Legendary production duo Griffin Dunne and Amy Robinson reminisced about how the black comedy After Hours helped rehabilitate Martin Scorcese’s career after his previous film provoked a culture war.
In a candid discussion with IndieWire, the pair recounted how Robinson championed Scorcese to direct After Hours, despite the controversy stemming from his previous film, The Last Temptation of Christ. Dunne reflects on how well Scorcese understood the script and effectively tackled the project’s unique challenges.
“Amy was the one who thought of Marty for this, which a lot of people would not have thought of Martin Scorsese for a comedy like that. He got it, it made him laugh. He was excited by the limitations of the budget and the amount of money that we had, and starting with a new crew, with a now-disbanded union we had at the time — and getting back to the urgency of a Mean Streets kind of situation. It excited him to work with a new DP like Michael Ballhaus, who we had worked with on [John Sayles’] Baby It’s You, a lot of the crew that he went on to make many movies with started on After Hours. He was just excited about diving in.”
Scorcese had cast Robinson as the female lead in Mean Streets more than a decade before, and she remained steadfast in recognizing his talent despite the uproar surrounding his work at the time. She remembers that Scorcese was aware that his career was on the brink, but he was determined to change his situation through sheer force of will.
“He was a little bit in director jail, and he knew it, and Marty is a very powerfully strong human. I think he knew that doing this movie the way we did it and, as Griffin said, with a limited budget, if it worked, and he did everything that he normally does. He storyboarded everything. He worked very hard and he was very committed to it, and I think he said something very nice on the last day of shooting about us as producers and our partner, Bob Colesberry, who is deceased, that we brought [Scorsese] back to his love of filmmaking. I don’t want to pat ourselves on the back. He would have come back without us, let’s put it that way. But it was a very nice thing and very moving thing for him to say.”
It is an understatement to say that Scorcese was in director’s jail in the mid-80s after the immense creative latitude he took with The Last Temptation of Christ. The film opened to weeks of protests from Catholics who saw Scorcese’s film as offensive. However, the Catholic action met an equal and opposite reaction from individuals who viewed the conflict as a matter of free speech and staunchly asserted their right to watch the film. While the debate propelled the film to box office success, many came to view Scorcese as a problematic figure. His best chance of resurrecting his career was by making people laugh. He knew that done correctly, After Hours was the perfect way to make that happen.
The film was a critical and box office success, successfully changing the subject from a firestorm that shrouded The Last Temptation of Christ. Scorcese’s comeback was complete when he was awarded the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival.