Abel Ferrara

Abel Ferrara’s cinema has a very special violence. His films are soulful investigations—searches for structure, however tentative—that try to frame and narrativize the same mystery: the lunatic modern death-drive. Ferrara has continued this search since 1979’s The Driller Killer, about a Manhattan painter, played by Ferrara himself, driven so insane with capitalist urban stress that he starts to kill homeless people with a power drill. Since then he has been compelled by the worlds of a raped mute seamstress who takes up a .45 Magnum and starts targeting first rapists, then men in general (Ms. 45, 1981), of gangsters (King of New York, 1990), of philosophical vampires (The Addiction, 1995), and even of self-destructive Hollywood moviemakers (Dangerous Game, 1993). Ferrara has always been fascinated by the limits of reason and of images, and lately he has pushed his latest poetic works (Pasolini, 2014; Siberia, 2020; Tommaso, 2019; Zeros and Ones, 2021) toward these murky outer limits. Now, his latest documentary, Turn in the Wound (2024), has debuted on the Criterion Channel, continuing this late-artist trajectory. Billed by Criterion as “an intensely visceral, aesthetically bold personal response to the war in Ukraine” with “incantatory spoken-word performance art by punk priestess Patti Smith,” the film most resembles the productively unfinished work of one of Ferrara’s lodestars, Jean-Luc Godard (One Plus One, 1968; Ici et Ailleurs, 1976). Ferrara engages the viewer in a dialogue about images that have become globally commonplace—too much so—through Hollywood exportation, the Internet, and social media. He lets spectators dwell on what images of war really mean to them on a visceral level, beyond thinking in abstractions like “Ukraine versus Russia,” “humanity,” “tragedy,” and so forth.

Ferrara now lives in Rome, where he is, as of this writing, preparing his next film, American Nails, in Bari, Italy, with Asia Argento. In his words: “We’re taking the Phaedra myth and putting it in a modern gangster story, with Asia Argento playing Phaedra. It’s about addiction: an independent successful woman gangster has lost her mind for her underage nephew, and she’s ready to give up her whole world for him. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872) Nietzsche argues that Greek drama rose out of the fusion of two sets of elements: the Apollonian ones of measure, restraint, and harmony and the Dionysian ones of unbridled passion. The film deals with that conflict in our lead character, as well as in the film’s style, where I want to return to the more unbridled hardcore elements of King of New York or The Driller Killer.” Ferrara has also written a memoir of his life and career, Scene, to be published by Simon & Schuster in the fall of 2025.

I spoke to Ferrara over Zoom about Turn in the Wound, what it means to him personally, whether the human drive to destruction is natural or not, and his response to modern chaos.

Carlos ValladaresI’m really excited to talk to you. At the beginning of Turn in the Wound, Patti Smith talks right off the bat about the artist as a youngster versus an elder. She says that when you’re young you have the arrogance but not the confidence of an artist—and that later in life, though you trade off the former for the latter, you become like Piero della Francesca in his last years: blind. Having just seen your dazzling-as-hell Siberia (2020), I wonder if that was an idea running through your mind when you were making Turn in the Wound.

Abel FerraraWell, I’m a late artist, obviously. As late as you can get. As relates to Turn in the Wound, I got it together with Sean [Price Williams, the film’s cinematographer] and Phil Neilson, a dear friend and collaborator with whom I work on my narrative films. We made two separate trips to Ukraine, maybe twelve days altogether. We didn’t film the actual getting there but the trip itself was pretty crazy. You fly into Warsaw, they drive you to some border town, you get on a fuckin’ train in the middle of the night since flying is prohibited. Kiev itself is safe, theoretically—safe as you can be during a war.

It’s ironic that the reason we even went is that their government is run by filmmakers. [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy is in the film business, an actor that’s also a producer. His guys knew of me—I’d met them at different film festivals over the years.

Our documentary approach is always the same: start from zero, turn the cameras on, and let it come to us. We were free to go anywhere and speak to anybody we wanted. We didn’t go to the front line, which is hundreds of miles from Kiev. I’m not that courageous and I don’t want to risk getting guys I know killed. But in Kiev it’s still a war, and you can get hit by a random fuckin’ drone or missile at any time—especially when the Russians are firing at people and the places they live, as well as at military targets.

CVI’d never really seen the war from the perspective of the civilians and the utter confusion from their vantage point, how Russian soldiers aren’t coming in dressed as soldiers but in civilian garb.

AFThat’s their MO: terrorize the fuckin’ population. In the first weeks of this war the Russians were totally avoiding the Ukrainian military. Instead they were targeting their grandmothers, mothers, and the children of the soldiers, not the soldiers themselves. Their thinking is, if you terrorize the populace, the Ukrainian military will succumb. But it doesn’t work that easy there, because the Ukrainians as a people are tough and ready to fight. Man, this war gets distorted when it becomes a conversation about politics and history. That’s the disgrace of abstract philosophizing. You could have a million conversations about and around this—all the while, average, everyday people are getting fuckin’ slammed.

CVPart of it is that people feel like they have to abstract today. I’m twenty-eight and I’ve grown up with the dehumanizing abstractions inherent in social media, let alone as a privileged American thinking about Ukraine. I had to confront all that while watching this.

AFFor most Americans, the Ukrainians fighting the Russians is like Game of Thrones; they think they’re doing this on horses with swords and shit. Ukraine is so abstract to them, unless you’ve been in a war. And how many of us have? I haven’t. This is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a war. Unless you count living in New York in the ’70s and the ’80s [laughs].

During the shoot, our Ukrainian cameraman said to us, “The war in Ukraine is like 9/11 every fuckin’ day.” If you haven’t experienced that every fuckin’ day, you don’t know what you’re talking about. And if you’re not from there, you’re not going to get what the fight is, or what they’re fighting for. There’s a million armed guys there and they know what they’re fighting for. And it’s not just for Zelenskyy but for their idea of freedom and sovereignty.

The film is predominantly focused on the events of the first weeks of the war. The invasion happened in February; we arrived in August and went to Bucha to talk to the people who lived through it.

CVAnd the Patti Smith footage—was that before or after you’d decided to go to Ukraine?

AFIt was during. The Patti stuff was its own separate documentary shot during the same eighteen-month period. So in the editing room we were cutting Patti in the morning and Ukraine in the afternoon. It was during this process that my editor, Leonardo Bianchi, suggested, “Why don’t we put them together?” And it started working for us. Because you can’t make a definitive fucking movie about the war, you’d have to be Ukrainian, you’d have to be Russian—you’d have to be beyond both. It would be a never-ending movie because the politics there are constantly changing. You could make a thousand movies about the history of Ukraine, and the politics since glasnost and before. The war now isn’t the war when I was there.

Maybe at my age it becomes clear: you’re either for life or for death. We’ve been fighting since we’ve been on Earth. The idea of killing people didn’t begin in the Ukraine and it’s not gonna end with some kind of fuckin’ peace treaty. This film is symbolic of every fuckin’ war that’s going on right now, in Africa, on the borders, Gaza—all of it.

CVAbsolutely. And the thing is, with social media and technology today, which provide a great number of the images in the film, it’s literally in your face now with the iPhone—more, perhaps, than in the 1960s, when you had CBS beaming what we were doing in and to Vietnam into every family’s television.

AFNo kidding! They filmed Vietnam. Growing up, we saw it. That war ended because we saw it. Then at a certain point the leaders of the world pulled the plug on giving out the images. You didn’t see what happened in Iraq or a lot of the other places. There were no images of the fighting. They’re fighting these wars and it’s like when you read George Orwell: somewhere, some place, is a war going on. Nobody sees the pictures. Nobody hears the screaming. Nobody does anything. This went on for a long time, and you can fight easily like that because it’s just a conversation. Like you say, an abstract, philosophical conversation from a million miles away. Now the soldiers themselves are gaff-taping their phones to their helmets. You see guys dying right in front of you. You’re getting it as it is, bro, in real time.

That last bit of footage we got blows away any combat film you could ever make. Look on Telegram, on X: it’s all there. And that shit is fuckin’ frightening. And it’s here, too. All I see on social media is kids bullying the shit out of each other in American high schools while ten other people are either laughing or filming it. Car crashes. Murders left and right. Cameras everywhere. And it’s a good thing that these images are everywhere. But it’s hard, Carlos.

CVSay more on how this proliferation is a good thing. Wouldn’t you feel like, given the incessant flow of images today, when we receive them there’s a possible apathy that builds up as a result of all of them, all at once, an insanity-inducing pileup?

AFWell, if you have real empathy, you’re not going to have apathy. If you’re an individual who cares, yes, it’s going to hurt, but at least you know what the fuck is going on.

CVAh, yeah, I get you now.

AFYou shut it off because there’s nothing you can do about it. But if you’re born, you’re born with empathy. Unless you’re a sociopath or it’s been beaten out of you, you’re not going to be immune. You’re going to feel for the victim.

I live in Rome, okay? I live in a peaceful town. I have a ten-year-old daughter and I’m raising a family and it’s a peaceful deal. And there’s plenty of complicated drama and nightmare here without anybody killing each other. But now when you raise the stakes to a war: Then what?

My favorite image in this movie is right near the end. You see the helmet footage of the guy out there fighting for his life. They all have their equipment—Uzis, grenade launchers, whatever. And then we cut to Emmanuel [Gras], one of the DPs, shooting at Patti’s concert in Paris and holding another piece of complicated equipment: the camera. And that’s it bro, you’re either killing people or you’re glorifying them. You’re on the side of murder or you’re on the side of fuckin’ life. And that’s what all that footage of Patti is about. Her glorifying art and people’s need for expression: [Arthur] Rimbaud, [René] Daumal, [Antonin] Artaud. Remembering and honoring their deaths, not just ’cause they’re great artists but because every life is sacred.

CVThat’s the position of what’s been my favorite of your films, Pasolini, with [Willem] Dafoe. You include the final interview [Pier Paolo] Pasolini conducted, on the day he was assassinated. He lays it out in the interview: the way schools, TV, and newspapers are set up, they’re trained to create a race of inhumane gladiators who have cut off that human part of themselves and replaced it with the will to destroy.

CVOne of the things I admired about Zeros and Ones and Turn in the Wound is the DIY iPhone aesthetic. This is something I find kind of troubling with a lot of filmmakers today who are so precious about shooting on 16mm or 35mm film, getting “beautiful” shots. But seeing your work I sense a different, more direct honesty in how you, Abel, observe, or how someone like, say, Hong Sang-soo observes: you don’t go out preserving conservative ideas of beauty, you create new standards. You wrestle with what an image is, in all its possible degradations. And that’s a more accurate reflection of our historical times.

AFThis is a lot to do with Sean, because he goes after the beauty. I joke with him and say, “We could use any camera we want—and you’re using cameras out of a Cracker Jack box” [laughs]. But he knows what he’s going for and what he needs to get it. And the other guys who shot Turn in the Wound [Gras and Alessandro Abate], even when they’re using high-end stuff, also know how to degrade that image. There’s a beautiful aesthetic in the negative and blah blah blah, yeah, but there’s another aesthetic: the practical reality of shooting a low-budget film and you need to get the fuckin’ images. If the guys got their phones, I’m telling them, “Pull ’em the fuck out.” Digital editing allows you to manipulate these images in a way we never could have before. You can take a shot, slow it down in the beginning, speed it up at the end. Maybe you have a shot and it’s something that in the past you would have thrown out—except there’s one thing in the background you love. Now you can isolate that thing.

AFPasolini was specifically talking about consumerism. And what did he say? You can fight fascism, you can’t fight consumerism. He said that these kids are programmed to want something, a watch. You have all these ads trying to sell a watch. Then everybody wants a watch. These kids want a watch too. Because advertising works; you can’t fight advertising either. But let’s say the fifteen-year-old kid doesn’t have money for a watch. He’ll either take your watch or your money. What put Pasolini over the edge was that he knew these kids, he was with them every night. And he knew that they were also willing to kill for a watch. Congrats, Madison Avenue.

Me, as an individual, I need my iPhone. I’m all for the iPhone, I’m all for AI; I’m for any bullshit that’s gonna make my moment-to-moment reality as a whatever—filmmaker, writer, father—easier. You take my phone, I might try to fuckin’ kill you. That day Pasolini was talking, it was 1975 Rome—but in fact he was envisioning the future, our present. And that’s what was getting him depressed.

You know how those kids knew Pasolini? They didn’t know him as a fuckin’ filmmaker or any bullshit like that. They knew him because he, the big communist, owned an Alfa Romeo, which he’d custom painted ice blue. (It took us forever to match in the movie.) It was the coolest car in Rome.

That speech he gave—I mean, he gave that interview the day he fuckin’ died, bro. He said it: “We’re all in danger and there’s nowhere to hide from it.” We’re all in this together.

CVWhen you interview Patti Smith in Paris, she mentions this story about Jimi Hendrix, which I feel is a lot of the thesis of the film. She says it was Hendrix’s dream to—

AF—have everybody in the world sitting around in a field somewhere, playing instruments together. Hendrix didn’t give a shit if they were in tune, out of tune, what key anybody played in: all that mattered was everybody making music in a field together. That was the John Lennon dream, too. Now, everybody’s in a field at the end of Turn in the Wound—and they’re all trying to kill each other.

Some of these people have a very specific reason why they’re going to kill the guy across from them. But I’d say 80 percent of those poor fuckin’ kids out there, they don’t know what the fuck is going on. They’re just there. This is what the powers that be want. But I’m a Buddhist. I don’t buy that’s the fuckin’ natural state of mankind. I don’t buy it.

CVNeither do I.