Jesus gets the beat:

...I know this kind of thinking is not legitimate, I think it's totally wrong...

...I figured the more risks the better...

...I'm not using it as a sermon, I'm not sitting here lecturing the world...

...And why not...

...He's saying, "I got it...

...It's the idea of relin-quishing, or cleansing...

...KELLY: For many Catholics guilt about sex becomes an insur mountable barrier to developing a mature spiritual life...

...But I'm still making the film, let's put it that way...

...I said to myself, after these women have been with him the whole movie, they'd stuck with him and they're the only ones at the Crucifixion...

...Have we lost the game already...

...I'm not saying it's wrong...

...We're not saying that Kazantzakis is the gospel truth...

...Are they only half-known to God...

...The flipside of hate is love...

...SCORSESE: Well, Kazantzakis's book is anti-female...

...It's a great temptation...

...Remember in the film when Jesus says, "I'm the farmer...

...I'm not a theologian...

...The whole movie takes risks: it takes risks in dialogue, it takes risks in the accents of actors, in costumes, locations, everything...

...KELLY: Did you find yourself praying while making this film...

...Scorsese: Yes...

...One element [in the film] that does come across as evil is the snake...

...That God understands exactly what his creatures go through...

...This colored my whole approach to my sense of God...

...I chose to focus on Jesus' humanity because I think that gives us a better understanding of what it means when they say, " He died for our sins...

...KELLY: Do our attempts to live the Christian life have a parallel in the movie...

...What would the meaning of the sacrifice on the cross have...

...We're in a life and death struggle now, it seems to me...

...Was Scorsese, as accused in a protest leaflet handed out in front of New York's Ziegfeld Theater, "the greatest blasphemer in 2,000 years...

...The rituals were dramatic, the litanies were beautiful, the stations of the cross were very dramatic...

...For twenty years his films have forced audiences and critics to confront disturbing realities: on the Mean Streets of Little Italy, in the boxing ring of Raging Bull, on the front seat of a cab in Taxidriver...

...I don't think everybody would be happy, but still life would not be based on greed, or taking over the world, or the subjugation of other people...

...He starts communicating after that moment...

...SCORSESE: Oh, all the time...

...To give us hope that God loves us...

...KELLY: Explain what you mean by taking Jesus seriously...

...If you want intellect, talk to [Paul] Schrader...

...But the snake represents not just women but sex...

...They had to...

...KELLY: Did you find that by working through this film you got beyond that...

...Because she represents the sexual nature...

...But Jesus appears to the women first...

...I do have doubts...

...Or power, just for the thrill of power...

...I think we're crippled because of it...

...Are women subhuman...

...SCORSESE: We see in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters, when he goes to become a Christian, naturally he's perplexed when he sees a 3-D Jesus winking at him...

...If you flip it over, the flipside of greed is generosity...

...He says, "Here I am...

...For me, being a Catholic from before Vatican II, sex has always been portrayed as the most evil sin...

...Although I preferred Christmas, as I guess everyone does, because you get gifts...

...SCORSESE: Yes, by dying for our sins...

...During the mixing [editing] of the film, Tom Fleishman, who's a Christian, would choose a reading for the day from the Bible while we were getting hit with so many things from fundamentalists...

...That's from Kazantzakis and maybe I should have changed the voice, not used Mary Magdalene ' s voice for the snake, but it seems the three main people in the film are Magdalene, Judas, and Jesus...

...But up until that point, he really isn't communicating...

...I believe it happened...

...The whole question is can we get there, because we have the weapons now that can destroy all of us...

...SCORSESE: I always wanted to do a movie on Jesus, on a Jesus who was approachable on the human side...

...KELLY: I notice the use of the quote from Isaiah, from the suffering servant, that is part of the Good Friday liturgy, and you've mentioned before the impact that those services had on you as a child...

...I think you have to work that way to get something good...

...But to non-Christians it seems pretty peculiar, very undignified...

...It's more fun...

...KELLY: And that is Christ's message...

...And so I said they have to partake of the Last Supper...

...KELLY: All kinds of culturally mediated images of Jesus clutter believers' understanding too...

...It's watching a guy get himself together and it's great...

...It wants tranquillity, it wants happiness and to be assured of that...

...The divinity doesn't seem to give him much help along the way...

...And this is what I feel in this case...

...He was part of the readings...

...If Jesus was mostly divine and the humanity was only one-tenth of his nature, then why would he have any trouble resisting temptation...

...SCORSESE: You have to change the spirit of the people...

...He's had enough sacrifice and hardship...

...KELLY: Would you say what "the last temptation" is...

...Or was he what he said he was," An artist who made the movie as an act of worship'' ? Suddenly in Time and Newsweek, on the evening news and Nightline, in Thai restaurants and in bars, Christ's dual nature became a hot topic...

...He'd read to us...

...And pity for us...

...He had to die in order to give us the hope...

...I am a devout Catholic...

...It's a nonintellectual point of view...

...Not necessarily the kind of controversy that has occurred, but of people taking Jesus seriously...

...World media fo-cused on the director Martin Scorsese...

...The only ones at the Resurrection are women although in one gospel John was there too...

...Through the humanity he has to find the divinity, to accept the divinity...

...KELLY: The idea of risk brings to mind another issue...

...KELLY: In the film Jesus and Judas discuss what must come first, changing the spirit of the people, or getting rid of the Romans...

...SCORSESE: Yes, the carnal seems to be always in the way...

...I want to get past the dogma...

...It's the greatest gift from God, yet it still seems to pull us towards evil...

...I'm hoping the film will have some effect on me in a good way...

...All these names alone-Passion Week-it's very terrifying...

...I haven't had time to really feel if the film has had any impact on me in that way...

...KELLY: Why...

...The characters in all his films seek some kind of salvation...

...I have to jump right into making another film...

...But in Holy Week you have to go through from Spy Wednesday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday...

...Sometimes you know, though...

...But I don't think there's anything wrong with that-to see yourself in Jesus-because it is your attempt to come to some sort of terms with God...

...His relationship to God the Father and our relationship to God through him...

...And Jesus is given this temptation...

...Or the Jesus that you put on the dashboard, or Jesus on velvet...

...How can you take that seriously...

...Because if we have the weapons we will use them somewhere...

...It starts on the lowest level which is ourselves and has to get to the highest level which is God...

...SCORSESE: The human side of you doesn't want to suffer...

...Do you believe in the Resurrection...

...Except for the fact of transcendence, I can't exactly say what the Resurrection means...

...If you take him seriously, then you take his ideas seriously, which are the ideas of love, loving God, loving your neighbor as yourself...

...This also gets laughs from the people...

...He would have them partake of the sacrifice, have them partake of the first Mass...

...He would have done it, I believe, he really would have done it...

...And that's the difference...

...When he gets it he feels terrific about it...

...You have to start somewhere...

...How did you get your sense of Jesus beyond conventional representations...

...KELLY: And Easter Sunday...

...What meaning would the resistance of the temptation in the desert have...

...It represents the needs, the bodily needs...

...We were mixing for two-and-a-half weeks, day and night, including Saturday and Sunday, sometimes until three in the morning...

...SCORSESE: For me Holy Week was a very powerful, very dramatic time, much more dramatic than Christmas...

...If you go that way, it wouldn't matter who's in charge because the loving is the idea...

...And it stayed with me that sexuality is evil...

...He's very happy...

...Doesn't God know them fully...

...It's sex in all forms...

...I saw him return again and again to ideas about God and Christ he first encountered in Catholic grade school...

...I got what You're talking about...

...It's simply my personal approach to the material, which was the Kazantzakis idea...

...Especially because he was a man who broke the rules...

...The drama in your life should be family drama, not something like war...

...He can have a pleasant death, which is a great thing...

...I feel closer but then again people have said that this is me seeing myself in Jesus...

...I'm speaking for me, that's totally my point of view, and my personal relationship to the material...

...SCORSESE: Oh, yes, I feel closer...

...Why should he...

...And then I decided to take more risks with it...

...It wouldn't have any meaning because he would know that he would be raised again in three days, that it's easy to die, and there's no problem because he's God...

...You're always on the edge...

...But I prefer to believe in the Resurrection...

...In Martin Scorsese: The First Decade (Redgrave, 1980), Scorsese spoke to me of how the theme of redemption informs his work...

...Scorsese: Because he comes to terms with his own nature, the divine nature...

...KELLY: To be willing to become one with us...

...It has to start on some level...

...Get back to the concept of what Jesus was and his relationship with God...

...or our sins means, I think...

...He knows all that stuff...

...Yes" he says, "you're mourning...

...As far as Catholics go, if they want to have a blinking Jesus in 3-D, great...

...The debate began...

...It's big risks, big gambles...

...After a fifteen-year struggle he had fulfilled his dream of making a movie based on the 1951 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis published in the United States in 1960...

...When the people say, "Well, these are children's stories," then he says, "What do you want...

...I wonder, have we given in to the darker side of ourselves...

...it has more to do with sex than it has to do with women...

...So can we get there...

...Here's this fellow, and he's suddenly enjoying himself, suddenly getting the right answers and this is really the way things are going.' 'I used to think God was angry, too," he says, " and then he blew over me like a cool breeze and said stand up and here I am...

...SCORSESE: Yes, I believe that what Paul preaches is true...

...Though we say "fully human, fully divine," the Jesuses we get in the movies are more divine...

...It's an idea...

...That's basically it...

...In Last Temptation women are part of the Last Supper...

...Of course, sometimes it's hard to tell what is prayer and what is superstition...

...I don't think laughs of ridicule, but laughs of enjoyment...

...That's the way I like to think of it...

...That's the idea, I think...

...they find it comforting...

...The wrong images...

...It wouldn't have any meaning...

...I'm not a theologian...

...KELLY: And yet you are criticized for presenting women as vessels of temptation...

...I haven't had time to take a vacation, to think...

...It's all within himself...

...SCORSESE: I prefer to believe that Jesus goes back (after the dream sequence) and does everything that Paul says happened...

...KELLY: But he is preaching that during the dream sequence and Jesus hasn't truly died or risen...

...It was a scary time...

...It wants peace...

...It kind of elicits laughs from those around him...

...He's like, well, he's getting the beat, he's getting the language and the rhythm of it...

...KELLY: And why is it resisted...

...The women are certainly not representative of real people...

...And though I did not work on the present version of this film, in 19831 helped Scorsese in the research for an earlier effort to make The Last Temptation of Christ...

...That's a very high level of existence, maybe we're evolving to it...

...It's kind of funny in a sweet way, a nice way...

...I think the Kazantzakis book opened up somewhat my sense of it...

...SCORSESE: No, not really...

...Scorsese: Well, it puts you in an artistic state of emergency all the time...

...Peter Gabriel was there, too...

...an idea, a film that was made to set off discussions...

...So you have to keep that together...

...Now we know the balance is off there, we know it's off, but I can't help it...

...SCORSESE: I think so...

...And he has sympathy for us...

...That's what the snake represents and that's why Mary's voice is there...

...You've got to do something, there has to be some way to get there...

...But even though these 3-D Jesuses and these plastic statutes are kitsch and I can appreciate them more as art than as religion, I think it holds Jesus up to ridicule by non-Christians...

...Scorsese...

...I really try to go back to what Jesus said about how we . should live and that's the most important thing...

...KELLY: This image of Jesus getting the beat of his Father's message certainly goes beyond that of our early training...

...Changing the spirit of all people means changing what's important to humanity...

...You want justice right, you want respect," then he starts communicating...

...It's really not surprising that a Martin Scorsese picture is generating such impassioned discussion...

...The snake represents sexuality in all its forms, even in thought...

...I think those are the most important and the hardest things to do...

...I mean, how can you take that seriously...

...To make a movie I have to feel something about the subject matter...

...He's telling us something...

...This is what it is, and I'm so happy about it...

...People need dogma...

...The farmer's me...

...The same kind of struggle and doubts and anxiety, but exhilaration, too...

...Now I know that people don't worship the images, they worship God...

...It's like a dialogue between him and God...

...It's a happy time...

...Fine, but I'm just trying to get past that...

...I don't think he made a difference between men and women...

...They sinned against purity, and that's that...

...And it seems that they would be fairer...

...See, he's not communicating with his audience yet...

...It was a nightmarish situation, a very difficult shoot...

...The humanity seems to have been stripped away...

...We spoke in his office four days after the film opened...

...He's had enough drama in his life...

...That' s what I thought and Kazantzakis seemed to be the right material to work through...

...In this film, he's more human...

...Now in August 1988 these concerns took center stage...

...That's what's in my mind...

...Now he can rest, for the next thirty-six years of his life...

...Now maybe it's kind of a low blow in the movie [Hannah], but we deserve it, because we've let these images take over and give non-Christians the wrong point of view...

...Have we given in to our basic nature...

...That's what dying for our sins means, I think...

...The emphasis was very much there, I think...

...SCORSESE: This Jesus was so great, how could he say, " wait in the kitchen," to these women...

...I think that's why the picture was made...

...We call earth a "vale of tears" and if you could be assured that you wouldn't suffer any more, that you'd have a wife and children, time to enjoy yourself and on top of that have a good death...

...Maybe I'm not a good Catholic, maybe I'm not even a practicing Catholic...

...It wants peace and quiet...