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FROM GOSPEL TO GIBSON: AN INTERVIEW WITH THE WRITERS BEHIND MEL GIBSON’S THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST1

DAVID SHEPHERD Briercrest College and Seminary

hile writer-director-producer Mel Gibson understandably received Wthe lion’s share of both the credit and the criticism for The Passion of the Christ (Icon, 2004) and its screenplay, the latter’s development and eventual realization on screen inevitably involved contributions from a variety of others. Two of the most significant contributors were Benedict Fitzgerald, Gibson’s co-writer on the screenplay and Dr. William Fulco, who consulted on theological and historical aspects of the script and translated the dialogue into the Latin, Aramaic and Hebrew heard in the film. Benedict Fitzgerald has been writing for both the big and small screen for over twenty-five years, beginning with the adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood for John Huston in 1979. His writing over the past decade has included Zelda (1993), a biopic on F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as small screen adaptations of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1994), starring John Malkovich and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1998). Dr. William Fulco SJ teaches in the department of Classics and Archaeology at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. In addi- tion to holding posts at the University of California, Berkeley and Loyola Marymount University, Fulco has been the Annual ASOR professor in Amman, Jordan, the Catholic Biblical Association Annual Professor at the École Biblique et Archéologique Française in Jerusalem, and has published widely in Ancient Near Eastern studies. What follows consists of selected excerpts of a panel interview with Mr. Fitzgerald and Dr. Fulco which took place at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in San Antonio, Texas. The panelists, Drs. David Shepherd (Briercrest), Alice Bach (Case Western Reserve) and Clayton Jefford (St. Meinrad’s) focused their questions on issues relating to the movement from scripture to screenplay and in doing so touched on a variety of other topics including, amongst others,

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the genre of the film, the screenplay’s relationship to the canonical gospels and subsequent mediations of these narratives, and the portrayal of Jewish opposition to Jesus. DS: I was wondering whether each of you could tell us briefly how you got involved in the project and what your contributions were? BF: I had known Mel Gibson socially, but I had never worked with him or for him. He had liked some of my ideas for a film which was never realized, and also Wise Blood in 1980. I was living in Italy at the time and he called me up out of the blue and said why don’t you come and see me. I knew a little, but I didn’t know how far this would go or how big it was going to be. Nor how difficult it was going to be, because it was. We met a week later and talked, as two fellas talk. And he said why don’t you go and write a first draft so I did and after that we began to collaborate. He said: ‘You go ahead and do this and give me more than less and we’ll work on it.’ I gave him something that was, I think, 280 pages long and unreadable. But it was 15 hours, after all, in our Lord’s life on earth. There was something there to work on and I thought long and hard about it, but mainly at first as just a storyteller. I was inspired by some of the people I’d read—Maria of Agreda2 and so on—but I was working basically as a story teller, trying to stick to the gospels but also to be free. WF: I was sitting in my office at Loyola Marymount and got a call from Icon productions. The person on the phone said, ‘Will you do something for us in Aramaic?’ and I said ‘What is it?’ and she said ‘We want a commitment first.’ I said ‘I’m going to Jerusalem tomorrow for a couple of weeks, so can we talk about it when I get back’ and he said ‘Fine.’ So I was sitting in Jerusalem when I got another phone call. I picked up the phone and the person on the other end said, ‘Hey, Padre, it’s Mel’ and I said ‘Mel who?’ He told me about the project and I couldn’t resist. My contribution ended up growing quite a bit. I was in from the very begin- ning when Ben and Mel met about the first draft of the script in Rome and after that Mel brought me into every phase, including the music, so I was flying back and forth to Matera and Rome. My primary job was the translation, but the ancient languages turned out to be a challenge for the actors, so I had to coach them on the Aramaic and the Latin. I was also advising on the historical and theological questions which arose during the shoot. AB: Ben, what did you think you were doing when you were writing this screenplay?

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BF: The first thing I should say was that I was remembering. Nothing to do with screenwriting, but as a human being I was simply remem- bering how I was brought up and in a sense, I was going back to a time in which all of this was unquestionably credible to me—all of it, every- thing—I simply opened up to the sort of faith that children have and let that influence me with the added help of years of experience writing screenplays. That’s basically what I was doing. I was remembering how I thought of this when I was a child. Those fifteen hours can bring a grown man to tears and a child can definitely feel twice as touched by it. And that’s what I was trying to go for. AB: When you were a child, you thought more of the Passion than the other elements of Jesus life? BF: It had to be because that was Mel’s conceit—to start in Gethsemane and end it on the cross. I actually talked him into doing the resurrec- tion—insofar as one can do that on film—based on a picture I had seen in Florence by Andrea del Sarto. It’s a beautiful fresco called Jesu in Pietà and it’s a picture of our Lord, as he’s come back to life, staring at his hands, just alone in the tomb. There’s something very powerful and very beautiful about that picture which I thought maybe we could get on film as a motion picture. Mel’s idea of coming in with the light and moving toward the slab of stone upon which the body was laid, watching the linens fall and then finding our Lord seated there as the light touches him was very close to what I had in mind. I would have liked to see a frontal view as well, with the puzzled expression that Andrea de Sarto managed to get into his picture—it’s very powerful because it is a com- bination of man and God and it was really something that had merged those two—rather like the fingers in Michelangelo’s work. It was beauti- ful and I wanted to get something like that. DS: Was this a historical film in your mind? BF: The reason I work as a screenwriter is because I don’t write text. I don’t think of it as text. It’s not to be published. It’s not to be read. It’s meant to evoke—in a series of different categories of mystera—a response. First in the director, then in the actors, then in the costume designers, then in the set designers and a whole series of people. It is an evocation. It’s not a text. No film screenplay is. It doesn’t pretend to be that. My father was a poet and a translator of text, but strangely enough even he was translating Homeric poems which come from an oral tradition. They weren’t text either.

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DS: You’ve adapted several classics for the screen. How does adapting what is, in every sense a classic, compare with adapting other classics for the screen? BF: It’s more frightening from the get go. This is probably why I was trying to reduce myself, redux to childhood, because if I’d actually thought as an adult about it, I would have been paralyzed with fear. And, of course, there’s the matter of faith, which was slowly coming back to me during the course of this work and succeeded in really filling me. In that sense it was really a remarkable experience, as the film turned out to be as well. CJ: The Passion draws on a variety of different sources, including but not limited to the gospels themselves. Perhaps you can tell us, which gospel is being presented in this film? BF: I thought of John’s gospel most because it seemed to be a portrait of the Son of God and it meant something to me in that sense; Mark’s [ Jesus] is a Son of Man and Luke’s is a poem and wonderful and Matthew’s Jesus is a teacher, a rabbi. I liked the Son of God that is rep- resented in John and I was drawn to that. That doesn’t mean that you’re not looking at other portraits of the same man from another perspective. DS: Some people have said that The Passion is really just an adapted screenplay of [The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ by] Anne Catherine Emmerich.3 Is that fair or not fair? BF: No, it’s not fair, though I think Emmerich is very powerful, by the way; if you were to sit and read Catherine Emmerich on a quiet after- noon at home you would burst into tears halfway through it and be unable to stop crying. On the other hand, there is a side of her—first of all it is not her, it’s somebody who wrote what she said—that really irri- tated me: sometimes in her vision, Our Lord or the Holy Mother or somebody very interesting had said something to her and she simply for- got it. She would actually say, “But I forget what they said.” A really short memory is not something you want to adapt for the screen! DS: The similarities are quite striking though, aren’t they? For instance, in the screenplay, Jesus falls off the bridge and he’s caught by the chains, and in Emmerich he’s going across the bridge and he falls off, and plunges into the river below; those kinds of things make people say, “Well, did he have Emmerich open while he was writing it?” BF: No. It’s not very difficult to remember a scene like that if you’ve read it. But I think you’d find that there is mention of a bridge in Brigita

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and Catherine of Siena and Maria of Agreda. Catherine Emmerich isn’t the only one who thought of the arresting soldiers throwing him over the bridge... It’s like saying that Mantegna must have looked at Paolo Uccello before he drew the body of Jesus in perspective, a corpse lying from a certain angle so it looks as if you are actually lying down looking at it, or just above it. These are not conceits that mean that he was copy- ing Paolo Uccello. But probably there was somebody in those days who said, hmmm, he’s doing what Paolo Uccello was doing. But he wasn’t. This essentially is what I think Mel Gibson was doing. I remember going through a museum with him in which we were looking only at paintings of Caravaggio. He was very interested in them because half the story [of the Passion] takes place at night, and Caravaggio is a painter who paints very violent scenes that often take place at night by torchlight or by can- dlelight. Actually one of his paintings represents Peter cutting Malchus’ ear off. It’s a beautiful painting and I remember Mel watching it—just standing there looking at that painting for ten minutes, just taking it in. This is what you have to do when you do something like this. WF: I keep saying that this film is an artifact. It’s a piece of art. It’s not a documentary. But the important thing is that the Gospels are already art. And what happens is that the Gospels are already taking an histor- ical event and spinning it and combining them so that you can’t pull them apart. So in the Gospels you already have four works of art, that is, four interpretations of events which don’t always jive with one another, which is very important. And so what Mel is doing is the Gospel according to Mel. People have said that sarcastically in critiques of the film, but in fact that’s not a bad expression. He also saw a historical event which suggested to him that human suffering can have a redemp- tive quality. It’s something he already pursued in Braveheart as he was working out his own spirituality and it culminated finally in the Passion narrative. He is taking what he considers the core event, and believing that the passion of Jesus has redemptive value when it enters into the human situation from the inside and transforms it. He’s expressing this artistically through the medium of film, just as the Gospels used the medium of words. CJ: Considering the fact that the story that you presented is the Passion, could you say a little bit about the narrative strategy? BF: This was something that Mel and I talked about from the outset. Often in the course of these 15 hours, it was going to have to be about the people around our Lord—not just what was happening to him—that was controlling the story: Peter’s reaction to things, Mary’s reaction,

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Mary Magdalene’s reaction, or simply their point of view. We decided that we had to have—in the course of telling the story of the last 15 hours—something that was comprehensible even though the film was going to be in Aramaic. Eventually it ended up being sub-titled. You had to understand what was going on with not only Caiaphas, Annas and the small group of Pharisees and Sadducees that were intent on having Jesus condemned, but also Pilate and his wife. There had to be sub-titles so that those things would be understood. DS: The film has been criticized in some quarters for its use of Aramaic as opposed to Greek? Given that the New Testament is in Greek, why not write the dialogue in Greek? WF: There were a couple of reasons. I started to do some of the trans- lations into Greek, as a matter of fact, because Mel’s original instructions to me were, “Do whatever languages are appropriate for the conversa- tion.” So my thought was the dialogue between Pilate and the elders of the people should have been in Greek as the language of communica- tion of the time. Mel wanted it back in Latin—there were a couple rea- sons why we ended up doing it in Latin. First of all in terms of the audience: Latin is much more familiar than Greek and gave a sense of comfort to the audience, a sense of being at home, but also gave a sense of being ancient and not being English—so you’re not bringing an English mentality or an American mentality to Jesus. Greek, on the other hand, would have been unfamiliar and rather jarring. But my main rea- son for not insisting on Greek was that we talked with a lot of Greek scholars at Loyola Marymount and at UCLA who said there is so much controversy about the pronunciation of koiné Greek that no matter what pronunciation you used, you would have 90% of Greeks furious with you. Whereas Latin, since you have to choose between the two pronun- ciations, you would only have 50% of the people furious with you! BF: Somebody said earlier that it was so Roman—it was such Italian Latin. But there is nothing wrong with that because this is probably as close to Latin as you can get—Italian being a language that came quite directly from Latin. WF: I got an email from somebody—all we had in the trailer so far was “ecce homo”—saying, “Why are you using this bastardized ecclesiastical Latin? I want you to know that I am boycotting this film, and I have written a message to my old Latin teacher and she is going to boycott this film too.” But the actors were mostly Italian, and the ones that weren’t Italian were for the most part European, Romanian, for exam- ple. So they were very familiar with that pronunciation and it’s what they

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learned in Rome. For them to have tried even an alternate pronuncia- tion would have been a nightmare—it wouldn’t have worked. They were able to be relatively consistent with this pronunciation. DS: So why does Jesus speak Latin to Pilate when they are in private, when they are in camera? WF: Mel wanted Jesus to beat Pilate at his own game, so Pilate addresses him in Aramaic and Jesus answers him in Latin. It’s purely an artistic choice to have Pilate think he’s in the superior position and all of a sud- den Jesus ends up in the superior position. That’s why he did it. BF: It also surprises Pilate. Instead of a governor of Rome whose instinct probably would be, “Well, who cares? Throw this guy to the dogs! What do I care?.” Now suddenly he’s interested. WF: Many people have complained that Pilate is far too sympathetic a figure, and that Caiaphas comes across as the rat. Well I think that’s an overstatement, but as a matter of fact that was a question of direction, and the direction in this case was influenced by the actor, Hristo Shopov. It was not Mel’s original intention to have him play [the part of Pilate] so smoothly and gently, but he let him run with it. It wasn’t so much the script as the acting and direction which resulted in what some people said was an overly sympathetic portrayal of Pilate. DS: And when you were writing, did you feel that he came across sympathetically? BF: No, I thought this guy’s just another Roman governor, a weakling. He’s going to do anything he can to keep his job and keep his head. He doesn’t care one way or another about the people that he’s governing. In fact he hates them. He’s above doing anything about it; he’s been told he can’t put down any more rebellions, so he’s going to try to stop a rebellion. That’s what he’s panicked about. And he doesn’t want to have anything like that go on. I wouldn’t want that to go on either, if I were Pilate. CJ: I’m curious to know what movies and screenplays you took into con- sideration before you produced this particular movie. As I was watching the movie, I kept thinking that this has the sound or look or feel of other things that I’ve seen over the years, but I wasn’t sure if that was just me having watched too many movies or whether you consciously were build- ing this into the narrative. BF: I was—I have to confess—not thinking about any of the pictures that had been done previously. I was very aware of Pasolini’s work, and

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without reading his script, saw the film again, but not until I was done with my first draft. It’s very easy to see, very slow going in terms of watching. It a beautiful film, it’s a poem, whereas ours I think of more as a mass. He was a poet—Pasolini was a poet. I think Mel Gibson is more of an altar boy in that sense. WF: We were watching various portrayals of Jesus, and this was one of the reasons we wanted to do the ancient languages—so that Jesus didn’t end up being American or Japanese or French. Some of the previous film portrayals of Jesus are simply absurd. In one of them Jesus was at the Last Supper and sounded like Michael Jackson. He was about 18 years old and looked like a surfer and he looked out at the disciples and said rather unconvincingly, “You know I’m not going to be with you much longer.” Mel was very intent on having a macho Jesus in charge. He wanted to make sure the Passion was something Jesus did, not some- thing for which he was a victim. That is why to my mind the key line of the film is, “Behold, I make all things new,” taken from the book of Revelation. DS: And Scorsese’s work? BF: I didn’t like “The Last Temptation.” There was only one unforget- table moment for me in it: that’s when Lazarus is called up—because it’s terrifying, because you’re seeing it from Lazarus’s point of view. I thought, my God, that’s really good. I didn’t really like the movie. I liked this one more—for whatever it’s worth. DS: One of the criticisms has been—and one thing that separates The Passion from the rest of the Hollywood Jesus tradition is—that it focuses intensely on a very limited part of the Gospel. Where is the life and min- istry of Jesus? That’s been one of the criticisms. WF: Yes, but one of the reasons behind that is that in almost every por- trayal of Jesus’ life, the Passion is downplayed. It’s an embarrassment, so it’s whitewashed. For Mel that was simply unacceptable. He suffered a lot in his own life, especially in the early 90s. He was disillusioned. He’s very honest about it—with drugs, with women, with everything else. He wanted a Jesus whose suffering spoke to his own. To have had a Jesus who doesn’t suffer in the Passion somehow would not have addressed his own suffering, and it wouldn’t have had a redemptive quality. That was an obsession with Mel. BF: Much like it is in the painters who painted the Passion, and sculptors who worked on representations of it. It is an artistic impulse and though the question may be as you say, ‘which gospel?’, what does it matter to

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the artist? It matters later to the people who are watching it. But in the end, a film is simply another painting that is moving, and it really touches you or it doesn’t. The Gospel that it’s drawn from could be all four, very easily. It doesn’t have to become, and it isn’t just, one. That would be a mistake: to think of it as just one. AB: I can understand [the importance of ] emphasizing the Passion, espe- cially for a Catholic director/writer for the same reason that in a Catholic Church you find a crucifix with Jesus on the cross and Good Friday’s a big deal. But for Protestants, Easter’s a big deal and it’s what some of us consider an empty cross. WF: There is some tension in Mel’s own thinking which I think mani- fests itself in the film, too. I think there is a tension between a theology of atonement... and then a more Johannine theology of God trans- forming the human situation from the inside. I think some of those ten- sions in Mel’s own thinking keep manifesting themselves in the theology of the crucifixion. I would have liked to have seen the film end one of two ways. Either end with the pieta, which I find the most powerful moment of the film, and just leave you asking, “How do I react to this?” Or, if Mel was going to draw us into solidarity with Jesus’ Passion—if we’re in solidarity with the crucifixion—we should be in solidarity with the resurrection. Mary Magdalene should have been there; or exercise some an artistic liberty and have Mary his mother there; have somebody there that represents us. If it was his victory, it should also have been our victory. But there are tensions like that in the film which reflect Mel’s own ambiguity regarding the passion in relationship to victory, regard- ing resurrection and so on. DS: The response to Scorsese’s film [The Last Temptation of Christ] in the late eighties was very dramatic, especially from the Christian conserva- tive right. In fact, the reaction to it arguably resulted in disappointing returns at the box-office. The response to Gibson’s film was also dra- matic. Had you anticipated the kind of response which the film eventu- ally generated when it was released? BF: No, no. I literally thought, this is a vanity movie I’m writing. In an odd way I had resigned myself to it. I’m writing a movie for Mel Gibson, because he wants to do this. Gradually it became something that I wanted to do, and then I discovered little by little that it was something that everybody, everyone who worked on the film wanted to do. It was one of those rare occasions in which there was a unanimity—cast, crew and everybody else wanted to do this film.

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WF: Initially, Mel talked about it being perhaps a small art film. The kind of film you’d find at the Laemmle Theater in LA, which does for- eign films and art films. But gradually as the momentum built, it became almost a sense of wanting to preach Christ crucified, a scandal to Jews and Gentiles alike. It became an obsession with everybody on the crew and especially those of us who were in the middle of how this thing was going to be produced. Eventually, there was an extraordinary unity amongst the cast, the crew, the director and a sense that there was a message that we wanted to proclaim. DS: As you were writing, you must have been aware that at various points the film might prove problematic for Jewish viewers? BF: No, I was brought up in Italy where there is no big problem about any of this. I don’t have any anti-Semitism in me, so I never thought about this. I thought, well, here are the Pharisees, here are the Sadducees and they’re appointed by Pilate and they want this man dead because he’s going against everything they represent. So they’re terrified—it’s a really political fight. WF: Perhaps I felt it more strongly than Ben because I was the first one to get caught in the turn of events. The Catholic-Jewish Committee of the Bishops landed on me first, and my correspondence, my email ended up being subpoenaed. I was caught tremendously off guard and I’ve learned a lot from it in terms of sensitivity but also in terms of suffering to be honest. It was a terrible experience; it was during Easter, during Holy Week of 2003. But on the crew itself, I had an assistant to help me work with the language who was Jewish, Evelina Meghnagi. Her family was kicked out of Libya during the Six-Day War and she ended up in Italy where she is now quite a famous singer of Yiddish folk music. Mel would keep asking her, “Evelina, what do you think of the way we are directing this scene?” and occasionally she would say, “That’s not the way we would do it, the way you are doing it is too western.” Occasionally she would say, “I find that very offensive,” and Mel would sit down with her and work it out. So for instance, she said, “You’re bowdlerizing the Passover service,” and so Mel changed it. He was very conscious about that kind of thing throughout the filming and so we were really caught off guard with the barrage that followed. DS: If you could go back and do it again, would you do it differently? BF: Would I? I don’t think so. In the context of what Bill is talking about, yes—Mel was willing to change the way he was going to set up a scene and represent it. But in terms of the structure of the film, the

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structure of these last fifteen hours as dramatically represented, I don’t think so; it was based on sacred text and there was no reason in the world to change it. There was nothing in it that was offensive that isn’t in the Gospels.

NOTES

1 The author would like to express his gratitude to the organizing committee of the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature and to Tenyia Miller who was of great help in producing a written transcript of the original interview. 2 Sor Maria de Agreda (1602–65) was a Spanish nun whose visions were recorded in her biography of the Virgin Mary, Mistica Ciudad (The Mystical City of God). 3 Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774–1824) was a German nun whose visions were recorded by the German poet Klemens Brentano and published as The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to the Meditations of Anne Catherine Emmerich.

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