"Ed Pressman Sucks Cocks In Hell"
"He (Werner Herzog) can die in Hell. I hate these people"
- Abel Ferrara
Juliette Binoche in Ferrara's Mary
"Ed Pressman sucks cocks in hell", I was laughing out loud after reading this quote from one of our most important, yet underappreciated, living directors Abel Ferrara. Ferrara was referring to Producer Ed Pressman's decision to allow Werner Herzog to remake Ferrara's indie-cult masterpiece Bad Lieutenant (1992). You can read the complete interview here from Filmmaker Magazine.
I was talking with Martim at the bar the other night and he brought up Rescue Dawn. Now why Wener Herzog would want to make a dramatized action-war movie based on one of his own, nearly flawless, documentaries is beyond me. Herzog has always been a director I've had nothing but respect and admiration for. Everyone seriously interested in cinema has their own favorite Herzog film; whether it be the brutally obsessive Aguirre, the terrifying Gulf War documentary Lessons of Darkness or the modern vampire film, his remake of Nosferatu . So Herzog's got a history of remakes. But WHY in god's name would he attempt to remake one of the most important independent films of the 1990's?
I remember going to see Bad Lieutenant in the theater during its first run in 1992. I was living in Boston at the time and was pretty obsessed with King of New York (1990). I was greated by a ticker taker with a multicolored mohawk, and asked him how it was. He flashed me an acid grin and said "you're gonna love it man!" There were about 12 people in the theater and i think we all loved. I certainly did and it has since led me to become something of a Ferrara completionist.
Ferrara should be revered as one of our greatest living directors, a true independent making difficult films under even more difficult circumstances. Originally i used the phrase "true independent auteur", however since re-listening to his hilarious commentary on the King of New York dvd i decided that autuer wasnt the right moniker for Ferrara. While discussing the film its like he isn't even a part of it, constant interjections of "look at that beautiful shot" "that's the way you kill someone" "that gold light is fucking beautiful" make him sound more like a fan than the director. And he is, and thats what sets him apart (again). He's a fan of his collaborators and an admirer of their craft, and he doesn't take credit for their technical expertise. He is an anti auteur, welcoming any and all onset ideas over ego.
Instead his films are forgotten, rarely distributed or released in the US and even here in his hometown of New York. New Rose Hotel (1998) had a limited run at Cinema Village, Blackout (1997) was, to my knowledge, never released and Mary just had it's NY screen debut at Anthology Film Archives after winning the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2005. Go-Go Tales (2007) still hasn't seen a release and was only marginally covered by the press around the time of the NY Film Festival. I was fortunate enough to see it there with a guffawing, inebriated Grace Jones hooting and hollering a few rows behind me. I was so irate about the lack of coverage for Go-Go Tales in NY Magazine's film issue, which feted the return of "The NY filmmaker" to the festival, highlighting Wes Anderson(ugh), The Coen Brothers and Noah Baumbach(barf), that I wrote the editor a letter.
Ferrara's work since his masterpiece Bad Lietenant has been a scattershot affair. Blackout, a trashy, cocaine feuled odyssey of marital infidelity; New Rose Hotel, a bizarre take on corporate espionage; Mary, a meditation on religion, redemption and the controversial "Jesus film"; and Go-Go Tales a degenerate screwball comedy about a compulsive gambler strip club owner all failed to even remotely interest audiences. But then again people never really had the chance to see these films. The films that were accessible, and in a way stylistically more controlled, did hit. The Addiction (1995) and The Funeral (1996) were both genre pictures, horror and gangster respectively, that found their audiences and both ended up staying in the theaters for much longer than 2 weeks.
Part of Ferrara's success is that he's always been able to get great performances out of his actors. Christopher Walken as Frank White in King of New York is legendary; Harvey Keitel's Bad Lieutenant is a "beyond Oscar" tour-de-force of modern acting; Lily Taylor in the Addiction, and the all star ensemble cast of The Funeral, with Chris Penn giving the performance of his career, all these films held up both critically and at the box office. The one Ferrara film that is just too dark, merciless, and intense that it could never reach a mass audience, despite starring Madonna, is Dangerous Game (1993). The film for me is Ferrara's criminally ignore other mid-90's masterpiece. Dangerous Game, along with Michael Mann's The Insider (1999) is among the most visionary films to emerge from the 1990's. Its a film that stars Madonna and Harvey Keitel in the most complex film within a film plot ever committed to celluloid. Guess what? It never came out, and the critics who did see it trashed the hell out of it. It is, however ironically, Madonna's best performance although that's not saying much. And it does give us insight into Ferrara's working method and his technique. I'm currently working on a full length article on the merits of Dangerous Game so I'm going to cut this short.
Ferrara's latest film to surface is Mary (thank you Anthology Film Archives). Mary is Ferrara's attempt to deal with one of his oft revisited themes: redemption and Catholocism. Matthew Modine plays a Mel Gibson with shades type director making a movie about the life of Christ influenced by the Gnostic Gospels in which Mary Magdelene is seen as not only a disciple of Christ but also the author of her own Gospel. Julliette Binoche stars as the title character who becomes so obsessed with her role that she flees to the holy land in search of her own personal truth/religion. The third concurrently running storyline is that of Forrest Whitaker's Charlie Rose esque religious talk show host who is questioning his own faith and relationship with his pregnant wife Heather Graham.
Modine's character, Tony Childress/Christ, is sort of an amalgamation of Gibson and Ferrara. You could also view it as Ferrara's response to, or attempt to, capitalize on the controversy and success of Gibson's film. I see it more in the lineage of Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ. And others yet will link it to another, very different, blockbuster film based on the Gnostic Gospels, The DaVinci Code. The film beings within the film until Modine interjects "cut!". Ferrara constantly returns to the film within the film format in his work. Dangerous Game, Blackout, and Mary all utililize this technique and, often it leads to a blurring of reality, especially so in Dangerous Game. When the film reality begins we quickly realize that both Childress and Binoche's Marie/Mary are on their own trips. Childress' is a power one and an obsessive filmmaker, Marie's is an obsession with her own spiritual quest. Childress can't wait to get off the set and cut the film, Marie can't wait to get off the set so she can go on her own personal spiritual quest.
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