The films of writer-director Abel Ferrara have a reputation as raw, guttervantaged works of alternately roughshod and lyrical street poetry, cinema as eternally associated with the crackling livewire energy of pre-Giuliani New York City as the director himself. And while that certainly may be true of a number of entries in the first half of his career—such as his feature film debut The Driller Killer (1979), the rape-revenge cult classic Ms. 45 (1981), the neo-noir gangster epic King of New York (1990), the incendiary noirodrama character piece Bad Lieutenant (1992), and the vampire flick/dependence metaphor The Addiction (1995)—it’s only part of Ferrara’s cinematic story and vision. His filmography traverses numerous styles and tones, exploding from goregunked exploitation movies to harrowing character dramas, from documentaries to sci-fi films, from crime joints to romantic thrillers, from biographical films to bleak-black noir. Binding them all, though, is the same searching ethos—a daring, uncompromising curiosity about/willingness to explore the moral ambiguities of modern living, and to reflect that (sometimes risky, always exciting) search through his genre-deconstructing/reconstructing films.
It should come as no surprise then that Ferrara’s new memoir, Scene, similarly deconstructs the very idea of the autobiography, stripping it down to its atomic core and rebuilding it as a razorwired and rakish look back at a life and career lived on the Edge. Written in the wry and at-times defiant, at-times melancholic voice of an eternal seeker-survivor, each chapter—with headings like “Kubrick,” “Crack,” and “California”—plays out like a Ferrara film, balancing extremity and poignance alike in its mosaic of memories. Scene purposefully drifts back and forth throughout his life, looking at his loves, his alcohol and drug addictions, his journey through a film industry that could not control him, and his extraordinarily powerful art.
This memoir also presents us with a Ferrara—now a practicing Buddhist who’s lived in Rome for the last 12 years with his wife, his young daughter, and his sobriety—who is still curious and craving to create. Less a period at the end of his career than it is an ellipsis leading to whatever comes next, Scene serves as the latest entry in a body of work that remains dangerously, thrillingly alive.
Ferrara recently spoke with Bright Wall/Dark Room from Rome about Scene (out now via Simon & Schuster), his films, and his life as an artist.
Travis Woods: How’s Rome treating you these days?
Abel Ferrara: Rome’s good, man. It’s a cool city, you know? It’s beautiful and the people have got the right attitude.
TW: I’m in the States right now, so I’m a little jealous. It’s stressful here, man.
AF: It’s a test, bro. Just take it as a test. Where you at?
TW: Los Angeles.
AF: Oh alright, OK, ground zero.
TW: Let me get the schmoozing out of the way: This is the best memoir I’ve read in years. It’s so fucking bracing and sad and funny and exciting—
AF: [laughs]
TW: —and soon as I hit that final page, I just rolled right back to page one, chapter one, and started reading it all over again.
AF: I wish I could’ve wrote more for you!
TW: Well, there’s always time for a volume two.
Scene ends with you writing that ever since humanity lived in caves, we’ve found our roles. Some hunt, some gather, some cook, and some—you include yourself in this group—need to be at the cave wall with a chisel, carving a story into stone. Once I finished that ending, I rolled back to the first page where you’re 23 years old, shattered by a romantic breakup, with your guitar and your student film under your arm. Just kicked out into the world by your girl with nothing left but a hunger to create something. And what struck me about that is how it’s always been about the chisel and the cave and the next story for you. How have you maintained that?
AF: Well how could you not? It’s not about how do you maintain it, it’s how do you shut it down? Which I’m not interested in doing, you dig? It’s something that I have. We each have our gift, and mine is storytelling. Filmmaking is one side of it. The book, that’s another way of doing the same thing. There’s a lot of writing inherent in making films; they all start as words on paper. There’s no way around that—the tried and true way is writing something as a starting point.
TW: Your memoir really plays with structure. You didn’t start with “Hi, I was born in 1951 to Ma and Pa Ferrara”—
AF: [laughs]
TW: –and instead you start with that breakup with Nadia in 1974, before you’d made your first feature. What about that moment for you—just before you became a professional filmmaker—needed to be the Big Bang of Scene?
AF: I just wanted to get into the filmmaking, you know? On one hand, I knew I was going to go back to my childhood. I was going to write about growing up, definitely, and where I came from, and the people in my life and my family. But I just wanted to get to the place of, hey, I’m a professional filmmaker, you know what I mean? It’s my gig. It’s how I support the people that need me, how I fulfill my social responsibility as well as…what’s the word? Search my art out?
TW: Catharsis.
AF: It’s always interesting in these autobiographies, how these cats got from zero to one. How to get from one to 10, that’s another thing, but how do you go from zero to one?
TW: The first step.
AF: For a lot of us American filmmakers, it’s that point where you had to learn how to make films. Now the kids are slamming at seven, eight—my daughter made a kick-ass movie at seven a few years ago, just because they’ve got the camera, they got the iPhone, they got the iPad, you know? OK. [My generation] had to come to terms with equipment that was only presented to us at a certain point. It was like…you know, becoming a doctor, you can’t just start operating with a switchblade, you need the kind of equipment that was at university, but being in university is not being in the real world, man. So I wanted to start [Scene] right there.
And so that [breakup] was my start. I could have stayed out in the country. I could have married Nadia. Had a bunch of kids together. You know, people do that. They literally have 50-year marriages and are happy every fuckin day. But she wasn’t going to have that with me! Maybe she had it with somebody else, but that wasn’t happening with me. My journey took us in another direction.
TW: I found it thrilling as a reader, how your journey through the book isn’t built around, “ok here’s what happened on my first movie, here’s what happened on my second movie,” and so on. One of the great surprises of the book is how it drifts back and forth in time, like a wave of associative memories hitting you. It reminded me a little of your film Dangerous Game (1993), the way that movie fucked with form and structure to tell a more thematic narrative than a chronological one.
AF: I definitely did not want to go from one film to another. I’m not going to do all 35 different films! It’s not what I was trying to get to. It wasn’t going to be about that. Filmmaking is part of my life, but it’s not all of my life, you know? So it centered around the women in my life, and certain films, but certain films for certain reasons. Even writing a book that’s a memoir, at a certain point, like when you’re writing a script or when you’re doing fiction, it’s like the character now has a life of his own, you know? And once this character Abel started the drug journey, then it became…well, there was no going backwards on that. They say it’s a progressive disease and it is, and you’re progressing deeper into it. And so then the structure started going up the river, you know what I mean? It’s going to get crazier, that’s just the way it was and the way it is.
TW: You’ve said cinema is a form of confession for you, and that’s certainly borne out in films like Dangerous Game (which depicts Ferrara’s divorce from his first wife inside a fictional film-within-a film framework), Tommaso (Ferrara’s 2019 semi-autobiographical film about a director living in Rome)—and hell, even The Driller Killer (in which he also starred as a frustrated, spree-killing painter) is about a struggling young artist like you once were. Cinema is confession, sure, but it’s often through a lot of veils and filters—you’re expressing your feelings but they’re couched in character, performed by actors, in a production crewed up with 20 or 50 or 100 people. But a book, that’s just you and the snowblind-white page. That’s pure confession. Was that terrifying, working without the veils you’re used to?
AF: No, because we’re always trying to get beyond the veil with the films. So when we’re at Tommaso, we’re trying to get as honest as we can, and use character and story to try to get even closer to what we’re feeling and try to express what’s making us all the things that we are, and being fucked up as part of it. I’m not talking fucked up like drugs and alcohol. I’m just talking about a way of living, the human experience and trying to navigate it and to learn from it and use it as therapy.
So once I decided to do the book, I wasn’t going to just do it. I needed to do it 100%. It was as honest as I could remember. It’s not fiction. It’s memory. But then again, Tommaso is memory. A lot of Dangerous Game is memory. A lot of those other films—Padre Pio (2022), Pasolini (2014)—they’re real people. Welcome to New York (2014). They’re about real people. I make documentaries. too. So we’re approaching it all as a way to find the truth, whether we’re using the camera and actors or we’re using paragraph structure to get to the clarity of what it is.
There’s great writers out there, bro. They’re really eloquent and I know I’m not one of them [laughs]. The camera, that’s a little bit more my thing. But it’s still a desire to get at the heart of the matter, at the truth of our feelings and our relationships and the day-to-day reality of living life.
TW: The great fucked-up-ness of it all, and finding a truth in that.
AF: Yeah, and it’s on life’s terms. It’s a bitch, man. You were talking about how right now it’s coming at you really hard politically with all that stuff in America. But hey, I’m old, bro. I remember Richard Nixon, OK? I remember that shit. I remember Ronald Reagan. There’s a long history of this kind of behavior. I try to remind myself every day: We shall overcome. I think the country’s too strong. We made it this far. But then, I’m living in a city that’s 3,000 years old. When people lay all this shit on me about America, I’m saying, man, give me a break. It’s 300 years old, right? When we get to 3,000, we’ll get it fuckin’ right.
TW: Talking about getting things right, there’s a line in your book—“You can’t live in regret, but how do you live with that?”— with “that” referring to the consequences of your addictions wreaking havoc on your family, on your life. I haven’t been able to shake that line from my head. And since we’re discussing storytelling as therapy and as truth, can you tell me—how do you live with regret?
AF: I come to terms with the people that I fucked over, number one. If they’re still alive, if I can still do it. [That line] was talking about my family, and they’re still alive. So I could do it with my daughters who are older, who lived through that. And I have a 10-year-old now. She’s never seen me anything but sober. I’m living my amends through her, to them.
You just move. You got to move forward because you can’t change the past. You can only live in the present. And you just try to make it as full and bright and be as righteous as you can be. But it’s rough, man. You know, we’re human beings and we have a lot of temptation.
TW: In your chapter on the making of Bad Lieutenant, you mention how you’re seen as a filmmaker who makes films about redemption. But you say it like you’re scoffing at that interpretation of you, like you don’t quite buy it.
When I watch your films, whether it’s something like the vampire flick The Addiction or something like Tommaso, it seems to me you’re someone who makes films about guilt, the necessity of guilt as an engine of change. But what kind of filmmaker is Abel Ferrara to you?
AF: It depends on the material, depends on the actor and depends on a million things. Redemption, it’s not that I scoff at it…There’s a line in the book: Redemption is a journey. It’s not a destination. It’s not a place. You know, you don’t arrive at redemption—“I’m redeemed!” You’re living from second to second and moment to moment. So you could be in the midst of redeeming, right? Yeah. But it’s not a place to arrive at because it’s day by day. You live breath by breath, moment by moment, day by day. All of us do. All of us.
That’s what the Buddhist practice is: You focus on the breath. You live in one breath at a time. With the sobriety, the mantra is one day at a time. But you really live in one breath at a time, one moment at a time. OK? So in this moment, we’re trying to make amends for the fucking shit, for the people we’ve hurt and things we’ve done wrong, actively in the moment that we’re living, to help us to get to another moment.
TW: And any life that goes on long enough, like a story, is gonna find the ghosts who haunt it. And it feels very much like your book, your story, is haunted by the ghosts of your father (a gambling addict who intentionally overdosed in 1980), and of Zoë Lund (the star of Ferrara’s Ms. 45 who died in 1999 due to drug-related heart failure). And both of them seemed to convene in Bad Lieutenant: Zoë co-wrote and co-starred in it, and its title character in a lot of ways mirrored the addictions of your father. I mean, the whole movie is this self-destructive cop who has to double down, triple down, quadruple down on everything in his life until it kills him.
AF: It dawned on me while writing this book, how much that character was based on my father…Some people, sports gambling is a big fucking aspect of life. Being the son of a gambling addict, I wouldn’t bet on a 50-cent lottery ticket, you dig? It’s a joke to me, it’s for suckers.
And Zoë brought a lot to that film, but she don’t know baseball.
TW: Last night’s game (2025’s World Series Game 3, in which the L.A. Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays went 18 innings and nearly seven hours) would have driven the Bad Lieutenant fucking insane.
AF: I mean, it was like every one of those innings began with somebody on second base and nobody got a run for fuckin nine innings!
TW: Bad Lieutenant would have gunned down his TV.
AF: You watch sports movies, if you know anything about sports, they’re mostly bullshit. Zoë, she understood what Darryl Strawberry represented in Bad Lieutenant. Something beyond a sports hero. Like how there’s as many statues of [famed Argentine soccer player Diego] Maradona in Napoli as there are of Padre Pio, or Jesus, you dig what I mean? So we wanted to make a film righteous to that.
TW: You bring up Italian art…you’ve lived in Rome for years, but I think you’re always going to be seen as a New York filmmaker. You’re a New York guy. It’s in your voice, it’s in your blood. Yet I feel like in the “Rome period” of your life you’ve made some of your bravest, most personal, and most eclectic films. Like Tommaso—I keep mentioning it because it’s a fucking masterpiece. How influential has Rome been upon you as an artist who has been defined for so long by New York?
AF: It’s a beautiful city, light-wise. And New York is, too. You know, you got to find it. You find the kind of beauty that matches what you’re going for, you know? New York’s a beautiful city in its whole varied thing. Here, it’s the light, it’s the buildings, it’s a culture, it’s the belief in art. And it’s not just the paintings, it’s not just the Sistine Chapel. There’s a sense of history and there’s a sense of the future—nothing’s just slapped up. Nothing is temporary. They ain’t building things just to build them. And they’re not changing things just to change them. And that’s just ingrained in the day-to-day beauty of the place and the people.
TW: And do you feel that sway of past and future permanence influencing your work now?
AF: Well, I’m filming here. I’m shooting here, you know? I’m using Italy [in the films]. Hell, Willem [Dafoe, a frequent Ferrara collaborator] is living in Italy. He’s married to an Italian woman, he’s more Italian than anyone, you dig what I mean?
I could see going back to New York. We do these crazy films. We went to Ukraine and shot there (the 2024 documentary Turn in the Wound, about art created during wartime). And then we made the film in Alabama (1993’s Body Snatchers). We work a lot in L.A. (Dangerous Game). L.A. is beautiful, too, but you gotta know it, you gotta commit to it. You don’t roll into town and do location scouts for three weeks. You got to live there. You got to die there. You know, To Live and Die in L.A.
I know a lot in the book was like a dark part of my life in L.A. But L.A. is a beautiful fuckin place. How it runs from downtown to the beach? Fuckin forget it! It’s like that here, too: Rome is a big city. Same thing with New York. Fifteen million stories in the naked city, whose New York do you want to know about?
TW: Or whose Rome? Like Pier Pasolini’s Rome, which you captured [in Pasolini]. You chronicled the last days of his life before he was killed, between his making of Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom and what would have been his next film, PORNO-TEO-KOLOSSAL—that’s the chapter of his life you chose to focus on. If someone were to make a movie called Ferrara, which chapter out of Scene, featuring the making of one of your films, would make the most interesting movie?
AF: Who knows? Depends on the point of view of the filmmaker. With Pasolini, we could have took any month of his life and it would have been a great film. It was varied. It was crazy…He came at the beginning of the Italian New Wave, the neo-realist films, and he was essential in it. And there’s his life as a fuckin’ famous filmmaker and then everything else he was. A journalist, a writer, a political leader, a fuckin’ poet, a novelist. But it felt like we needed to film his death, you know? Because even he said: Through someone’s death, their life comes into perspective. I knew we needed that. And we had just come off 4:44 Last Day on Earth (2011) with Willem [Dafoe], which was basically 35 or 36 hours in somebody’s life. That structure was strong for us. So Pasolini, we just backed up 36 hours [from Pasolini’s murder].
TW: You mention using death as a form of clarity—in 4:44, you end the whole fucking world (in the film, everyone on Earth awaits a deadly solar flare that is coming to consume the planet the next day).
AF: I didn’t even realize the ramifications…how the point of that movie becomes everything is gone. All the paintings, all the books, all everything. Goodbye, everything.
TW: All those cave carvings. You ended the world, Abel!
AF: OK, so that’s pretty evil. I didn’t think of that consciously, I didn’t even realize that til the film was in the editing room.
TW: What are you working on now, while the world’s still here?
AF: I’m working on a gangster film with Asia [Argento] that we’re going to shoot in Italy, in a town called Bari. It’s called American Nails.
TW: When the two of you are working together, like New Rose Hotel (1998), I’m happy.
AF: She’s at her peak. So we’ll see what happens. She plays a gangster.
TW: We gotta wrap this up. There’s this moment near the end of the book. You’re in a French courtroom because of your film Welcome to New York (an angry, lurid indictment of French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who in 2011 was accused of attempted rape by hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo in New York City; Strauss-Kahn later took Ferrara to court). As you’re being put through the wringer for having made the film, and having to testify about it, you make an aside to us, your readers, about talking to the State: “Nobody ever got in trouble keeping their fucking mouth shut.” I appreciated the irony of closing out a 300-page memoir with that line.
AF: [Laughs] Yeah, that’s funny.
TW: That case, man…
AF: You know, we based that film on her [Diallo’s] testimony. Strauss-Kahn had the best lawyer you could buy…And we’re representing her. You read what I had to go through to get that chick’s voice out because nobody wanted to hear it. They just don’t want to hear what this one African woman said. And this is right at the birth of the Me Too movement.
TW: It’s like you said earlier—using the work to get at the truth. Amidst the great fucked-up-ness of it all.
AF: Yeah, that was a cool film.
Alright, man, I gotta go. Thanks for all the nice things you’ve been sayin, bro. Keep pushin the book [laughs]. I’m kiddin, I know you already have. Good luck to ya, man.
[This interview has been edited for clarity and length]