• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

RART 9,3-4_f8_321-331 11/24/05 3:35 PM Page 321 Interview 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, RELIGION and the ARTS 9:3–4 (2005): 321–331. © Brill Academic Publishers, Inc., Boston Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 02:03:29PM via free access RART 9,3-4_f8_321-331 11/24/05 3:35 PM Page 322 RELIGION and the ARTS 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? 322 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 02:03:29PM via free access RART 9,3-4_f8_321-331 11/24/05 3:35 PM Page 323 Interview 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. 323 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 02:03:29PM via free access RART 9,3-4_f8_321-331 11/24/05 3:35 PM Page 324 RELIGION and the ARTS 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.

Load more

  11

Copy Link