a long time, Dangerous Game seemed like your most personal film. Like Tommaso, it’s autofictional in a way that doesn’t use its author’s life so much as subtext but as the actual text of the narrative itself. How did that come about, since it was a studio picture?
Ferrara: It wasn’t a studio picture. Dangerous Game was gonna to be a low-budget movie until Madonna and Maverick got involved. Then they all came running. Everybody. You gotta remember, she had the book [Truth or Dare] out, she had the number one album. She had just made a Warner Brothers movie [Dick Tracy].
Filmmaker: At that time, she was definitely a superstar. A global phenomenon.
Ferrara: Right. So this little million dollar movie, like The Addiction, we were gonna do it in black and white, and it wasn’t gonna be fiction. And once she decided she wanted to play that role, it became a studio movie overnight. Changed everything.
Filmmaker: But it’s still pretty out there for a studio picture. And so much of yourself is in there.
Ferrara: Yeah, it’s not fantasy. It’s about my breakup with Nancy [Ferrara, Abel’s wife at the time, who plays the wife of Harvey Keitel’s character Eddie Israel in the film]. That part is basically a blow by blow. And it’s the same with Tommaso: This is my life. Welcome to New York? Same thing: This is what we think happened. It sounds made up, sure. But we didn’t make anything up. Pasolini, we did the homework, researched what was going on, and this is what we found. The last 36 hours of his life, you don’t have to make anything up.
Filmmaker: So many of the stories you include are really heartbreaking and speak directly to characters in your work, and what kind of stories, which projects you’ve pursued. Specifically, I’m thinking about your father, and the eerie parallels between his life and Keitel’s character in Bad Lieutenant.
Ferrara: Yeah, I guess there is a lot of my old man in Harvey’s performance. Maybe I just didn’t realize it at the time. I always thought that one day I would make a film about my father, but that I just hadn’t yet… I mean with the betting, that double down, triple down mentality… You don’t stop until you’re dead broke, everybody around you is dead broke, or you win.
Filmmaker: From the beginning of the book, it seems like you’re all in. Like there was never any doubt in your mind that this was what you were going to do with your life. Talk about that resolve. It wasn’t something everyone in your family understood.
Ferrara: The truth is I was just contrary and rebellious and unemployable. I had no skills. There’s nothing else I was ever gonna do. It was that or die. No one’s gonna hire me as a professor. I was never gonna drive a cab like Oliver [Stone], I didn’t go to NYU or UCLA. I had no choice but to make a living in film; there really was no other option. In reality, I grew up exactly like Spielberg. We both grew up in the suburbs, started making films as teenagers. We’re the same age, we started the same way. But I couldn’t just walk on a movie lot, like he did. Otherwise, he and I are like kindred spirits. I mean, he’s my contemporary, way more than Tarantino or Scorsese or any of those guys.
Filmmaker: There’s been a great many sea changes in your life. Your studies and practice of Buddhism, finding sobriety, emigrating to Italy. But your voice is distinct, so there’s a form of thematic and aesthetic continuity at play, and you try to remain true to certain principles throughout the various stages of the moon. Uncompromising is a word that’s used a lot in describing your work.
Ferrara: Yeah, I mean, but… It’s a book about change. I get what you’re saying, but from the beginning of my life to now? I don’t know if I’m the same. I don’t know if anyone is.
Filmmaker: There’s definitely no love lost for Hollywood or the mainstream, from your side of things. It seems like moving abroad helped you pivot and transform your life, make necessary changes, and keep going.
Ferrara: Well, the films weren’t working for me anymore. You know, we could have made six Driller Killers. We could have made King of New York 2, King of New York 3… But we never wanted to do that. It’s still a struggle. I’m struggling now more than ever, even being sober. This business is always going to be tough if you’re trying to do anything honest, of quality, with zero compromise. It’s not easy, it’s never been easy, and it ain’t getting any easier.
Filmmaker: You’ve long held that as soon as you could, you would try to work towards making the kinds of films you’re making now.
Ferrara: Well, think about it. When and how we started out… When I came out of school, what was the opportunity? There’s movie theaters. There’s no video, no online, no nothing. People are paying actual dollars to buy tickets to see 35mm film run through a projector. It was the last hurrah for that. Now, the studios had been doing it since 1910, so they got that business locked down, right? So what don’t they do? They don’t make hardcore films, and they don’t make super violent films, right? So, there’s our two opportunities. People want to see sex, and they want to see hardcore violence. They want to see fucking and killing chicks. You’re giving the customer what they want. Pornography? If I’d wanted to stay in that business, trust me, I was perfectly situated. I had all the contacts, whether they were legal or not, outrageous or not, I had the ability, and the opportunity. There’s a zillion dollars to be made in that business. But we weren’t the kind of guys to do that, and we were never gonna be those guys.
Filmmaker: There’s twists and turns along the way that would have thrown any director through a loop. I’m thinking of the chapter on Carlito’s Way. I never thought the story I had heard could have possibly been true. You go into detail in the book, so I won’t spoil it here. But you were replaced as director over a perceived slight— some misunderstanding about a bottle of wine at a film festival banquet. All over something trivial, almost petty even.
Ferrara: Come on, it wasn’t that petty. I mean, what do you want? Scarface is not just a great movie. Scarface is a billion-dollar enterprise. Scarface took a ghetto city, which is what Miami was, and made it the biggest paying tourist center of the world. That movie. That’s the power of movies. Miami Vice, as a series, made a billion dollars. Pushing clothes, pushing the brand. Star Wars, you’re selling hamburger. That’s the other side of the business. How do you fucking use this [format] not to make Breathless, but to mobilize the world behind a product. So: Scarface, Miami Vice — you can’t put a price on how much money that shit generated. And I’m not talking about selling copies of Scarface. I’m talking about selling hotel rooms in a place where, in 1980, nobody would dare go to that fucking town. Even in ‘85 when we first started shooting Miami Vice — Forget it, it was shootouts in the parking lot, fucking Cubans chasing cars with 90-year-old Jewish women in between ‘em. It was ridiculous. Nobody’s going there on vacation, okay? Now you got hotel rooms for a thousand bucks a night. Carlito’s Way… What were those guys gonna do? Roll the dice because Al [Pacino] thought I was an interesting director? Come on.
Filmmaker: From all of us here at Filmmaker, thanks for doing this Abel. The book is really a treasure. It’s an exceptional piece of work.
Ferrara: Well ,it took three-and-a-half years to get this shit down the way I wanted it. I can stand behind it, let people take what they want from it, but at least I made it clear. But… If someone reads this [interview] and doesn’t read the book, it’s a waste of time. We’ve both failed. When I think of criticism, of Truffaut, or Godard, it’s about putting the work into a perspective. That’s what you’re doing. Putting it into perspective with who I am, where I’m from. And that’s the point. It’s the same reason I wrote it: I just wanna get this shit straight for once. These are the stories, they’re not this sci-fi version of my life that I read about.
Abel Ferrara’s memoir SCENE is published by Simon & Schuster and in bookstores now.
