Last summer, the Horcynus Festival in Messina, Sicily, hosted a conversation between director Martin Scorsese, speaking via Zoom from his home in New York City, and Antonio Spadaro, SJ, an undersecretary for the Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education. The two answered questions posed by moderators Gaetano Giunta, Scilli Piraino, and Franco Jannuzzi about their new book, Dialoghi sulla fede, which reflects on their nearly decade-long friendship and summarizes their ongoing exchanges about life, faith, and cinema. Their remarks, a version of which first appeared in the journal Avvenire, have been translated from Italian by Griffin Oleynick and edited for clarity and length.

Moderators: Mr. Scorsese, please tell us about your faith. What was your experience like, from childhood to today?

Martin Scorsese: When I was growing up, my parents didn’t really practice religion. But when we moved to New York, to Little Italy in Lower Manhattan, I was sent to a Catholic grammar school that was operated by nuns, the Sisters of Charity. That gave me another structure and another way of thinking about life. I was seven or eight years old, and where we lived was a very difficult place. Third Avenue and the Bowery are very chic now, but back then the area was known as the “Devil’s Mile”; a few blocks west was Mulberry Street, called “Murder Mile.” As a kid, I was thrown into the middle of all this, and I found that the only place I could find a sense of refuge, peace, and protection was inside Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the first Catholic church in New York.

As I grew older, witnessing what I witnessed, in the streets and in my family—I should say that my parents made great efforts to give us a decent life—I began to understand that faith wasn’t just something you practiced in church, in the building alone. Imitating Christ had to be something you translated into daily life. How, I wondered, could I take those elements of love and compassion, which meant so much to me when I was growing up, out into the streets and into the world, which was so violent and full of conflict?

That’s how I learned what faith is: by losing it, doubting it, coming back to it, being gifted with the ability to make films, and finding a kind of faith in that. Filmmaking is a gift from God, and a very powerful one, because you can touch a lot of people. I’ve come to understand that rather than a conviction of faith, I have a trust in faith. I trust there is faith—yes, there are doubts, at times, but really it’s a more constant searching, a constant attempt at living with faith. It’s about learning to adapt to whichever way the wave of faith takes you.

Who the hell are we? I mean, who are we as human beings, in our souls, in our very essence: Are we ultimately good or bad? Loving or violent?

Moderators: Fr. Spadaro, what strikes you most about how Mr. Scorsese represents the world in his films?

Antonio Spadaro: First, when Mr. Scorsese was little, he had asthma. So he couldn’t stay outside on the street for very long. Instead he would look down, observing what was happening from the balcony. That perch protected him from bullying, and from a certain toxic masculinity. But his love for the streets, his perception of reality from that other location, also helped form his cinematic eye.

And then, in church, he served as an altar boy. Actually, he even entered the seminary, then left, realizing it wasn’t his path. But after serving Mass, he’d go outside, and realize nothing had changed. He’d wonder, “How is it possible that the body and blood of Christ are here, and yet nothing has changed?” It’s a profound mystical insight, a conviction that later shows up in the film Mean Streets. As one of the characters says: “You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets.”

Moderators: Mr. Scorsese, there’s a lot of violence in your films, and violence is of course a theme that has preoccupied many artists—you’ve mentioned Dostoevsky, for example. What explains the presence of violence in your movies? Can an artist depict violence without explicitly showing it?

MS: Well, as I said, I grew up around violence. Even if I didn’t fully experience it, I was certainly aware of it, all the time. It was a constant factor, a mode of expression—something very serious. Yes, there was a kind of colorful humor in it, but the violence was real, not something to laugh off or take lightly.

So I asked myself: Who the hell are we? I mean, who are we as human beings, in our souls, in our very essence: Are we ultimately good or bad? Loving or violent? Anger, self-defense, selfishness, intolerance, hatred—I saw people behaving very badly. But at other times I witnessed a great deal of compassion and love for others.

How to explore that? How to live with the sense of violence around us? We have to admit that it’s seductive: violence has an excitement to it. It can be attractive, especially if we mainly encounter it in art. But it has to be confronted head on—not just in art, as something we perhaps dismiss. We can’t hide what we’re capable of. We have to understand that violence is part of our nature. And I didn’t know how else to do it in my movies, except to show violence as it really is, directly, in all its ugliness.

Moderators: Pope Francis has spoken widely about the importance of poetry for the soul. Mr. Scorsese, how do you understand the relationship between art and the spiritual life? What, in your view, is grace? What does it mean to talk about grace in a world dominated by economic rationalism and egoism?

MS: I think the ability to create art is a gift, and a spiritual act. Creativity, the attempt to give a form to the beauty of the world God has given us—which doesn’t shy away from complexity or difficulty—is a kind of imitation, a way of being close to God. It can be a blessing to have this ability, but for many it’s also a torment. Either way, making something out of the world around you, showing the way you see life, is profoundly spiritual.

When I’m working—whether it’s a feature film or a commercial—it’s like a prayer, because I’m doing what I was made to do by God. The work is a prayer: it has less to do with success, whatever that means, than with exploration of the soul. When I make a film, I learn to be a better person, and so the film expresses my yearning to be better. When I do that, I come to a kind of peace with myself—and maybe others do, too. That’s grace. I don’t know what else to call it.

Moderators: Fr. Spadaro, talk to us about how grace is present in the characters in Mr. Scorsese’s films. What strikes you about them?

AS: I’m always struck by their ambiguity, their shades of gray. They’re often in conflict with themselves, and you never really know whether they’re good or evil. For example, consider Travis Bickle, the protagonist of Taxi Driver. He commits a massacre, but he also wants to rescue a young girl trapped in a sex-trafficking ring, whom he loves. As a viewer, you’re in conflict, too: you identify with Bickle, but you’re also repulsed by him.

Something similar happens in Silence, which is about the history of the Jesuits missions in Japan. One of the missionaries, Fr. Ferreira, ends up apostatizing. The other, Fr. Rodrigues, wants to become a martyr. But Rodrigues ends up apostatizing anyway, to save other Christians. The viewer is caught up in this tension, too. It reminds me of something Mr. Scorsese once said about the difference between “a problem” and “a mystery.” With a problem, there’s an answer that solves it, exhausts it; but with a mystery, no answer ever does.

(Courtesy of Antonio Spadaro)

Moderators: Mr. Scorsese, you’ve said that Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) made a great impression on you. While you’d always wanted to make a film about Jesus, after Pasolini’s film came out, you decided not to. But then you went on to direct The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Silence (2016). You’re now working on another film about Jesus. Why do you keep returning to this character?

MS: When I first saw The Gospel According to Matthew I was so moved, so excited by it—it’s just such a wonderful work of art. At that time I was still very young, still holding on to a childish view of faith. My idea, when I was sixteen or seventeen, was to do a version of the Gospel set in Manhattan in 1960. But Pasolini made me realize that I needed to find a different vision, another cinematic language, one that was really my own. I needed to live a little first, then decide how to approach not necessarily the Gospels, but the story of Jesus.

I found what I was looking for in Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel: the concept of the spirit and the flesh, the idea of the Word made flesh, fully human and fully divine. I wondered whether there could be a different way to think about Jesus: Who was he? Pasolini’s cinéma vérité style had made Christ very immediate, but I wanted to make Christ immediate beyond style. How could we identify with him? What is his message, yes, but also, what is his faith?

I wanted a new way of looking at Jesus, especially because at the time, in the United States, there were various movements, powerful ones, that talked about him all the time. They behaved as if they knew Jesus. But in reality, they were extremely intolerant, filled with hate and anger. For many non-Catholics and non-Christians, this was the public face of Christianity. This just isn’t the way, I thought: Christianity is not intolerance, hatred, or rage.

So the way I decided to approach it was to have the Jesus of The Last Temptation of Christ be the compassionate Jesus that a poor addict dying of an overdose in the middle of Eighth Avenue in New York might encounter. Perhaps such a person might consider themselves beyond redemption, or think that Jesus would not speak to them, not even look at them. Well, this Jesus would, that was the idea.

It took more than a decade to make that film, and it was a humbling experience. I found that after I was finished I had to go deeper, to keep searching. I wanted to go beyond the iconography of Jesus. So when the Episcopal archbishop of New York gave me a copy of Silence the night he saw Last Temptation, I read it.

And it took another fifteen years to understand how to put it on film. Ultimately, when Jesus tells Fr. Rodrigues to renounce his faith by trampling on an icon, Rodrigues understands that Jesus accepts such humiliation—which we might be tempted to read as a betrayal—to lead Rodrigues to a deeper understanding of the mystery of divine love.

Making Silence was a very special experience for me, and for a lot of people who made it with me. It changed my life and theirs as we attempted to become aware of the mystery of God’s love and put it in a film.

Moderators: Fr. Spadaro, much of your conversation with Martin Scorsese has revolved around the figure of Christ. What strikes you about the director’s relationship with this figure?

AS: At the end of our book you’ll find an earlier draft of a possible film about Jesus that Martin plans to make, and it’s a great one. It began with another book that I presented here at the Horcynus Festival last year, for which Pope Francis had written the preface. At the end of it, the pope issued a call to artists that ended like this: “Help us to see Jesus.” It was quite beautiful. I translated it and sent it to Martin. After about two weeks he replied, telling me more or less that he felt that Francis’s call was directed to him. He enclosed a draft of a screenplay he’d worked on—the same one that’s in the book. And the figure that emerges actually represents a synthesis of Martin’s work.I’m struck because it’s as if Martin has been followed by the figure of Christ since he was twenty years old, and now, after more than sixty years, he’s still thinking about Him constantly. El Greco’s depiction of Christ’s face is the one that he’s particularly fond of, as was Pasolini. In Silence, the image that Rodriguez tramples on is actually El Greco’s. And it’s interesting that he juxtaposes—correctly—El Greco and Piero della Francesca. Martin is also a great reader. He knows the work of Dostoevsky well, as well as that of many other great writers. His understanding of God and the figure of Christ has developed in light of his reading of figures like James Joyce, in whom he found a vengeful God he didn’t agree with. Then he read Georges Bernanos, but, despite the presence of mercy in those books, found Bernanos’s vision of God too harsh, too bitter. Endo’s is probably the vision that comes closest to Martin’s: it’s not about miracles so much as the true great miracle of tenderness and compassion—two themes his films have always followed.

Moderators: A final question, Mr. Scorsese. We’re all Sicilians here, yourself included. Do you feel an emotional tie with this land? Even if you weren’t born here, your roots are here.

MS: Without a doubt. There isn’t a moment that goes by that I don’t think of Sicily, and my family from Sicily that is and was. My dream is to live long enough to be able to visit all of Sicily. I’ve been there a few times but it was many years ago, in the early nineties, and so I’d love to come back and I’m planning on it. The land fascinates me, and in fact my production company is called Sikelia, the ancient word for the island. Sicily is so much a part of my life and my identity that, in a way, I’ve reached a point in my life now where I can embrace it to an even greater extent.

Antonio Spadaro, a Jesuit priest, is the former editor of La Civiltà Cattolica and the present undersecretary of the Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education.

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