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  Click here to follow Easter on rejesus. Frank Deasy, who wrote the script of The Passion, was interviewed by Simon Jenkins. Click here for interview video clips. |
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| FRANK DEASY There have been many film and TV retellings of this story. Did any of them inform your approach to the passion? I remember seeing Jesus of Nazareth when it came out, when I was quite young, and a few years ago I saw The Gospel According to St Matthew, Pasolini's film, and I had seen some of The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson's film, but truthfully I left after about 20 minutes. Part of the reason I was drawn towards the opportunity to explore the Gospels was that I felt that The Passion of the Christ drained the spirituality from Jesus. I was keen to try a different approach that focused on not only his humanity, but the very profound tenderness and compassion that is a big part of his message, but also in terms of him as a human character. And then I re-watched the Gospel according to St Matthew, which is a beautiful film. I liked the realism of it – not so much in the language, because Pasolini used language very directly from the Gospels, but in that he used Italian farmers, and virtually everyone in it was a non-actor. So I took a lot from that. Zeffirelli's film is very beautiful and Robert Powell's performance is very moving, but I suppose I had almost the opposite of my response to The Passion of the Christ. I was keen to draw Jesus down into the world more as a human character who is frustrated, angry, fearful and doubtful, and who doesn't have what is almost a mask of humanity, but is truly human. So they were the main influences. There are other films, such as Downfall, a very different film, obviously, as a portrait of Hitler and an icon of evil. What I really loved about Downfall was that this was not a film about the Hitler we know now. This was about Hitler as he was perceived at the time, as the leader of the country. The film begins with a young woman looking for a job and she's excited, she could be secretary to effectively the prime minister of the day. It immediately gives you a different perspective of Hitler and you begin to see him from the point of view of, in a sense, his disciples. The opening of Downfall very much influenced the opening scene in The Passion. In it, a peasant coming to Passover in Jerusalem is frightened when he comes across the disciples, because they've been in the desert or in Galilee for two years. They've been sleeping out and they appear slightly intimidating to him. It attempts to introduce a world in which Christianity didn't yet exist, and these precepts and concepts that are so familiar to us now, were startlingly new and really exploded on the scene during this crucial week. Did you enjoy working with the four Gospels? I was very privileged to spend a year exploring the Gospels, and I found them very interesting in terms of the differences. John's Gospel is so different from Matthew, Mark and Luke, and the Jesus of Matthew and Mark in particular is such a human character, while in Luke's Gospel, I found Jesus' relationship with women very interesting. John, on the other hand, was the last Gospel to be written, and Jesus is very much perceived as a sort of god. To a certain extent there's an element that his time here is a sojourn, and that he is almost a tourist in his own passion. Those sort of differences became very interesting in terms of what approach to take, and I was drawn more and more to Jesus as an entirely human person. His duality, both his divinity and his humanity, is a mystery, but it is essential to that duality that his experience as a human is an entirely human experience. So the Gospels become a meditation on humanity, suffering and death. I became very interested in opening them up to find the drama within that that has a universal accessibility, whether you are a person of faith who believes that Jesus is the Son of God, whether you see him as a prophet, or simply as a first century Palestinian Jew who believed he had a God-given mission. Obviously, Jesus is an historical figure, but for millions of people he's much more than that. But his journey in that week, from Gethsemane to the crucifixion, to acceptance of his destiny and the transformation of his suffering into something meaningful, is a story that is accessible whatever your point of view. Jesus as you've written him is a very positive, upbeat character. Do you see this as a positive and hopeful story? For me it's a very hopeful story. It's a story about the transcendence of suffering and death. And again you can become involved in that on all sorts of levels, pretty much regardless of your faith or your indifference, even, to the theological aspects. As a human and as a person surrounded by people who loved him – his disciples, his mother and Mary Magdalene, his confidante. He takes them to a dark place and he finds himself in a very dark place, both in Gethsemane and on the cross. But somehow through sacrifice he transcends that. The passion was one of the first stories I ever heard. I grew up in Ireland in a Catholic community, and as a child the passion story was probably the first adult story that I really absorbed. Looking back on that experience as an adult, it's always struck me what a strange thing it is to have this iconic image of suffering and cruelty as the centre of a world religion. You know, what is that about? And that again was part of my motivation in going on that journey –to find out for myself what is that about. One of the things I found was that the passion is also an iconic image of transcendence, of overcoming futility and bleakness and a sense of abandonment, and finding a redemptive love, and giving and expressing a redemptive love that becomes an eternal love in this story. So for me, it's a very positive story. In other tellings of this story, Caiaphas the high priest is often played as an evil baddie. But in The Passion, he emerges as a real human being. Were you aiming to rehabilitate him? My aim in approaching the whole project was to create a drama. I can't remember who, it might have been Arthur Miller, but somebody has pointed out that tragedy isn't right against wrong, it's right against right. And so as a dramatist it became more and more appealing to me to see the world from Caiaphas's point of view. When I was happy with Jesus as a character who was coming to life, I began to concentrate more on the opposing point of view, and I found myself becoming very sympathetic to Caiaphas, in the sense of his humanity. Both dramatically, but I also feel theologically, it's much more rich to see Caiaphas as a flawed human being, prone to the same fear, the same self-deceiving, self-deluding political thought processes that we are familiar with today. By giving him a wife who's pregnant, with a child who's on the way, it made it very concrete that he's not just trying to protect something abstract like a social order or a theological hierarchy. He's trying to protect his family, his child and his people, and that noble aspiration leads leaders into all sorts of disastrous situations. The way that happens and the stages in that process are all too human. So I don't think it's so much an attempt to rehabilitate Caiaphas, as to inhabit his way of seeing and humanise everyone in the story. It's a story of human frailty in the face of fear, in the face of destiny, uncertainty, violence. It's all in there. The story has been told and retold for 2,000 years. Do you think it's compelling in the 21st century? I hope so, I hope it's compelling and I hope people watch it. It's not so much an attempt to appropriate the story for the 21st century. For me, it became a question of going in the other direction, trying to strip away my 21st century head and see the world from the point of view of these characters. I think there's a big part of us that likes to hear the same story again, just told in a different way. To hear someone else's way of telling a story can illuminate and enrich our view of the story. A new production of Hamlet, or a different production of the Homecoming can completely open it up in a whole new light as a piece of drama. Different interpretations shed new light, and that's the ambition, that people will find it enriches the story to see it told again in a different way. People focus on a new telling of a story as if it's going to be the last one, the be all and end all. But this story has been a spiritual reflection for 2,000 years. It's rewarded reflection for 2,000 years, and that's not going to stop. This is just someone else telling the story. |
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