The Last Temptation of Christ (film)

Based on Wikipedia: The Last Temptation of Christ (film)

A Film That Nearly Destroyed Its Director

In October 1988, someone planted a bomb in a Paris cinema. The device—potassium chlorate triggered by sulfuric acid—ignited under a seat in an underground screening room, burning thirteen people and gutting the theater. The target wasn't a political rally or a government building. It was a movie about Jesus Christ.

Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ had been in theaters for just two months. The director was already traveling with bodyguards, fielding death threats from people who had never seen his film but were certain it was blasphemy. An evangelist had publicly offered to buy the negative just to destroy it. Protesters dressed as crucified figures picketed studio headquarters.

What could possibly provoke such fury?

The Question No One Wanted Asked

The controversy centered on a simple premise: What if Jesus, being fully human as Christian doctrine claims, experienced the full range of human temptation? Not just hunger in the desert or the lure of political power, but the quiet, persistent pull toward an ordinary life—a wife, children, growing old surrounded by family instead of dying young on a Roman cross.

This wasn't Scorsese's invention. Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis had explored this idea in his 1955 novel, which itself sparked controversy and was banned by the Catholic Church. The book imagines Jesus as genuinely torn between his divine mission and his human nature—not as a theological abstraction but as a lived, agonizing experience.

Scorsese first encountered the novel as a film student at New York University in 1962. He didn't actually read it for another decade. But once he did, the book became an obsession that would consume fifteen years of his life and nearly end his career.

The Long Road to Production

Hollywood doesn't make difficult religious films. Or rather, it makes safe religious films—reverent biblical epics with handsome actors in flowing robes, speaking in hushed, important tones. Scorsese wanted something rawer. He envisioned a Jesus who questioned, struggled, and doubted—a man who had to earn his destiny rather than simply accepting it.

Paul Schrader, who had written Taxi Driver for Scorsese, spent a year adapting Kazantzakis's novel into a screenplay. Scorsese and his frequent collaborator Jay Cocks then spent eight months rewriting most of the dialogue. By 1983, Paramount Pictures had committed to a fifteen to twenty million dollar production.

Then the letters started arriving.

Religious groups who had somehow learned about the project—though the script wasn't public—began flooding Paramount with protests. The studio's parent company, Gulf+Western, grew nervous. The budget kept climbing. In December 1983, Paramount pulled the plug entirely.

Scorsese was devastated. He made After Hours instead, a small film about a nightmarish night in downtown Manhattan that reflected his own sense of frustration and displacement.

A Second Chance on a Shoestring

The project should have died there. Most abandoned films stay abandoned. But Scorsese and his agent Harry Ufland kept shopping it around, looking for anyone willing to take the risk. They considered filming in Yugoslavia, Spain, North Africa—anywhere cheap enough to make the economics work.

In 1986, Universal Studios bit. But with conditions. Scorsese would have to shoot the entire film in fifty-eight days for just seven million dollars—roughly a third of the original Paramount budget. He also had to agree to direct a more commercial film for Universal afterward, a debt he would eventually pay with the thriller Cape Fear.

The reduced budget transformed the production. Gone were the lavish sets and cast of thousands. Instead, Scorsese would shoot in Morocco with a small crew, relying on natural locations and unknown actors.

Finding his Jesus proved difficult. Scorsese watched Willem Dafoe in To Live and Die in L.A. and then again in Platoon. Something in Dafoe's intensity—his ability to project both vulnerability and conviction—convinced the director he'd found his lead. Dafoe, who was teaching in Massachusetts at the time, accepted immediately.

David Bowie signed on to play Pontius Pilate, bringing an otherworldly quality to the Roman governor. Harvey Keitel, a Scorsese regular, took the role of Judas, though his performance would later earn him a Razzie nomination for Worst Supporting Actor—a sharp contrast to the acclaim surrounding most of his collaborators.

Filming in the Desert

Morocco in late 1987 was not a comfortable place to make a movie. The crew worked out of a village called Oumnast, which stood in for both Nazareth and the town of Magdala. Desert sequences were shot twenty minutes away. The ancient city of Meknes became Jerusalem, its historic stables doubling for temple architecture.

Scorsese deliberately avoided spectacle. He didn't want pomp or excessive reverence. On the first day of filming, he looked at the Roman soldiers and found them too clean, too polished. He made the extras roll around in the dirt.

The crucifixion sequence took three days to shoot, using sixty different camera setups. Dafoe could only remain on the cross for two or three minutes at a time before the position became unbearable. A slow-motion shot of the jeering crowd was inspired by a Hieronymus Bosch painting of the same subject—the fifteenth-century Dutch master known for his nightmarish, grotesque imagery.

Principal photography wrapped on Christmas Day, 1987. The timing felt appropriate.

The Story Itself

The film opens with a Jesus who is not at peace with his calling. He works as a carpenter in Roman-occupied Judea, but his trade involves building crosses for Roman executions—a collaboration with the oppressors that marks him as a traitor to his own people. His childhood friend Judas has been sent to kill him for exactly this betrayal.

But Judas suspects Jesus might be something more than a collaborator. He stays his hand, watching, waiting to see if this troubled carpenter might actually be the Messiah that Jewish prophets had promised for centuries.

Jesus begins his ministry reluctantly, saving Mary Magdalene from a mob prepared to stone her for prostitution. He gathers disciples. He preaches love when his followers want revolution against Rome. He retreats to the desert to wrestle with God and Satan, returning weakened but more certain of his path.

Miracles follow—including the raising of Lazarus from the dead, the act that finally draws the attention of Roman authorities who cannot allow a Jewish holy man to command such power. Jesus enters Jerusalem, drives the money changers from the temple, and accepts that the cross awaits him.

He instructs Judas to betray him. The kiss in Gethsemane, the arrest, the trial before Pilate—all proceed according to the gospel accounts. Jesus is beaten, mocked, and led to Golgotha.

And then comes the temptation.

The Dream That Wasn't a Dream

On the cross, dying, Jesus sees a young girl who claims to be his guardian angel. She tells him he is the Son of God but not the Messiah. He has proven himself, she says. God is pleased. He can come down now and live a normal life.

The girl leads him to Mary Magdalene. They marry. They are happy.

When Mary dies, the angel consoles Jesus and guides him to start a family with Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus. Years pass. Jesus grows old, surrounded by children and grandchildren, living the ordinary human life that was always the alternative to his extraordinary death.

Near the end of his days, an elderly Jesus encounters the apostle Paul preaching about the Messiah—preaching about him. Jesus tries to explain that he's the man Paul is describing, that he didn't actually die on the cross, that the whole story is wrong.

Paul doesn't care. The message is true, he says, regardless of what actually happened. He'll keep preaching it.

This is the theological heart of the film's controversy: the suggestion that Christianity might have survived even without Christ's sacrifice, that the story became more important than the historical event.

But the temptation isn't over.

On his deathbed, Jerusalem burning around him as the Jewish revolt against Rome reaches its catastrophic end, Jesus receives a final visitor. Judas comes to him—old, weathered, furious. He reveals what the audience may have suspected: the guardian angel was never an angel at all. She was Satan, offering not a gift but a trap.

Jesus crawls through the burning city, finds the place of his crucifixion, and begs God for another chance. "I want to be the Messiah," he cries.

And suddenly he is back on the cross. The temptation was a vision, a final test in his dying moments. He has rejected the ordinary life, the safe choice, the human path. His last words are triumphant: "It is accomplished."

The Fury and the Fire

The film opened on August 12, 1988, in just 123 theaters across the United States and Canada. This limited release was partly strategic—the studio was gauging the intensity of the opposition—and partly necessary. Many theater chains refused to show it.

The protests that had killed the Paramount production in 1983 returned with greater force. A religious California radio station organized six hundred protesters to picket outside the headquarters of MCA, Universal's parent company. One demonstrator dressed as MCA chairman Lew Wasserman and pretended to hammer nails through Jesus's hands.

Evangelist Bill Bright offered to reimburse Universal for the entire cost of the film if they would hand over the negative for destruction. The studio declined.

When the movie reached France, the violence escalated beyond picket lines. The Saint Michel cinema bombing in Paris was the most severe incident, but not the only one. Other theaters showing the film faced threats and vandalism across Europe.

Scorsese required bodyguards for years afterward. "I was targeted by death threats and the jeremiads of TV evangelists," he later reflected.

What the Critics Actually Saw

Lost in the fury was what the film actually achieved. Roger Ebert, giving it a perfect four stars, wrote that Scorsese and Schrader "paid Christ the compliment of taking him and his message seriously." They had made a Jesus who was "flesh and blood, struggling, questioning, asking himself and his father which is the right way."

The film earned generally positive reviews—eighty-two percent of critics approved, according to later aggregation—and Scorsese received an Academy Award nomination for Best Director. Barbara Hershey's performance as Mary Magdalene earned a Golden Globe nomination. Peter Gabriel's haunting score, blending Middle Eastern instruments with electronic elements, won a Grammy and helped popularize what would come to be called "world music."

Even some religious critics acknowledged the film's sincerity while disagreeing with its approach. The Catholic News Service review called it a failure of artistry rather than irreverence. Others found it too long, too wordy, too slow—legitimate criticisms of a film that runs over two and a half hours and occasionally labors under the weight of its philosophical ambitions.

The film's theatrical run was modest by Hollywood standards, grossing about thirty-four million dollars worldwide against its seven million dollar budget. But its real impact came later, as home video allowed audiences to see what the controversy had been about.

Blockbuster Video, the dominant rental chain of the era, refused to stock it. But the Criterion Collection issued a special edition in 1997, signaling the film's acceptance into the canon of serious cinema. That edition has been re-released multiple times since.

The Director Who Walked Away From Schindler

The aftermath of The Last Temptation of Christ reshaped Scorsese's career in unexpected ways. He had been attached to direct Schindler's List, the adaptation of Thomas Keneally's book about the German industrialist who saved over a thousand Jews during the Holocaust. He had worked extensively on the script with screenwriter Steven Zaillian.

But after the firestorm over Last Temptation, Scorsese withdrew. He felt, he said, that it would be inappropriate for a non-Jewish director to make the film—a decision that opened the door for Steven Spielberg to create what became one of the most acclaimed movies in cinema history.

Whether Scorsese's reasoning was genuine reflection or a convenient exit from another potentially controversial religious project remains a matter of interpretation. What's clear is that the experience of Last Temptation marked him deeply.

The Offer Mel Gibson Refused

Years later, in a 2025 podcast interview, Mel Gibson revealed that Scorsese had approached him to play Jesus in the film. Gibson declined immediately, reportedly telling Scorsese simply, "Wow. I'm not doing that."

The irony is rich. Gibson would go on to direct The Passion of the Christ in 2004, a film about Jesus that generated its own controversies—accusations of antisemitism, debates about its extreme violence—while becoming one of the highest-grossing independent films ever made. Gibson's Jesus was orthodox where Scorsese's was questioning, brutal where Scorsese's was contemplative.

Both films asked audiences to confront the physical and spiritual reality of Christ's suffering. Both drew furious opposition. Both found their defenders among religious and secular viewers alike.

Eric Roberts also turned down the role, later claiming in his memoir that Scorsese held a grudge against him for the decision. Whether true or not, the story illustrates how radioactive the project seemed even to actors who might have benefited from the prestige.

The Music That Outlasted the Controversy

Peter Gabriel's score deserves special attention. Rather than the orchestral swells typical of biblical epics, Gabriel created something stranger and more intimate. He drew on traditional music from across the Middle East and North Africa, collaborating with artists like the Pakistani vocalist Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the Egyptian kanun player Abdul Aziz, and the Armenian duduk players Antranik Askarian and Vatche Housepian.

The kanun is a kind of zither, plucked rather than bowed, with a shimmering, harp-like quality. The ney is a simple reed flute with an ancient lineage, producing breathy, human-sounding tones. The duduk—an Armenian double-reed instrument made from apricot wood—has a mournful, almost weeping sound that has since become ubiquitous in film soundtracks.

Gabriel released the score as Passion, which won a Grammy for Best New Age Album—a category that didn't quite capture what he had accomplished. He followed it with Passion – Sources, an album of the traditional music that had inspired him, introducing Western audiences to artists they might never have encountered otherwise.

The score's influence extended far beyond this single film. It helped establish "world music" as a legitimate category in Western consciousness and demonstrated that Hollywood films didn't need to default to European orchestral traditions.

What the Film Actually Argues

Strip away the controversy and The Last Temptation of Christ makes a surprisingly orthodox theological argument. The entire point of the "temptation" sequence—Jesus imagining a normal life while dying on the cross—is that he ultimately rejects it. He chooses sacrifice over comfort, mission over family, divinity over humanity.

The film's Jesus earns his divinity through struggle rather than simply possessing it from birth. This emphasis on Christ's humanity was not Scorsese's invention; it's a long-standing tradition within Christian theology. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD affirmed that Christ was both fully human and fully divine, not one nature at the expense of the other.

But showing that humanity on screen—showing doubt, showing fear, showing sexual attraction—proved too much for many believers. The brief scene of Jesus and Mary Magdalene consummating their marriage, even within what the film reveals to be a Satanic illusion, crossed lines that abstract theology never approached.

Scorsese understood this. He included a disclaimer at the film's opening: "This film is not based on the Gospels, but upon the fictional exploration of the eternal spiritual conflict." He was asking for permission to imagine, not to rewrite scripture.

Many viewers refused to grant that permission. Others, including some religious leaders, found the film a profound meditation on faith. Archbishop Desmond Tutu reportedly appreciated the movie's exploration of Christ's humanity.

The Violence That Followed

The Paris bombing remains the most disturbing legacy of the film's release. The perpetrators belonged to an integralist Catholic group—"integralist" meaning committed to integrating Catholic doctrine into all aspects of public life, including law and politics. They believed they were defending Christ's honor.

Thirteen people were injured. Four suffered severe burns. The cinema was heavily damaged.

Similar attacks on theaters occurred elsewhere, though none as devastating. Franco Zeffirelli, the director of a more traditional Jesus film (Jesus of Nazareth for television), withdrew his movie Young Toscanini from the Venice Film Festival in protest when Last Temptation was included in the lineup.

The violence against the film and its exhibitors raised questions that remain relevant today: What are the limits of religious offense? When does protest become terrorism? Can art that questions faith ever find a safe audience?

A Film That Survives Its Controversy

Thirty-five years later, The Last Temptation of Christ is available on Blu-ray, streams on various platforms, and is taught in film courses around the world. The protests have faded. The threats have ended. What remains is a film.

Whether that film is a masterpiece or a noble failure depends on the viewer. Its pacing is undeniably slow, its dialogue sometimes stilted, its ambitions occasionally greater than its execution. But its sincerity is unmistakable. Scorsese genuinely wanted to explore what it might feel like to be both God and man, to know you must die for humanity's sake while possessing every human instinct toward survival.

He made that exploration at enormous personal cost, enduring years of hostility from people who believed they were defending their faith. The irony is that Scorsese himself is a product of Catholic education, deeply influenced by religious imagery since childhood. He wasn't attacking Christianity. He was wrestling with it.

Perhaps that's what made the film so threatening. A straightforward attack can be dismissed. A sincere question demands an answer.