More than 110 film titles from the days of silent movies to the present have told the life of Jesus. It is impossible to name a few without wronging the large number of great filmmakers who have tried their hand at narrating the figure of Christ over the decades.
Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth came out in 1977, long after Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Matthew and a few years after Roberto Rossellini’s musical Jesus Christ Superstar and Messiah.
It was followed by Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ and much more recently Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.
Of all the film versions, Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth is the one that has been the most widely circulated and the one that has been most prominent in the collective imagination, marking several generations of viewers.
From March 27 to April 24, 1977, RAI, in its first year of color broadcasting, sent the five episodes of Jesus of Nazareth in prime time: “The Nativity,” “The Advent of the Son of Man,” “The Choice of the Apostles,” “The Preaching,” and “The Passion and Death.”
“With Palm Sunday came the long-awaited telecast of the Jesus of Nazareth and, inevitably, I was caught up in the whirlwind of excitement and enthusiasm that erupted everywhere. The Jesus was broadcast in America, England and Italy, at different times during the Easter season. Other countries and other dates followed, but everywhere the ratings were astronomical. In Italy, almost eighty percent of the population followed the episodes. And for the first time, the Pope hinted at a television program in the message sent to the world that same Sunday, from the window of his study: Tonight you will see an example of the good use that can be made of the new means of communication that God offers mankind, Paul VI announced.” FZ
Despite initially opting for Ingmar Bergman, in the end producers Lew Grade for ITC-Incorporated Television Company and Vincenzo Labella for Rai – Radiotelevisione Italiana chose Zeffirelli for the colossal television production of Jesus of Nazareth. Certainly not without risks, it would, however, have been able to offer a more detailed narrative and a much wider fruition, reaching millions of viewers of different religious orientations and different cultural backgrounds right in their homes.
The production obtained the approval of the Vatican, which saw in the operation the possibility of popularizing Christ’s life in light of the lines drawn by the Second Vatican Council. The latter, among many openings, had in fact established that, at the level of doctrine, the word of God should be historicized, opening up the possibility of interpreting sacred texts, linking them to modern times.
Lew Grade, an English impresario and producer, had known and appreciated Zeffirelli from the Old Vic years particularly during the staging of Saturday Sunday and Monday . When it came to deciding to whom to entrust the difficult task, Lew Grade, of the Jewish religion, had no doubts pointing to the Italian Catholic Zeffirelli, a director so beloved by English audiences.
But he was not easily convinced:
“It was while I was working at La Scala [Ballo in maschera, 1972] that my agent, Dennis van Thal, called me from London, to tell me that my name was first on the list of possible directors for a grandiose film on the life of Christ, destined for televisions all over the world… He expected me to jump for joy; instead, I accepted the proposal with a thousand doubts and difficulties. […] Now I wanted to deal with other projects, one in particular on Dante’s Inferno, which was very close to my heart. Bringing the life of Jesus to the screen, then, scared me just thinking about it.” FZ
Zeffirelli agreed to make the film with the clear intention of making it a colossal didactic operation, the historically and theologically detailed account of the life of Christ.
Therefore, his first and unquestionable request was to have the highest experts in theology (Christian and Jewish) as advisers during the film. The first draft of the screenplay was entrusted to the English Catholic writer Anthony Burgess, already the author of A Clockwork Orange and in 1976 of The Man from Nazareth. It was he who plotted in a race against time the scansion into episodes.
Suso Cecchi D’Amico and Masolino D’Amico took over for the fine-tuning of the screenplay el Gesù di Nazareth, with the contribution of Franco Zeffirelli himself and the advice of Pier Emilio Gennarini, very close to Ettore Bernabei, RAI’s general director at the time.
Underlying Zeffirelli’s reading is the observation that Jesus was a Jew: convinced by Lew Grade’s fervor and Paul VI’s encyclical Nostra Aetate: “Lew never ceased to surprise me by his passionate devotion to the project. A project, as I once allowed myself to tell him, which, dealing with the figure of Jesus, was not exactly everyday bread for a Jew. “Not true!” he had replied briskly. “Jesus is as much ours as he is yours, his story is our story: we created him!”
Zeffirelli’s Jesus is thus first and foremost a man of his time, a Jew born in an occupied land torn by internal strife.
Filming for Nazarteh’s Jesus, which will last more than nine months, will be preceded by more than a year of surveys between Israel and North Africa. But it was in Morocco and Tunisia that Zeffirelli was able to locate the sites of the Gospel.
So it was for Bethlehem, recreated in Tinghir in Morocco and, scouted almost by chance, for Nazareth in Fertassa. Monastir then offered its watchtower to the Antonia Tower home of the Roman garrison, Golgotha opposite, and the imposing setting of the Temple of Jerusalem was propped on its walls. And then Ouarzarate for Herod’s palace.
The difficult search for locations was added to the difficult choice of cast: “In the Gospels there is never a ‘physical’ description of the characters.”
“At first we thought of making the program with little-known actors, according to the reasonable fear that too well-known faces would bring with them memories of other roles, perhaps not in line with the film about Jesus.[…] But I ended up rejecting even this thesis, not because I wanted to fill my film with stars, but because the best of the profession was needed. I wanted every part to be given to a recognized master of theater and film.”
It was Laurence Olivier who was the first to ask to participate in Zeffirelli’s big production. He, a true authority in the world of theater and cinema, was followed by the biggest stars of the day, all of whom were hired with a symbolic cachet, equal to that of the great British actor, who had passionately agreed to play the role of Nicodemus.
Anthony Quinn for Caiaphas, Peter Ustinov for Herod, Christopher Plummer for Herod Antipas, James Mason for Joseph of Arimathea, Michael York (formerly Lucentius in Zeffirelli’s Shrew and Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet) for John the Baptist, Ian Holm for Zerah, Cyril Cusack for Yehuda, Ernest Borgnine for the centurion, Stacy Keach for Barabbas, Anne Bankroft for Magdalene, Rod Steiger for Pilate, Ian McShane for Judas, Claudia Cardinale for the adulteress, Valentina Cortese for Herodias, Regina Bianchi for Anna, Marina Berti for Elizabeth, Maria Carta for Martha, Renato Rascel for the born blind man.
Even entrusting the difficult role of Mary was not an easy matter. The assistant director, now president of the Zeffirelli Foundation Pippo Zeffirelli, was tasked with looking for that classic and intense face the Maestro wanted for his film about Jesus of Nazareth. After many auditions without a satisfactory outcome, the choice fell on the very young Olivia Hussey, the wonderful Juliet of 10 years earlier. To the extraordinary Italian makeup artists Franco Zeffirelli relied to age her face during the final scenes of the film.
After rejecting Al Pacino’s candidacy, Franco Zeffirelli chose Robert Powell who had applied for the part of Judas.
“Among the many auditions I was doing almost daily, I called to Rome for the difficult part of Judas a very good actor I had seen in the theater in London, Robert Powell. A fairly ordinary little fellow, but with two breathtaking blue eyes. I immediately thought he would make an interesting Judas, but my cameraman, who was also fascinated by those eyes, remarked, “If Judas has these eyes, what eyes must Jesus have?”… We worked very hard to get him ready: long hair, makeup, clothes, lighting. When everything was ready, and Powell was already captivating us, I called a seamstress for the final touches to the costume. The woman, who had not yet seen Powell, suddenly found him in front of her and, overcome with emotion, fell to her knees exclaiming, “Lord!” And she made the sign of the cross. We understood that we had found “our Jesus.” FZ
Starting with costume designers Marcel Escoffier and Enrico Sabbatini and set designer Gianni Quaranta, Franco Zeffirelli is aware of the fortunate combination of talents that makes up his équip:e
“We had a magnificent équipe. I had been working with many for years, some I had helped to step up when they were young, and they had done their internship with me, each in their own field. But one person, above all, contributed more than any other to leave his imprint on the film-David Watkin, lighting operator and creator. Having lost my previous operator, Armando Nannuzzi, who had gone to be a director, I was lucky enough to find David. It was he who created that atmosphere evocative of the paintings of the old masters, an atmosphere of intense, warm colors struck by sudden light. Each scene thus became an auteur painting, accompanying the pacing of the acting and drama.”
“David undoubtedly got the best results with the scenes in the Temple, when the Sanhedrin gathers under Caiaphas to interrogate Christ. Among the many memorable moments in the film, that was for all of us the key moment of our two years of work, because of the stature of the stars who participated: Anthony Quinn as Caiaphas, Olivier and James Mason among the Pharisees. It was also meant to be a kind of trial by fire for Robert Powell, as if on the stand, before that jury of great actors, he was the defendant.”
Crucifixion from partisan memories
Franco Zeffirelli often draws on his own youthful memories to construct scenes for his films.
Thus, just as Jesus is executed by the cruel occupier and executioner, so many friends and fellow partisans were unjustly killed during the Nazi occupation that Zeffirelli lived through as a partisan beginning in 1943.
“When I shot the crucifixion scene in my Jesus, the horror of that morning [after a Nazi reprisal] returned to my heart: a mother prostrate on the ground weeping for her dead son, hanging like a Christ from the wood of a tree, with German soldiers marching relentlessly like Roman centurions.”