Ferrara, Abel

b. 19 July 1951, New York City, United States

“I do think that filmmaking is sacred.“ 

– Abel Ferrara¹

Discussions of Abel Ferrara – who celebrates his 75th birthday this year – have long been shaped by a popular mythology that has proved remarkably persistent: “the folk hero of New York independent film,”² the eccentric solitary, the Dionysian/Orphean maverick filmmaker³ who has survived (both metaphorically and literally) in the film industry for more than five decades without ever fully belonging to it, the liminal figure moving between seemingly incompatible cultural and industrial spaces, the gritty street poet with a camera, venerated by audiences and critics with something approaching cultic devotion or punished with emphatic rejection. Such attributes are certainly somewhat clichéd, but they also testify to the difficulty – to invoke yet another cliché – of categorising Ferrara’s extensive and multifaceted body of work.

His films do in fact move restlessly between genres, cultural registers and production contexts, and have never quite settled into the taxonomies by which film histories tend to organise careers in retrospect. As a director, Ferrara has shed his skin more than once: from his beginnings in the cinematic underground of late 1970s New York, through exploitation cinema and the indie film wave of the 1980s and 1990s, to his later status as an arthouse darling and regular presence at A-list festivals of the European circuit. 

These transformations may have altered the outward shape, but not the essence of his rough yet deeply philosophical filmmaking. One critic once attributed a “tabloid sensibility”⁴ to Sam Fuller, and the same label can doubtlessly be applied to Ferrara, who combines it, however, with the ethos of an auteur and an almost avantgardistic spirit of disruption and refusal to please his audiences all too easily. The result is a stylistically and generically eclectic body of work held together by a series of recurring motifs and topoi – questions of guilt and redemption, often negotiated through Catholic iconography; the immediacy of violence, bodily degradation and addiction; urban alienation and social displacement; debt, dependency and personal betrayal – all of which return, in different forms, to what I would argue is the central question of Ferrara’s cinema: whether an authentic, unalienated and autonomous self, still capable of at least some form of ethical judgement, remains possible in a world fundamentally hostile to it. 

Setting the Scene: Ferrara’s Beginnings

Born in 1951 to Italian and Irish-American parents and raised in a lower-middle-class milieu in the Bronx, Ferrara was a film enthusiast from an early age and began shooting his first 8mm films at 16. As far as his filmmaking education beyond these first autodidactic attempts is concerned, the literature is not entirely consistent. Depending on the account, he attended practical film courses at Rockland Community College in New York State⁵ and/or spent a brief period studying film in England in 1970 as part of the college’s exchange programme.⁶ Ferrara’s recently published autobiography does little to shed light on the matter, apart from adding the anecdote that he sneaked, without being officially enrolled, into film classes at the San Francisco Art Institute, including some transgressive-performative lessons taught by the iconic German enfant terrible Rosa von Praunheim in the early 1970s.⁷

Like many young filmmakers of his generation, Ferrara first tested the possibilities of the artform in the short-film format. Nicky’s Film (1971), The Hold Up (1972) and Could This Be Love (1973) are significant above all because they mark the beginning of one of the decisive creative relationships in his career, as they were partly (co-)written by Nicodemo Oliverio, who would become – usually under the pseudonym Nicholas St. John – Ferrara’s most important collaborator during the first phase of his oeuvre. Between 1976 and 1996, Oliverio contributed the scripts to ten of Ferrara’s films before fundamental disagreements arose during the preparation of the William Gibson adaptation New Rose Hotel (1998). Differing opinions on the ethos of filmmaking (and on Ferrara’s drug issues at the time) brought this artistic symbiosis to an end.⁸

The move towards feature-length filmmaking took Ferrara into a cinematic territory of comparatively low cultural prestige: the (s)exploitation market of the 1970s, a niche of the industry that offered young directors still without credentials access to (admittedly modest) means of film production. His first feature, 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy (1976), emerged from the brief historical moment in which hardcore pornography had acquired a certain fashionable visibility beyond its usual audiences. This relative cultural permissiveness did not, however, translate into a climate of open authorial acknowledgement. Ferrara appeared in the credits as “Jimmy Boy L.”, Oliverio/St. John as “Nicholas George”. As this long-obscure⁹ film was only retrospectively acknowledged as part of Ferrara’s filmography, The Driller Killer (1979) has therefore often been misidentified as his ‘actual’ debut, which established a form of notoriety of its own that would haunt the director for decades. The film was a hyperbolic low-budget hybrid of horror film, art-world grotesque, black comedy and downtown music culture; its afterlife as a cult film was decisively shaped by its prominent role in the context of the British “video nasties” moral panic of the early 1980s. 

The Driller Killer

The film is only at the most superficial level the blood-soaked splatter film its title promises, although it certainly exploits the gory attractions of the genre. Beyond this, it is also the first film in which Ferrara presents us with the archetype of what might be called the Ferrarian protagonist who will reappear in many of the films to follow, like a revenant in various guises: a figure torn between an intrinsic drive to do something good, true and meaningful and circumstances that make this impossible, and who ultimately breaks under this dilemma. Ferrara himself plays Reno Miller, a struggling painter in the Lower East Side whose precarious existence is defined by unpaid bills, pressure from his landlord, the scorn of the institutionalised art world, the emotional instability of his domestic arrangement with the two women he lives with, Carol (Carolyn Marz) and Pamela (Baybi Day), and the intrusive rehearsals of a No Wave band in the neighbouring loft. As Reno tries to finish a painting that is meant to secure him both money and artistic recognition, his mental state steadily deteriorates. On nocturnal wanderings through the city, he starts to murder homeless men with a power drill, before his violence turns against the figures he associates more directly with his humiliation and failure. While gory and committed to a sensationalism that follows the conventions of the genre (pushing them slightly towards the grotesque), Ferrara stages the film’s graphic violence as the expression of a specific crisis rooted in profound alienation. Reno’s rampage marks the collapse of a creative individual caught between the demand for authentic artistic existence and the social and material conditions that make such authenticity almost impossible. In this sense, The Driller Killer is not only Ferrara’s first major work of notoriety but also an early treatment of one of his central themes: the often irresolvable tension between individual self-realisation and socially induced alienation which, in his cinema, often seeks release in acts of violent catharsis, however doomed such attempts may be.¹⁰ At the same time, it is a contemporary document of the late-1970s New York Downtown scene, a milieu that later cultural memory has often converted into an object of nostalgic fascination, but which Ferrara presents as a space of existential struggle in a material and above all metaphysical sense.

Excessive violence as revenge against a hostile world also structures Ferrara’s next film, the rape-revenge drama Ms .45 (1981), which, like The Driller Killer, acquired the somewhat problematic status of a cult film, problematic because such a label tends to reduce the disturbance of the work to the pleasures of subcultural recognition. Zoë Lund plays Thana, a mute seamstress in New York’s garment district who is raped twice on the same day, first in the street and then in her apartment, where she kills the second attacker and takes possession of his calibre .45 pistol. After dismembering his body and disposing of it across the city, she begins to shoot men whose gestures, looks or advances appear as extensions of the violence already done to her. The film culminates in a Halloween party, where Thana, dressed as a nun, turns her revenge into a grotesque ritual of purification. In Ms .45, the violence that had erupted in The Driller Killer from a profoundly masculine wounded artistic ego, denied recognition and subjected to economic humiliation, is displaced onto another terrain. Here it emerges from a different manifestation of a socially determined denial of self-determination: the female experience of patriarchal humiliation, which escalates into extreme sexual violence and is met with no less extreme counter-violence.¹¹

Ms .45

With Fear City (1984), Ferrara expanded his spectrum of genres. The film, his first sustained engagement with mafia material, already points away from the semi-underground conditions of the earlier work and towards a brief period in which he moved through more conventional industrial formats. During the second half of the 1980s, this included China Girl (1987), the Elmore Leonard adaptation Cat Chaser (1989), two episodes of Miami Vice, the pilot for the short-lived series Crime Story (like Miami Vice, produced by Michael Mann), and two largely (and quite rightfully) forgotten television films – The Gladiator (1986), The Loner (1988). Undoubtedly, this period can be understood as an interlude of commercial compromise as these works remain, in many respects, closer to the aesthetic and narrative expectations of their respective industrial formats than to the more disturbing energies of Ferrara’s strongest films. 

Of Good and Bad Lieutenants

The rise of American “indie” cinema in the late 1980s and early 1990s resulted from an interaction between changing viewing habits among at least parts of the audience and a set of transformations within the film industry itself. The commercial success of comparatively low-budget films with complex themes and recognisable stylistic ambitions contributed to an – at least nominal – erosion of the opposition between capital-driven mainstream studio production and marginal filmmaking. A cultural space emerged in which the label “independent” increasingly functioned as a marketing category for artistically mature and demanding works that appeared sufficiently distant from the blockbuster logic of mainstream cinema in the 1970s and 1980s, even when their financing, distribution and promotion remained tied to the commercial structures of the industry, partially obscured by the use of imprints promising a higher degree of cultural capital. It was in this ambivalent context of “Indiewood” that Ferrara’s cinema entered its first broadly visible phase. King of New York (1990) and Bad Lieutenant (1992) are certainly the most significant, critically acclaimed and most prominent films of this period. 

King of New York, written by Oliverio/St. John, begins with gangster Frank White’s (Christopher Walken) release from prison and his return to a city he regards as lost territory he wants to reclaim. Walken plays Frank as a drug lord with an almost aristocratic allure, an urban dandy of unsettling politeness, whose calm and elegance obscure the ruthlessness with which he pursues his business interests; this also makes him an allegory of the yuppie-capitalist zeitgeist predominant in the coke- and money-infused Manhattan of the 1980s. Once back in New York, he gathers his old crew, most prominently Jimmy Jump (Laurence Fishburne), and sets about eliminating rival dealers, Asian gangsters, mafia figures and other obstacles to his control of the cocaine trade. At the same time, he surrounds himself with the white-collar crooks of New York’s high society and presents himself as a civic benefactor, as he wants to secure the funding of a hospital in the Bronx, whose survival the official city seems unable or unwilling to guarantee. Ferrara does not allow this mixture of criminal power and social gesture to settle into a simple Robin Hood fantasy. It is more ambiguous: Frank wants to be the drug kingpin, criminal entrepreneur, violent avenger and – the film makes quite clear that he is sincere about this – a benevolent saviour at the same time because he needs to maintain some kind of moral compass in the nihilistic world he operates in. Yet, as in a classic tragedy, he seems predestined to fail in all these roles.

The King of New York

His antagonists are a group of street-level policemen, above all Roy Bishop (Victor Argo), a lieutenant whose weary sense of morality gives the film its clearest, if increasingly fragile, counterweight to Frank’s criminal sovereignty. On Bishop’s team are Dennis Gilley (David Caruso) and Thomas Flanigan (Wesley Snipes), two younger and more impulsive officers whose pursuit of Frank gradually assumes the form of a private vendetta as they are frustrated by a legal system that cannot keep Frank contained, enraged by the deaths of colleagues and drawn towards the temptation to answer his violence with their own. The conflict of the film therefore does not run only between criminality and law enforcement, but also through the police themselves, where institutional duty, personal revenge and masculine humiliation begin to contaminate one another. The ensuing escalation leads to a spiral of violence on both sides during which both Flanigan and Gilley are killed. At the end, the film moves towards a duel-like confrontation in the New York subway between Bishop – the good lieutenant who has preserved a modicum of ethical restraint and belief in institutional justice that his disillusioned and cynical colleagues, increasingly drawn into a vigilante logic, have long abandoned – and Frank. The latter is wounded in the shootout, flees, and finally dies in a taxi stuck in traffic (his journey quite literally brought to a standstill) in the realisation of his failure. 

Bad Lieutenant, made two years later, was co-written by Ms .45 star Zoë Lund and centres on an unnamed New York police lieutenant (Harvey Keitel), who is corrupt, addicted to drugs, consumed by gambling debts and caught in a routine of theft, intimidation, sexual coercion and self-degradation. He is assigned to investigate the rape of two Catholic nuns in a church. One of the nuns knows the perpetrators and refuses to identify or condemn them and forgives them based on her Christian ethic. As his gambling losses and drug use intensify, the Lieutenant roams through the city in a downward spiral towards utter physical and psychic devastation, abusing his badge, stealing, hallucinating and trying to impose his own need for redemption onto the crime he is supposed to investigate. After a breakdown in the church, he tracks down the two rapists, but instead of arresting or killing them, he gives them money and puts them on a bus out of New York. After sending the two rapists out of the city, the Lieutenant returns to his car near Penn Station, where men connected to his unpaid gambling debts pull up beside him and shoot him. The film closes on the immediate aftermath of this killing, with the dead Lieutenant left in the car.

Bad Lieutenant

These two films have often been discussed as complementary works, and to a certain degree they are. Both move within a genre framework – the gangster film and the post-noir cop drama respectively – in order to tell twisted morality tales. Frank White and the Bad Lieutenant are two deeply morally degraded figures, both products of a profoundly dysfunctional society, who nevertheless try, helplessly and in full knowledge of the futility of these attempts, to resist this degradation. 

During the following years, Ferrara remained committed to innovative genre cinema and displayed a considerable range within it, with varying degrees of recognition from audiences and critics. The gangster film remained a staple within his repertoire, though not always in the contemporary setting of King of New York. With The Funeral (1996), set in 1939, he made an excursion into the historical gangster saga, supported by an illustrious cast including, among others, Christopher Walken (by then a regular member of what one might call the Ferrara ensemble), Chris Penn, Isabella Rossellini, Vincent Gallo and Benicio del Toro, before returning thematically to the narcotic underworld of contemporary New York City with ’R Xmas (2001). He also contributed two films to the then-current trend of meta-films on the social and creative impact of the film industry on its protagonists that had gained a certain popularity in the 1990s after the success of Robert Altman’s The Player (1992). The first of these, Dangerous Game (also released under the title Snake Eyes, 1993), is a drama starring Madonna and Harvey Keitel, (the latter as a director clearly modelled on Ferrara himself) that explores the unhealthy dynamics within the creative process of filmmaking. It was followed by The Blackout (1997), a drama about a burned-out film star that, despite an illustrious cast including Matthew Modine, Dennis Hopper, Claudia Schiffer and Béatrice Dalle, failed at the box office. He also adapted William Gibson’s 1984 short story New Rose Hotel (1998), starring Walken, Willem Dafoe and Asia Argento. With the often-underrated Body Snatchers (1993) – the third screen adaptation of Jack Finney’s timeless parable of social conformity – and The Addiction (1995), Ferrara also entered the terrain of horror film. These two films are especially significant in his career as they brought him his first major recognition at A-list festivals, with the former screening in competition at Cannes and the latter in competition at Berlin.

The Addiction is one of Ferrara’s most complex and interesting genre pieces, and not only because the director here deals, in sublimated form, with his own personal problems with addiction. Again written by Oliverio/St. John and realised by Ferrara’s regular cinematographer Ken Kelsh in elegiac-expressionist black-and-white images, the film centres on Kathleen Conklin (Lili Taylor), a philosophy graduate student in New York whose work is concerned with questions of evil, responsibility and historical violence. One night she is attacked in the street by Casanova (Annabella Sciorra), a vampire who bites her and leaves her with a hunger for blood that quickly begins to structure her movements through the city. Kathleen’s transformation manifests itself as an increasingly compulsive condition. She becomes physically weakened, avoids daylight, and begins to prey on people around her, including strangers, but also acquaintances, especially her fellow student Jean (Edie Falco). Her academic reflections on guilt, human cruelty and free will increasingly turn into a self-reflexive discourse on her new bodily and psychic state of dependency. Kathleen later encounters Peina (Christopher Walken), a kind of elder statesman among vampires who has learned to control his appetite through discipline and abstinence. His example gives her a possible model of restraint, but it does not release her from the hunger that has taken hold of her. After completing her dissertation, Kathleen hosts a graduation party attended by friends and colleagues. The gathering turns into an outbreak of vampiric violence, in which the façade of social and academic distinction collapses and the party essentially breaks down into two groups: vampires and their victims who, once ‘infected’, follow the implacable logic of addiction and become driven by the same hunger. After the party, Kathleen is taken to hospital, where she tries to end her existence by exposing herself to daylight, but Casanova returns and prevents the attempt. A priest is then called to her bedside and administers the last rites; the film’s final image shows Kathleen in daylight at her own grave.

The Addiction

In the figure of the doctoral student, the film intellectualises – quite uncommon for a genre film – the perennial Ferrarian theme of autonomous, ethically-oriented selfhood being made impossible by circumstance. This intradiegetic explication of these questions and their framing within a deeply Catholic mysticism of guilt and atonement are doubtless indebted to the script by St. John/Oliverio, who, unlike his by-then Buddhist director, never renounced Catholicism and, according to Ferrara’s account, also holds a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Würzburg in Germany.¹² 

Towards New Shores

In the early 2000s, Ferrara made Italy the centre of his life and became a sort of expat filmmaker in Rome. With this geographical relocation, the production conditions under which he worked inevitably also changed, as did the character of his films. He himself has repeatedly stated that he receives greater appreciation in Europe than in the United States and that it is, at least in part, easier for him to get his projects financed there, even if this meant gathering money from various financiers, often – as is, after all, quite common in European cinema – from different countries. With this move, Ferrara left his ‘American’ phase of renegotiating classic genre conventions behind. His feature films now moved closer to the European arthouse cinema for which he had always felt an affinity, even if he remained faithful to his fascination with the sensational and the spectacular. And he discovered a new field for himself: documentary film.

Ferrara’s documentaries are often neglected in the reception of his work, partly because many of them have had only limited circulation. They are nevertheless interesting, since several have a strongly personal, autobiographical character, with Ferrara often integrating himself into the films as a gonzo-style documentarist in search of (sometimes vanished) authentic cultural niches that can serve as refuge in a capitalistically alienated world. His documentary work begins with Chelsea on the Rocks (2008), a return to the legendary Chelsea Hotel and to a bygone mythological bohemian New York. Napoli Napoli Napoli (2009) shifts his filmic exploration to Southern Italy, closer to his familial roots, which had always remained partly present in his Italian American cinema. Mulberry St. (2010) brings him back to Little Italy and the festival of the quarter’s patron saint San Gennaro, but the neighbourhood film also becomes a film about Ferrara himself: walking, talking, singing, working, drifting through a place already marked by gentrification, population shifts and the unease of belonging to something that is disappearing while one is filming it. With Alive in France (2017), a film about Ferrara’s activities as a musician, he puts himself literally centre stage. Piazza Vittorio (2017) explores the eponymous square in Rome and portrays the various migrant communities that gather there. The Projectionist (2019) returns to New York to portray Nicolas “Nick” Nicolaou, the Cypriot-born cinema owner whose life in exhibition also becomes a history of disappearing independent theatres, changed viewing habits and the erosion of the city’s older film culture. Sportin’ Life (2020) then folds Ferrara’s working life, his collaborators, the Berlin presentation of Siberia (2020) and the beginning of Covid-era confinement into a video diary. With Turn in the Wound (2024), his documentary practice moves to the experience of the war in Ukraine, where interviews with soldiers, civilians and Volodymyr Zelenskyy (alongside a spoken-word performance by Patti Smith) form a rough mosaic that, it has to be said, remains strangely underdeveloped. Nevertheless, these documentary works would deserve a larger audience; in their subjective and often dissociative-essayistic form, they give insights into Ferrara’s worldview, in large as well as small matters, that could enrich the reception of his feature films. 

The first of his international features was Mary (2005), a French-American co-production starring Juliette Binoche, Forest Whitaker, Marion Cotillard, Matthew Modine and Heather Graham that approaches religious crisis as a spiritual drama of faith, while the dark comedy Go Go Tales (2007) was funded by American and Italian producers. Although both films had financial backing from the US, they were never commercially released in America. In 2011 came 4:44 Last Day on Earth, an apocalyptic film that entered the competition at the Venice Film Festival, which did not prevent it from failing with critics and at the box office. 

After these less successful films, 2014 proved to be a better year for Ferrara with two films that received broader resonance and also belong among the strongest works of his second career phase. Welcome to New York is a fictionalised version of the sexual assault allegations against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former director of the International Monetary Fund and prospective candidate for the office of French president. For several reasons, the film had the potential for scandal and generated considerable controversy, especially in France. The casting of Gérard Depardieu as George Devereaux (the Strauss-Kahn figure) was itself highly contentious, since Depardieu brought with him his own long history of sexual abuse charges. 

Welcome to New York

The film also provoked legal threats from Strauss-Kahn’s side and, because of the prominence and explosive character of the case, was rejected by the Cannes Film Festival and moved to the film market. The film again takes up the question of an unalienated selfhood no longer stifled by social convention, but here, unlike even in the gangster films, this selfhood has no emancipatory dimension and becomes purely predatory. It is an unsparing portrait of a fusion of hubris, power and misogyny, allegorically condensed in Depardieu’s massive body: the portrayal of a figure permeated by entitlement and a feeling of superiority, but no longer capable of even asking the question of ethical coordinates and, unlike earlier criminal figures in Ferrara’s cinema, no longer showing even a trace of ambivalence.

Pasolini, Ferrara’s second film released in 2014, deals with an artist for whom he expressed his deepest appreciation and whom he has repeatedly named as an artistic role model. Based on a cleverly constructed and knowledgeably written screenplay by Maurizio Braucci, Ferrara’s first venture into the biopic breaks with the conventions of the genre from the outset. The film is a highly experimental homage that interweaves the historical facts of Pasolini’s last day and his murder on 2 November 1975 in Ostia with adapted passages from two texts Pasolini left unfinished: the novel Petrolio and the script for the never-realised film Porno-teo-kolossal. Pasolini, too, negotiates alienation and authenticity on the level of plot as well as on the theoretical level. 

Pasolini

Willem Dafoe – who almost literally slips into the skin of Pasolini¹³ – presents him as a tired figure, worn down by Sisyphean activist and artistic struggles, yet still repeatedly articulating his sharp diagnosis of society and capitalism in conversations with other characters. That the historical Pasolini, with his preference for hustlers from the subproletarian borgate, also has a history as a sexual exploiter is not judged by the film in the same way as in the case of Depardieu/Devereaux. His nocturnal cruising is staged instead as part of an anti-bourgeois quest for authenticity, understood alongside art and politics as an equally integral element of an ethos of liberation. At the same time, the film also shows Pasolini – as history itself leaves it little choice – as a failing figure whose restless searching culminates in an act of brutal violence, staged with the graphic directness typical of Ferrara. 

The next two films were again made in close collaboration with Dafoe, who by then was also living in Italy. Tommaso (2019) places an American expatriate artist in Rome at the centre of a loose narrative whose autobiographical undertones are difficult to miss, with Ferrara’s own domestic and creative surroundings being unusually close to the fictional material. Dafoe plays Ferrara’s quasi alter ego in recovery, living with a young wife and child, played by Cristina Chiriac and Anna Ferrara, the director’s actual wife and daughter. He teaches, works, moves through cafés, AA meetings and the Roman streets, while the fragile stability of this life is repeatedly disturbed by jealousy, memory and fantasy. Siberia (2020) is more introspective, moving into the unstable terrain of surreal psychological drama, and brought Ferrara again to the Berlin Film Festival competition. Dafoe plays a man withdrawn to an unnamed, cold and remote place, where isolation does not bring peace but sets in motion a complex spiral of introspection and recurring traumatic memory. 

Zeros and Ones (2021) quite visibly came out of the pandemic conditions. Ethan Hawke moves through a Rome of soldiers, checkpoints, night streets and political rumours, and Ferrara lets the film remain jagged, thin and feverish instead of hiding the restrictions under which it was made. With Padre Pio (2022), he returned to Catholic material in a more literal sense, though the film’s public reception was soon tied to Shia LaBeouf as much as to the saint. LaBeouf played Pio after spending time with Capuchin friars and later described the preparation as decisive for his turn to Catholicism. His confirmation in 2023 gave that story a second life around the film.

Abel Ferrara is a filmmaker who, despite often adverse production circumstances, has created a body of work marked by audacity, independence and a self-conscious disregard for the cultural registers of high and low, though not always consistent in quality (but whose is?). His present reception remains divided. In the United States, he is still valued above all for the genre films of the 1990s, while his more recent works, though highly present on the European festival circuit, unfortunately do not receive the attention and distribution they would deserve there. But regardless of the stage in his career, and whoever his collaborators are, Ferrara’s cinema has the unique signature of an auteur. It is spiritual, somatic and visceral in equal measure, and addresses deeply philosophical questions in cinematic forms where one would not necessarily expect them. 

Filmography

Shorts

• Nicky’s Film (1971)
• The Hold-Up (1972)
• Could This Be Love (1973)
• Not Guilty: For Keith Richards (1977)
• 42 One Dream Rush: Segment: “Dream Piece” (2010) 
• Hans (2017) [Viennale trailer]

Television work

• Miami Vice: Episode: “The Home Invaders” (1985)
• Miami Vice: Episode: “The Dutch Oven” (1985)
• Crime Story (1986)
• The Gladiator (1986)
• The Loner (1988) 
• Subway Stories: Tales from the Underground: Episode: “Love on the A Train” (1997)

Features

• 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy (1976)
• The Driller Killer (1979)
• Ms .45 (Angel of Vengeance) (1981)
• Fear City (1984)
• China Girl (1987)
• Cat Chaser (1989)
• King of New York (1990)
• Bad Lieutenant (1992)
• Body Snatchers (1993)
• Dangerous Game (Snake Eyes) (1993)
• The Addiction (1995)
• The Funeral (1996)
• The Blackout (1997)
• New Rose Hotel (1998)
• ’R Xmas (2001)
• Mary (2005)
• Go Go Tales (2007)
• 4:44 Last Day on Earth (2011)
• Welcome to New York (2014)
• Pasolini (2014)
• Tommaso (2019)
• Siberia (2020)
• Zeros and Ones (2021)
• Padre Pio (2022)

Documentaries

• Not Guilty: For Keith Richards (1977)
• Chelsea on the Rocks (2008)
• Napoli, Napoli, Napoli (2009)
• Mulberry St. (2010)
• Searching for Padre Pio (2015)
• Alive in France (2017)
• Piazza Vittorio (2017)
• Talking with the Vampires (2018)
• The Projectionist (2019)
• Sportin’ Life (2020)
• Turn in the Wound (2024)

Endnotes