Delinquency, addiction and creativity: Abel Ferrara makes no apology for his wicked ways

CINEMA
Scene: A Memoir
Abel Ferrara
Simon & Schuster, $59.99

After he cut his teeth on a trio of short films in the early 1970s, Abel Ferrara turned to the grindhouse to get his career off the ground. The title of his first feature, 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy (1976), which is still available on Hamster, speaks for itself. What its original viewers mightn’t have anticipated, though, was that its director, disguised behind the nom de camera of Jimmy Boy L., was destined to become one of the American cinema’s most celebrated independent filmmakers.

Over the following half century, he directed, sometimes wrote and occasionally contributed bit parts to more than 30 features in the US and abroad. He’s probably best known for two early horror films (The Driller Killer and Ms. 45) and the films he made during the 1990s with Christopher Walken (including King of New York, The Addiction and The Funeral) and Harvey Keitel (Bad Lieutenant and Dangerous Games). However, he’s also worked extensively with Willem Dafoe (on films such as New Rose Hotel, Pasolini and Siberia) and on documentaries.

Now he’s written Scene, a cryptically entitled and engrossing memoir in which he jukeboxes his way along the path he’s taken from the Bronx and a delinquent adolescence. Surviving various addictions, run-ins with the police and forays into the offices of potential investors, many of dubious repute, he ends up on the sets of generally low-budget, often in-your-face movies that don’t shy away from the dark side.

In no special order, vignette-style, he introduces us to his Italian-American father who was a bar owner and a bookmaker, “mostly a bookmaker”, his beautiful, blonde Irish-American mother who was “every bit the Marilyn Monroe to my father’s Joe DiMaggio”, and sundry other family members and friends.

He reflects extensively on the numerous women in his life and on the collaborators with whom he’s worked. As well as Walken, Keitel and Dafoe, there’s Asia Argento (actor-daughter of famed Italian filmmaker Dario Argento, and one of those women), Al Pacino (during pre-production on Carlito’s Way, eventually directed by Brian De Palma), Gerard Depardieu and Juliette Binoche. Central to Ferrara’s evolution as a filmmaker, there’s also his long-time screenwriter Nicholas St. John (real name Nicodemo Oliverio), who was with him from the beginning until the wheeling and dealing that’s a fundamental part of the film business led to their falling-out.

Offering little more than passing nods to the films he’s made, Ferrara concentrates instead on what’s gone on behind the scenes, tracking his battles with investors and producers, and likening his commitment to his work to that of the Hippocratic Oath binding doctors to their patients: “When the film is being harmed, I cannot let it happen, never, that’s my oath as a director.” His unhappy experience with Warner Bros. on Body Snatchers (1993), the second remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, was, he proudly proclaims, “the last time I ever worked without final cut”.

He confesses, intriguingly, that he’d rather read a book than watch a film (“More bang for your buck”) and that what he finds most fascinating about films and filmmaking is the acting. “It’s the hit I’m constantly chasing,” he enthuses. “I love the beautiful shots, I sit in awe of Welles and Kubrick, but it’s the acting that keeps me coming back.”

He alludes to the influences on some of his films: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on The Driller Killer, I Spit on Your Grave on Ms. 45, The Terminator and The Road Warrior/Mad Max on King of New York. But he doesn’t elaborate, leaving readers to conclude that his primary inspiration must have been that they were all low-budget productions that rose far above their officially decreed station.

Scene belongs to the same confessional, warts-’n-all style of memoir as Charlie Sheen’s The Book of Sheen, published late last year. But it’s also very different. Describing himself as “a street rat”, the book’s Ferrara (like his public persona) is more like a character in a Scorsese gangster movie than a child of privilege who fell out of a comfortable nest.

Seen through his own eyes in Scene – the pun is doubtless intentional – Ferrara is someone who’s grown up on the wrong side of the street, lives according to his own rules, is restless, constantly on edge, and as dangerous as he is determined.

So it’s not by chance that Josh Safdie, who used to work at a video store Ferrara patronised in New York’s Little Italy, cast him as a gangster in Marty Supreme. And, for him, Scene is a spot-on portrait of its author. “The second you see Abel enter the movie with his dog,” he told The New York Times earlier this year, “the dog softens him in some ways. But there’s a hardness to him. You can feel the entire memoir in his face.”

Unlike Sheen, Ferrara has no regrets, real or feigned, except perhaps for his 16-year heroin addiction and for how his partnership with St. John ended. And he makes no apology for his wicked, wicked ways.

Citing a Native American parable – “We all have two wolves inside of us, the evil one and the good one. Which one survives? The one you feed” – he makes it clear that what matters most, at the age of 74, is what he does next. Forget Scorsese and Safdie; he’s now a character in his own story.

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