Why this overlooked Robert De Niro movie is life-changing
- Next to Taxi Driver and Goodfellas, religious epic The Mission is a little-known masterpiece, says Faust International Youth Theatre founder Matthew Gregory
The Mission (1986), directed by Roland Joffé and starring Jeremy Irons and Robert De Niro, tells the story of missionaries in 18th century South America against the backdrop of brutal colonial suppression of indigenous people; it won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and is often cited as one of the greatest films about religion.
Matthew Gregory, founder and director of Faust International Youth Theatre and executive producer at theatre production company ABA Productions, explains how it changed his life:
I have a great memory of going to see it when it first came out – it made a huge impression on me. I was 13, and I saw the film in an old London cinema, which probably doesn’t exist any more, with my older sister and her then boyfriend. I didn’t live in London – I grew up in Yorkshire, but I was visiting my sister, who was training at a London hospital. I didn’t know anything about The Mission – I was just told that we were going to the cinema.
I remember the opening sequence, where the guy is going along the river (a missionary who has angered the local Guaraní people), and you have no idea he’s going to go over the falls (the Iguacu Falls on the Argentina-Brazil-Paraguay border). The scale and the grandeur of it, accompanied by the music of Ennio Morricone – I just fell in love with the whole thing. It wasn’t necessarily the subject matter of the movie but the visual spectacle. I was moved by it – it had such an emotional impact.
In junior school, I’d been a chorister at York Minster cathedral and I’d got a music scholarship. I’d never heard music like this, combining Spanish classical and local Guaraní influences. I love music that creates a feeling or an atmosphere or an impression – it works so well in this movie. If I’m on my own and play the soundtrack, it quickly takes me back to my original memories of the film. It’s still among my favourite pieces of music; it never gets old.
After seeing the movie, my interest changed more to the theatre side. The spectacle of it was inspirational to me. One of my favourite things about theatre is the spectacle: the whole feeling of everything coming together. I probably got a lot of that from The Mission, aged 13, without even knowing it.
