Three weeks before filming was to commence on Bad Lieutenant, Abel Ferrara‘s pitch-dark 1992 crime masterpiece, the director had a problem.
His leading man, Christopher Walken, had decided he couldn’t play the bad lieutenant. And Ferrara had already spent his salary.
“I had two kids at the time. I had fucking houses. I had a drug addiction. I had fucking chicks on the side,” Ferrara tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I spent it on every motherfucking thing you could spend it on.”
Speaking from Rome for an upcoming episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s It Happened in Hollywood podcast, Ferrara revisited the precarious beginnings of his 1992 film, which ultimately starred Harvey Keitel as a corrupt New York detective careening through drugs, gambling and spiritual despair.
It is currently streaming as part of the Criterion Channel’s “Directed by Abel Ferrara” retrospective.
Walken had already starred in Ferrara’s King of New York (1990), playing a drug lord with ambitions to redistribute his fortune.
Ferrara still remembers their first meeting, when he and his writer were so nervous about hosting the Oscar winner that they rehearsed everything, down to what beverage to offer and whether to bring the children downstairs. Walken arrived, sat down and never took off his coat.
“Then he stood up and he said, ‘I know exactly what you guys want to do and I could give it to you,’” Ferrara recalls.
By Bad Lieutenant, the relationship was established. Ferrara was developing the film for Walken, and the two spent a week at the Chateau Marmont rehearsing and shaping the material. Back in New York, preparations were underway.
Getting that far had taken two years. Potential financiers struggled with the premise, particularly the idea that the title police officer himself was dealing crack. Even those who understood weren’t opening their wallets.
“I almost gave up on it,” Ferrara says. “I told Ed, ‘Let’s just fuck this. I can’t take it anymore.’”
Ed was producer Edward R. Pressman, who was sitting with Walken and Ferrara on a Saturday morning at the Chateau when the actor pulled out of the project just as easily as he committed to King of New York.
“He just says to the producer, ‘I know what Abel wants here. Now I really know what he wants, and I can’t give it to him. I can’t do this movie.’” Then Walken got up and left.
Ferrara remembers mentally running through a series of increasingly desperate responses. Pressman sat there for about two minutes before offering one of his own: “Should I go after him?”
The script next reached Keitel, whom Ferrara admired but had never met. That introduction didn’t go particularly well, either. “He read the first three pages and threw it in the fucking garbage, man,” Ferrara says.
The document was roughly 30 pages long, hardly a conventional screenplay. It took an intervention from actor Victor Argo, a Ferrara regular and close friend of Keitel’s, to get it another look.
“No, dude, get that thing out of that garbage,” Ferrara recalls Argo telling him.
What finally persuaded Keitel was a lengthy passage written by Ferrara’s collaborator Zoë Lund, who also plays a woman with whom the lieutenant mainlines heroine. The passage concerned the confession of the nun whose rape the detective investigates. Much of it didn’t survive into the finished film.
Keitel’s arrival meant discarding the work Ferrara and Walken had done together.
“All the whole week I rehearsed with Walken, all that shit went out the window,” he says.
The result became one of Keitel’s defining performances, and the film remains a frequent subject of conversation for its director.
“I’ve made 35 movies,” Ferrara says. “But with Bad Lieutenant, everyone’s like, that’s the only movie I ever made, or King of New York. I get that. That’s cool. I’m glad I made them.”
Ferrara’s full interview will air during season 10 of The Hollywood Reporter’s It Happened in Hollywood podcast.