Tom Hibbert on Abel Ferrara
IT was four years ago that I first set out to interview Abel Ferrara, the “maverick” film director whose talent to shock seems unparalleled. His Bad Lieutenant – in which Harvey Keitel plays a corrupt copper who is coked to the gills, given to masturbating in public and having writhing nervous breakdowns entirely in the nude – was so controversial that I flew to New York to meet the man whose allergy to journalists was legendary.
For some days, I stayed in my hotel room ringing his “people”, whose role seemed to be to deflect me from my task. “Ah, Tom, Abel’s feeling a little, er, confused today …” “Oh, Tom again? Abel’s unable [no pun intended] to meet with you today as he’s feeling a little, er, disturbed right now … ” “Oh, hi there, Tom. Abel says sorry but he can’t do the interview after all.” But he agreed! “Yeah, right, well, Tom, see the thing is, Abel really doesn’t care to discuss his work.” Click. Brrrr.
Four years on, Ferrara has two films to promote, both opened simultaneously in most parts of the world – The Funeral (Mafioso men on the verge of nervous breakdowns, starring Christopher Walken and Isabella Rossellini) and The Addiction (philosophy student Lili Taylor gets bitten on the neck and goes bonkers in a weirdo vampirish sort of way) – so when I turned up at his London hotel room, the idiosyncratic one turned up too, albeit reluctantly.
It was mid-morning but already there was evidence that drink had been taken: empty bottles of Beck’s beer littered the room. Ferrara’s main concern, after he greeted me with a scowl, was not discussion of his work (no, he is not comfortable with that) but opening another bottle of the stuff. The problem was he could not locate the opener.
The photographer kindly offered him his penknife and Ferrara stabbed shakily at the bottle top with the tip of a blade. We tried to explain that the contraption contained a bottle-opening gadget, but the streetwise “auteur” was having none of it. He stabbed and stabbed until – pop! – voil! He took a hefty swig, smiled and winked. But then the bottle was finished and he had to start the process all over again.
Abel Ferrara was born in the Bronx in New York in 1951. The boy was a punk, although his ambition was always to be an actor or a film-maker or something like that. He smuggled himself into film school in Philadelphia because that was the place where one could “borrow” equipment, and he made his first feature in 1979. Driller Killer was a zonkers “slasher” concerning a maniac, convincingly played by Ferrara himself, who, driven insane by the loud music of the awful rock band in the next apartment, discovers some novel uses for a Black & Decker.
Driller Killer caused an absolute stink and outrage when it was released in Britain; this was the first of the so-called “video nasties” that had the tabloids and the rent-a-quote politicians in such a fume and splutter: questions were even asked in the House of Lords. Ferrara considered this all a tremendous hoot. “Ha!” he tells me as he stalks back and forth across the room, unshaven and round-shouldered, a somewhat menacing figure brandishing that omnipresent bottle of beer. “Ha! They’re your politicians! You voted for those guys! How could you vote for those guys?”
I consider explaining the intricacies of British electoral procedure, but think better of it. “I’m not asking for any sympathy with my films. I kinda like to capture a total degradation on film, you know.” Driller Killer was followed by MS.45, about a deaf-mute rape victim on a killing spree, and Fear City, an almost (for Ferrara) orthodox thriller starring Tom Berenger and Melanie Griffith. King of New York (1990) featured Christopher Walken (“Man, Walken’s so out there, you don’t know where he’s at.”) as a gangster not averse to snorting cocaine from people’s unclothed bodies and then shooting them.
This sealed Ferrara’s reputation as the cult “underground” director. Scorsese and Tarantino are just two of his admirers, as evidenced by the former’s comments: “I thought Bad Lieutenant was a key film. It was the kind of film I wanted The Last Temptation of Christ to be. It’s among the greatest pictures made about a man’s descent in search of redemption.”
But despite the sensationalism, the controversy-courting, the reputation as a creator of “an unflinching, in-your-face depiction of the moral mayhem of modern life”, Ferrara is a highly-skilled craftsman, a director of style and wit. However, don’t try telling him this: he doesn’t take kindly to praise. “Yeah, yeah,” he says, and disappears mumbling from the room. Minutes later, he is back, slumped in a chair.
I tell him I detect certain themes running through his work, er, “Catholic guilt” for example. “Ha! Bullshit!” is his response. He has worked with Madonna, drawing from her what no other director has managed: a respectable and solid performance (in Dangerous Game in 1993). Would Ferrara like to go Hollywood and make a “proper, commercial movie”? “Who cares about Hollywood?” he sneers. “Hollywood gives me the creeps. All they care about in Hollywood is `sympathy for the character’, whatever that means. I never did understand that concept. Anyway, when I’m out in Hollywood all I do is stink the place up.”
He gives a sinister chuckle and returns to the main topic in hand: the opening of another Beck’s …