Today, my guest is the legendary writer-director Abel Ferrara.
Abel Ferrara is a filmmaker who has always brought a raw immediacy to his work, and has said that he makes movies on sheer blood and guts.
His cinematic resume is insanely stacked, ranging from early-career exploitation classics such as Driller Killer and Ms. 45 to seminal 90s street movies like King of New York and Bad Lieutenant, more cerebral titles like the vampire parable The Addiction and the Shakespearean mob tragedy The Funeral, or fictionalized examinations of Hollywood like Dangerous Game and The Blackout.
In the 21st century, he has expanded his creative palate to also include biopics, movies focused on religion, and documentaries, and his greatest film of recent years is arguably 2019’s Tommaso, a fictionalized self-portrait about a director in recovery who’s now living in Rome.
I’ve crossed paths with Abel a bunch over the past couple decades, first when I interviewed him around the U.S. release of his excellent, underrated drama thriller Mary. I remember I was told to meet him at a restaurant in Little Italy, where I then waited for maybe 20 minutes or half an hour. When he did arrive, he immediately rushed me off to another restaurant, where we talked and he gave me great quotes, until it seemed like he’d tired of the interview …
In the early days of Talkhouse, I commissioned a piece from him, delivered in his inimitable voice, and shortly after set up a Talkhouse Podcast conversation between him and Gaspar Noé, which was as compelling as it promised to be. In 2020, when Italy was hit incredibly hard by the pandemic, we connected about what he was doing to get by from his home in Rome.
When I was thinking about who I wanted to talk to for this season of Nobody’s Ever Asked Me That, Abel was one of the first names that came to mind, because he’s so approachable and direct, and also because his fascinating memoir Scene – which came out last fall – recently gave me a new understanding of him and his work. In the book, he’s particularly thoughtful looking back on his struggles with drugs and alcohol, now as someone who has been in recovery for 13 years and has found a new lease on life in Rome, where he lives with his wife and young daughter.
In an honest and really rather profound conversation, Abel and I spoke about a lot of stuff, including: bad acid trips, his love of books, his fascination with writing code, his addiction to social media (including following people like the late Charlie Kirk …), why he’s not a night person anymore, how he manages to stay hopeful about the state of the world, being traumatized by a bloody, life-sized crucifix as a young boy, and much, much more.
Pretty much all of Abel’s movies from his long and storied career are out there to stream in one place or another, but I’ll give a special shout-out to two personal favorites, The Funeral and Tommaso. His memoir Scene is available wherever you get your books and is highly recommended too.
This episode was produced by Myron Kaplan and the theme music is by The Range.
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Next week on Nobody’s Ever Asked Me That, my guests are July Talk’s Peter Dreimanis and Leah Fay Goldstein ...
Featured image of Abel Ferrara by Mauro Maglione.
