But the real force behind Temptation is of course Scorsese. He seems to direct by infecting those around him with his passion. He recounts how he wanted to move away from traditional Biblical epics ("Jesus goes to the movies" as he puts it) and try for something unconventional. He chose actors from different regions of the United States to play the apostles. For Paul, he chose Harry Dean Stanton, a Southerner, who could lend a revivalist quality to the role. Judas is played by Harvey Keitel, a longtime Scorsese collaborator, whose New York sensibilities bring vulnerability to the often misunderstood disciple.

Music is as important as always, and Scorsese asked composer Peter Gabriel to bring "the ancient and the contemporary together." The result is an eclectic score combining rock with indigenous music from West Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan, and India. More than anything else, Gabriel’s score dispels the Sunday school notion of a white-washed Judea, and replaces it with a bustling, heterogeneous melting pot. And by mixing the Eastern and Western, the old and new, Gabriel achieves a "timelessness" that makes the movie feel fresh after ten years.

The idea of mixing antiquity with modernism also informs Scorsese’s visual compositions. The scene where Jesus carries the cross through a crowded street is modeled after a famous Bosch painting. There’s a "two-dimensional quality" to the painting which Scorsese imitates by using a faster camera speed so that the faces seem to float in the air. Other scenes are patterned after archaeological finds that Scorsese researched before filming. Holding these scenes together is Scorsese’s restless camera, zooming and swooshing all over the place, and the brusque editing by Thelma Schoonmaker. These distinctly modern touches draw attention to themselves, bringing Jesus’ state of mind closer to us, and ultimately demystifying his character.

The most vocal protestors attacked Temptation for the now famous scene in which Jesus imagines making love to Mary Magdalene (Barbara Hershey). In the brief scene, Jesus imagines what being human is like, which necessarily involves marriage and the act of procreation. But fundamentalists exaggerated the sexual content, condemning it as pornographic and salacious. They even offered to buy the negative from Universal Studios so that they could burn it. This occurred before the movie had even opened. People objected to the idea of the film, rather than to the film itself, Scorsese speculates. He tells how he showed the movie to his neighborhood priest, an elderly gentleman, who didn’t have any problems with the sexuality but did think that overall there was a little too much "Good Friday and not enough Easter Sunday."

Schrader is more academic in his defense. He concedes that the movie is blasphemous because, from a purely theological viewpoint, if Jesus is God, then he cannot be used as an artistic metaphor, or as a symbol to convey the filmmaker’s message. As a Calvinist, Schrader explains, he grew up in an environment where the Scripture was hotly debated every Sunday and was treated as a piece of literature to be picked apart and scrutinized. It’s this confrontational spirit that he wanted to guide the movie. This is probably the most cerebral film about Jesus ever made.

But the real proof is the movie itself, which most protesters never saw. How does it interact with the public’s conceptions of Jesus? Remembering opening night at New York’s Ziegfield theater, Jay Cocks recounts how he expected the movie to be roundly booed. Instead, it received a standing ovation from the paying audience. Elated, he rushed off to phone Scorsese, who was working on another film at the time. Scorsese was speechless, for once, and had to stop what he was doing to ask his friend to repeat what he had just said.

We get a further sampling of Scorsese the man through a brief home movie that Scorsese himself made during the shooting. It’s jumbled and a bit fuzzy, but there a few hilarious moments, including one where Scorsese films himself in the mirror and wonders aloud if the red light on the camcorder means it’s on. We also get a sense of the frantic pace the crew had to endure. With fewer than eight weeks for principal photography, Scorsese and his production staff drew each shot by hand, allotted themselves a fixed amount of time to get it on film (sometimes less than fifteen minutes), and then moved to the next set-up. And Dafoe explains, in painstaking detail, how he had to film the crucifixion scene two minutes at a time to avoid suffocation and black-out.

Those who haven’t seen the movie in some time will be surprised how well it’s aged. Every scene packs a punch, and the last temptation, which spans the movie’s final forty minutes, is as devastating as ever. What a joy it is to be able to experience this movie. And to be able to own it is a real treat considering that it is still banned in certain countries (and at Blockbuster Video). Protestors aside, The Last Temptation of Christ has become a modern day classic.