I saw Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant at this year's Cannes Film Festival, and it was like getting hit on the head with a baseball bat -- it was so good. In 1973, Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets opened a new chapter in American movie history. It was a seed for a highly personal, intimate, and naturalistic urban attitude toward filmmaking. It posed a lot of questions, one of which confronted Catholicism in the modern world of New York City's Little Italy. Some of those questions are answered in the most succinct and unusual way in Bad Lieutenant, which Ferrara co-wrote with Zoë Lund, the star of his 1981 film Ms .45. A nun who has been raped tells the investigating officer, played by Harvey Keitel, that she forgives the two guys who raped her and says in confession she wishes she could have done more to help them. This detective, who's on his own private march through hell, is a compulsive gambler in a constant state of sexual and narcotic derailment; he's more focused on the outcome of the National League Championship play-offs than on the downward spiral of his life. He tells the nun to get real, but through her finds his own salvation.

As I look over this interview, I realize that sometimes the subject is Bad Lieutenant, sometimes Zoë Lund's metaphor of the B.Lt., sometimes Harvey Keitel's role as the B.Lt., and sometimes Keitel himself. These four subjects seem so unretractable from one another that there's no division whereby one could say art is imitatlng life, or life is imitating art. The peculiarity of that convergence makes Bad Lieutenant function in an exorcistic way for both the viewer and its participants -- rather like a snuff film.

"This is a character who is so flawed that a lot of viewers can't understand how far he goes to seek redemption." -- Zoë Lund
"When I was a kid, I wish someone had said, 'You have the right to break any fucking thing around you because of the suffering you are going through' -- instead of 'Shut up!'" -- Harvey Keitel
"I have a project for a film about Pasolini. Sometimes I think, Why am I doing this? Here's this guy who's dead, didn't know me, never met me -- where do I come off robbing this guy's grave?" -- Abel Ferrara

JULlAN SCHNABEL: Harv, in this film it was like you were dying on the cross, dying for our sins, your character's sins.

HARVEY KEITEL: I guess you did say to me at Cannes that what I did was what Jesus did.

JS: It was a moment I hope you don't have to relive in your personal life, but I think it's a great moment for your work.

HK: I go through that every day...

ZOE LUND: This is a character who is so flawed that a lot of viewers can't understand how far he goes to seek redemption. People talk about how morally terrible the character is, not understanding what the lieutenant finally did. One of the things the lieutenant is raging against is that Christ had already taken this ultimate act of responsibility. Some people wait for the opportunity to do that, but you can't wait. You have to seize the moment. And that is what the lieutenant finally does. He finds a need to do it, and that is the terror but also the duty of existence. He's saying: "It's wrong, I know it's wrong, therefore I must right it." It can all be summed up in the sense that your conscience has to be equal to your consciousness.

HK: That's the essence of it. The need to deal with what is is bigger than any ethic. Take Christmas; it's a wonderful time because people give to others, but unless we start to experience why we give to others -- and before we give to them -- nothing is going to change. We have to attack problems at the core. I had watched some of Jimmy Swaggart's sermons as sort of an interested citizen, you know, [his] proselytizing to people and all that. He got up there one time, and he was talking about his own sins, having committed adultery. Did the guy have any validity? And, by the way, he never got to confess that sin until he was caught at it. So I think in its own way it was a perfect example of what Zoë means when she talks about the difficulty of confronting one's own conscience.

JS: Many naturalistic films get made, but what is It that turns naturalism into something transcendental? I think it's paying attention to detail. And what moves me about this film is the poetics of the world It shows. You're taking an ordinary thing, and you're presenting it to somebody in a way they've never seen before. I've watched Harvey for years, and the fact that after all this time he's still in the trenches doing these tough, independent films, encouraging young directors and actors -- for example, with Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs -- places him in a pivotal position. It seems that he alone has assumed the responsibility for the mental health of young filmmaking in this country. Why isn't Harvey getting $4 million a picture? He's too busy doing these low-budget films.

HK: [laughs]

JS: I just think that whatever idiosyncrasies or pitfalls of his life have kept him fresh all the time, and insisted on him being in that place, have meant he has paid for our sins -- in life and in this film!

HK: NOW you're making me feel like Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ. Zoë was saying that without owning pain and rage, it's difficult to trust someone's sense of what is good. And it seems to me that a person has the right to own that pain and to scream as a result of it. And we have to teach that to ourselves, our friends, and, most importantly, our children. When I was a kid, I wish someone had said, "You have the right to break any fucking thing around you because of the suffering you are going through" -- instead of "Shut up!"

I get a strange sensation sitting here talking about my own work, a feeling like, Don't do it, Harvey. It sounds sort of self-righteous, in a way. What I would like to say is that I am dying to see my child navigate the waters between the womb and death on her own terms, on life's terms, without her mother and me burdening her with our sins -- the greatest sin being the one of ignorance. Because we have not confronted our own conflicts, our own sins, we will burden our children with what has been going on since time began. That's what I'm interested in. We made the movie because that's our responsibility to these children.

JS: Abel, what's on your plate these days?

ABEL FERRARA: I have a project for a film about Pasolini. Sometimes I think, Why am I doing this? Here's this guy who's dead, didn't know me, never met me -- where do I come off robbing this guy's grave? I mean, would you want someone making movies of your life?

ZL: But all you have to do is go up to a gas-station attendant in Italy and say "Pasolini," and there's immediately an eruption of emotion and sanctity and reverence and titillation and awe and mystery and desire that comes from mentioning that name.

JS: You can't generalize about the artistic process. If there's something you can say that needs to be said for you, then I think it's valuable.

HK: I agree with that. I read a three-volume set of the van Gogh letters. How many people know he stared at the canvas and he said the empty canvas stared back at him and said, "You can't paint. You are nothing"? Would van Gogh object to somebody writing a story about the essence of being van Gogh? I would think not.

JS: After seeing Bad Lieutenant, I'm interested to know what Abel thinks about Pasolini.

AF: It's funny: more people have seen Bad Lieutenant than have seen half my movies already.

JS: You have to do something, take a chance.

AF: The thing about gambling, it's like the chaos of a ball game. Who knows what's going to happen? The gambler [the lieutenant] has a kind of inner confidence in the beginning because he has a fix on that ball game. He knows who's going to win. [Darryl] Strawberry is not going to let him down. Then again, if anybody is really gambling that way, it's almost a desire to lose. Anybody who is a real degenerate gambler can't be thinking they're really going to win.

HK: I don't know much about gambling.