EPB 005: Acts Etcetera

Paul Maliszewski, author of the story collection, Prayer and Parable (2011), and the cultural study, Fakers (2008), interviews Hal upon the publication of his screenplay, Acts.

What drew you to the story of Paul the Apostle?

First, but not foremost: I chose Paul as my confirmation name in the fourth grade. But the sisters were on to us by then and knew us boys (in 1966 or so) were angling to chose a saint’s name that was also the name of one of the Beatles. If one of us chose John, Paul or George we had to write a much longer essay about our veneration of this particular saint…

Much later though, when my reading life began, I couldn’t help noticing how much he was referenced. Even in secular writing. In common phrases like “through a glass darkly.” When I was about eighteen, I found a discarded copy of Erik H. Erikson’s Young Man Luther, which was subtitled “a study in psychoanalysis and history.” It was way above my reading level at the time, but I worked my way through it. Something about this analysis of a representative “gifted young man,” Martin Luther, helped me learn about the world I was moving through; what people are like; power structures; when certain people find themselves at a specific point the perfect vehicle for some world changing initiative… Erikson considers Luther’s identification with Paul’s evangelical mission as well as his talents for organizing, for conceptualizing. It’s a book I returned to in my thirties when I was writing Henry Fool (for the analysis of a gifted young man like Simon Grim) and Soon (where I needed to understand the deepest beginnings of eschatological Christian beliefs). By then I had also become very involved with the writing of Simone Weil, to whom Paul is very important too. I spent years trying to write a bio-pic about her when I gave up and, following indications in her writings, decided what I needed to do was write about Paul.

However, in 1988, after seeing the opening day screening in New York of Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, me and my friends hung around for hours in a bar arguing the relative merits of the film and so on. We were all filmmakers. None of us were religious—although one of us would become so soon after. But we’d all been brought up in either Catholicism or some form of Protestant religion. I guess we were trading ideas about how each one of us would approach a telling of the life of Christ. That was the first time I thought, “No, the right way to treat this subject is to focus on Paul.” Because that was the thing that struck me about Scorsese’s film: Paul (played by the excellent Harry Dean Stanton) is accosted by an elderly Jesus (who is still under a spell by Satan and doesn’t know he is, in fact, at that very moment, crucified up on Golgotha) and tells the man he’s all wrong, that he, Jesus, got over his youthful enthusiasms and just got on with a normal life. That was provocative enough. But then Stanton’s response actually made me stand up out of my seat. To paraphrase: “Well, who cares if you’re Jesus or not? My interpretation of you is great and it’s going to save mankind!” I like to point out that I have Saint Paul proclaiming the words of Don Quixote at the end of the story.

Why Quixote? What has that book meant to you?

The quest narrative. From the start, I read The Acts of the Apostles as a quest narrative, not unlike all the romances the don’s head is filled with. But, also, scholars have pointed out that whoever wrote Acts (the writer we call Luke) had probably read The Odyssey. The Acts, in Greek, uses poetic formulations recognizable from Homer to describe ships and the sea and all that. But—anyway—it’s not just that the don is nuts. Cervantes has him say some pretty beautiful and insightful things even from deep within his delusion. If Paul wasn’t in fact beheaded in Rome (and there is still some argument about this), he might have done what he wrote about and gone off to preach to the Spaniards. I sort of play it both ways in the script. His trip to Spain is Luke’s conjecture. But once I decided I’d follow him to Spain, I couldn’t see him as anyone but Don Quixote. With a new assistant named Sancho and a busted up motorbike with sidecar.

Don Quixote was pretty formative with me. In my senior year at film school, I did an independent study in it with my chief literature advisor, Bob Stein. At the same time, over in the film department, I was doing an independent study of the Western movie with my film history advisor, Tom Gunning. The paper I eventually wrote for Bob conflated Don Quixote and the American road movie. And, similarly, my paper for Tom on the Western—a comparison of Ford’s The Searchers and Hawks’ Red River—considered the quest narrative traditions and how they changed as used in conveying the conquest of the American West.

I remember when Last Temptation came out, and it was met with so many protests—preceded by them really. The Christian right was coming into their own.

Opening day at the Ziegfeld in NYC was wild. We waited for hours in a line stretching around the block. There were police dogs sniffing for bombs. Catholic priests and nuns and regular Catholics kneeling in prayer on the far sidewalk. Of course, I had followed all the controversy about Godard’s Hail Mary a few years before. But I had not been present at these kinds of sit-ins. In any event, had no idea of right or left Christianity. (Hail Mary, by the way, has been a major influence on the way I conceived The Book of Life and Acts.)

In The Book of Life, belief feels like a need, like food or water. It’s part of life; it’s not just a set of elaborate symbolic rituals occurring in a church; it’s outside, in the streets, at the airport, in offices. Is this how you think of belief, personally, in your life?

It was conceived differently, as unhistorical, with gods and devils existing in the world, and all the characters moving through the story accepting that the world is miraculous, even if they are pretty blasé about it. It’s more like Greek mythology—Zeus and Athena buzzing around between mortals… causing trouble, righting wrongs… It gave me a freedom to talk about ideas very directly because I didn’t have to worry about sounding naturalistic.

On the other hand, the impulse to write Acts was more about history. I needed to convey the continuity of the human train wreck and our occasional moments of grace, genius, and foresight. Reading the Epistles (and Saint Augustine too, for instance), I felt I was reading about today—these people were the same as we are today. It might have been as simple as that: to illustrate how close two thousand years ago is to our present situation. And certainly I think the codification of the Hebrew religion—and the eventual Christian offshoot of it—laid the groundwork for the contemporary West.

But belief doesn’t play much of a part in my life. I recall reading somewhere a rabbi explaining one wasn’t a Jew because of what one believed. One was a Jew by virtue of the things (the acts, a list of ethical principles) one was willing to undertake. It was a religion of doing rather than believing. (In fact, this was Rabbi Hyam Maccoby referenced in Karen Armstrong’s memoir, The Spiral Staircase.) I use whatever helps from any tradition. Buddhist thought provides me various mental tools to help navigate the world. But I get the same message about the importance of practical empathy from all over. Islam, Christianity, Judaism… I don’t subscribe to any particular religion. But I’ve always responded to the poetry in the monotheisms.

Talking about ideas without worrying about strict naturalism runs through your work. Was it hard for you to make that break?

Not at all. In the films, plays, and novels I stumbled upon, I responded to contrivance that addressed reality. From Moliere to Beckett and Brecht for me were very short steps. From the moment I started writing, I liked (though I could never have said this at 20) this dynamic between a consideration of the natural world presented in a patently artificial manner. It wasn’t just an ease. It felt necessary.

I was thinking about the lines in The Unbelievable Truth, “Are you a priest? / No, I'm a mechanic.” Josh is repeatedly mistaken for a priest, which on one hand you can think, Well, he seems like he could be a priest, he wears black and has that air about him. Or you can think, These people need a priest, they’re looking for someone, or for something. What connections do you see between the pieces in this book and your other films?

I think even my earliest films always presented American culture as a place bereft of a spiritual charge, crowded with superficial enthusiasms righteously held and that, in particular, a kind of asceticism is introduced with certain characters. Josh in The Unbelievable Truth, for sure, Maria in Trust (very obviously an ascetic penitent), the younger brother, Dennis, in Simple Men… But the lines in The Unbelievable Truth that, these days, shout out to me are when the girl, Audrey, insists that if she weren’t going to college, she’d be a carpenter. “Jesus was a carpenter. He was a radical. I like radicals!” For me, asceticism and spirituality have always been aligned. And they are most often seen to be radical by the mainstream culture. This, in my work, continues all the way up to Ned Rifle in 2014. But these three scripts in this book are the only times I’ve made religious tradition the subject of a piece.

Soon was inspired by the 1993 standoff in Waco, Texas, between the Branch Davidians and the federal government and the ensuing tragedy. How was it to read that play again, in light of the present-day?

The events at Waco occurred when I was 32 and I was finally—after a very slow and circuitous process of learning about politics, history, the law, capitalism, and various religious traditions—able to see the catastrophe as a kind of emblem of everything I find worrisome about the United States of America: maximum freedom of belief (religious or otherwise) and maximum access to firearms. I was also intrigued by how common this type of conflict has been throughout the history of Christianity. Different denominations of Christians have repeatedly insisted there is a law higher than secular law and come into conflict with civil society (or even within the church—like the Albigensians). As I got deeper into writing, Soon was as much about American political and cultural assumptions as it was about trends in Christianity. It was intended to be as current as possible because I felt battles like this are much more part of the fabric of American civil society, now, than they are elsewhere. Still, I needed to understand what the Branch Davidians believed and what were the antecedents to that belief system. I spent a lot of time reading about the Great Awakening and what followed it up through the 19th century, the Millerites, Seventh-Day Adventism and so on. And, of course, these different Christian sects tend to go back to Paul, often reading him out of context and using passages to justify all sorts of ideas of their own. But in reading all that, I became more and more interested in Paul himself.

What were you reading and watching that contributed to your awakening to politics?

Peter Brook’s film of his staging of Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade, principally (1966). And the most obvious thing I took from it in making Soon was that characters would be attempting to perform a play about historical events. I’ve told this story a lot, so forgive me if I’m repeating myself, but I had Marat/Sade out from the video rental store so much from 1988 till around 1991, that they just let me have it. No one else asked for it! But that play about revolution, counterrevolution, and individuals’ needs apart from political action—it hit me at a point where I knew just enough about history that it organized my thinking about civil society in a fresh and exciting way—not necessarily comforting—but useful, energizing. I felt a little less hapless in this world. —May 23, 2022

Paul Maliszewski’s books can also be found on Amazon: Prayer and Parable and Fakers

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