THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2011 by Richard Schickel
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada
by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi, and the colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scorsese, Martin.
Conversations with Scorsese / Richard Schickel [interviewer]. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Includes filmography.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59546-1
1. Scorsese, Martin—Interviews. 2. Motion picture producers and directors—United States—
Interviews. I. Schickel, Richard. II. Title.
PN 1998.3.S39A3 2011
791.4302’33092—dc22 2010034250
Front-of-jacket image © Bureau L.A. Collection / Corbis
Jacket design by Chip Kidd
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
LITTLE ITALY
CUTS AND ANGLES
THE FORD CONNECTION
OF STUDIOS AND STYLES
WASHINGTON SQUARE
TURNING PRO
WOODSTOCK/HOLLYWOOD
BOXCAR BERTHA
MEAN STREETS
ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE
TAXI DRIVER
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
THE LAST WALTZ
RAGING BULL
THE KING OF COMEDY
AFTER HOURS
THE COLOR OF MONEY
THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST
NEW YORK STORIES
GOOD FELLAS
CAPE FEAR
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
CASINO
KUNDUN
BRINGING OUT THE DEAD
GANGS OF NEW YORK
THE AVIATOR
NO DIRECTION HOME: BOB DYLAN
THE DEPARTED
SHINE A LIGHT
SHUTTER ISLAND
DRAWING DREAMS
COLORS
SHOOTING
DIRECTING ACTORS: AN EXAMPLE
OBSESSIONS
EDITING
MUSIC
RESTORING AND COLLECTING
ASPERGER’S SYNDROME
THE ONRUSH OF TIME
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FILMOGRAPHY
INDEX
A Note About the Author
Other Books by This Author
INTRODUCTION
We are an odd couple, Marty and I. I grew up in a placid suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, cosseted by my middle-class family—loving, indulgent, always avoiding openly expressed emotions. I’m certain that I gravitated to the movies because I was looking for melodramatic excitement, a relief from the “niceness” that was the highest value of that time and place. Marty’s young years were, of course, the opposite, spent mainly in Little Italy on New York’s Lower East Side—working class, but also criminal class, with the Mafia providing much of the neighborhood’s half-hidden social organization and control. There was an element of danger on—well, yes, all right—the Mean Streets of his boyhood. And there was an element of anxiety in his home, which was rife with discussions of complex family issues tensely, if lovingly, argued out. He was escaping a vastly different sort of reality when he went to the movies—melodrama and fantasy, to be sure, but of a kind that was actually less threatening than the harsh realities this asthmatic little boy encountered in his daily life.
We’ve more than once laughed about this: he envies the peace of my picket-fence childhood; I would have loved the stir and occasional menace of Little Italy. But it speaks to the appeal of the medium in the 1940s and even the 1950s, when the movies were thought to be dying, that members of our youthful demographic almost universally went to them—their sheen and shimmer were that irresistible. The difference between Marty and me and the rest of our friends is that they drifted away from the movies, except as a form of casual entertainment, while we almost helplessly professionalized our passion. That process, as Marty experienced it, is what much of this book is about. In talking with him I’ve often felt we are like immigrants from two different countries meeting on neutral ground and discovering that we can communicate in a third language: the language of film.
It helps, of course, that in addition to being a filmmaker Marty is a passionate film scholar, a man who devotes almost as much time to studying and preserving the movie past as he does to making new films. This is a matter that naturally concerns me as a critic and film historian. It may also help that I eventually, much more modestly, became a filmmaker myself, a documentarian specializing in movie history. Technically, as well as historically and aesthetically, we communicate easily, instinctively, in the shorthand of shared experiences.
That was not always the case. We met for the first time in 1973, when I was working on the first television programs I wrote and directed, a series of interviews with American movie directors of the classic age. I was running their pictures of an evening at my apartment and I casually asked Jay Cocks, at the time my reviewing colleague at Time magazine, if he’d like to take a look at Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday some night. This was well before the home video revolution, when you had to haul out a cumbersome 16mm projector to see movies in your living room—a bigger, rarer deal than it is now in the digital age. Anyway, Jay was, and is, one of Marty’s oldest friends, dating back to their days at the New York University film school, as well as his occasional screenwriting collaborator, and he asked if he could bring Marty along, which he did. I can’t recall anything memorable being said. We all just had a merry time rewatching one of the greatest of all romantic comedies.
No friendship arose out of that encounter—largely, I think, because I was, at the time, not particularly fond of a lot of Marty’s films. I did not, for example, greatly care for Mean Streets. It was Marty’s breakthrough film, and though I have since come to respect it, I still don’t quite love it. I enjoyed the lightsome Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, but had to wrestle hard with Taxi Driver, before giving it the good review it deserved. I remember Henry Grunwald, Time’s great managing editor, scribbling this note on the proof of my piece: “You don’t like this movie as much as you say you do.” He was right at that moment, though he would be wrong now.
A little later, Marty and I shared one of the most awkward moments of my career. This was in 1977 when the producer of Marty’s New York, New York, Irwin Winkler, set up an early screening of the film for me. It was, you may recall, a drama with music about the troubled relationship between a bandleader (Robert De Niro) and his vocalist (Liza Minnelli)—in part, a tribute to the kind of musical comedies MGM had made in the 1940s and ’50s, in part a dark and painful romance. These two ideas never really meshed, and the production had also been attended by all sorts of troubles, personal and professional, that rather obviously afflicted the finished product. Irwin invited Marty and me to dinner after the screening—at which I found I couldn’t say a word about the film that would not have hurt Marty’s feelings. So we awkwardly talked around the only subject that was of interest to either of us. I didn’t know at the time that Marty, Irwin, and almost every one else connected with the film had the gravest doubts about it, and were perhaps hoping against hope that an objective observer might see something more promising in it than they did. Nor did I know that Marty was on the verge of a life-threate
ning illness, the result of exhaustion and the interaction of a wide variety of drugs—prescription and, shall we say, nonprescription—he had been taking to keep himself going through a brutal schedule.
Somehow, Marty survived—many of his friends insist that it was quite a near thing—and when he was recuperating in the hospital De Niro visited him to insist that he at last focus his attention on a project on which the actor had invested a profound passion: Raging Bull. Marty had always been dubious about the film, if only because he had never had the slightest interest in boxing (or any other kind of sports). De Niro, however, thought boxing was just a pretext for the film and judged that Marty, having now touched bottom in his own life, might forge an emotional connection with this story about the boxer Jake LaMotta reaching a similar condition. De Niro was obviously, spectacularly, right, and Raging Bull became in my opinion—and I was scarcely alone—Marty’s first fully realized masterpiece.
When the movie was released, most of the critical and audience response focused on the unprecedented brutality of its boxing sequences, though when you re-encounter it now you tend to see it rather differently. Its more profound brutality lies in the story of an angry, inarticulate man’s struggle to find a few grace notes in an otherwise savage existence. But however you read Raging Bull, it is manifestly a movie that gives, and asks, no quarter. Thereafter, no critic could fail to see Martin Scorsese as anything but a major film artist.
He’s had his flops, of course, and his misunderstandings with the critics and the audience, and even his common-consent critical successes have not always been rewarded as richly as they deserved at the box office. But the range and intensity, technical and emotional, in his work have made him, in the minds of many, the Great American Director of his age. He’s not so sure about that. And neither am I, largely because it is a critic’s duty to resist the superlative. In any case, history has yet to have its say, and we are both historians enough to want to await its judgment—not that either of us will be around to discuss it.
Not that we were discussing much of anything after Raging Bull, either. I sometimes saw Marty around in New York, usually in Jay’s company, and we would exchange pleasantries. But that was it. I admired a lot of his subsequent movies—The King of Comedy, Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence—and I thought that his documentaries about the American and Italian cinema were great works in their field. Even in his more problematical movies I saw the impatience and restlessness of a man who was easily bankable in the eyes of the studios only when he was making crime stories. Even given the admiration he has enjoyed, he has always struggled, as directors of comparable stature have not, for backing and trust from the powers that be.
This struck me, strikes me, as ludicrous, especially since his work outside what people thought was his main line—After Hours, Kundun, Bringing Out the Dead—was often more interesting to me than, say, Cape Fear or Casino. After 1986, when I left New York for Los Angeles, this was an opinion I had not even a wan hope of sharing with Marty. Or so I imagined. But by the 1990s I had begun writing and directing documentaries almost full-time, specializing in films about movie history, and I began turning to Marty as an interviewee on these programs. At which point some sort of sparks were beginning to leap the gap between us.
And some sort of relationship began to develop between us. It’s not too much to say that he became my favorite talking head, because his knowledge was so boundless and expressed with such riveting passion. We always exceeded the bounds of our ostensible subject (and the planned length of our talks). Everyone knows from Marty’s many appearances on television and on DVDs that he is an explosive, free-associational talker about movies. But what I was at first unprepared for was his self-deprecating humor. He’s onto himself. He knows he’s an obsessive. He knows that he’s quite capable of driving people crazy with his attention to minute details, not just about the making of his own movies, but about everyone else’s movies as well. Off camera (and sometimes on), he was always shaking his head over his behavior—not that he shows the least sign of self-reformation. Eventually, these sessions led to my making, in 2004, a film, Scorsese on Scorsese, about his career, which in turn led to the series of conversations that comprise this book.
Most of these talks took place in an apartment at the Waldorf Towers in New York, where Marty and his family were living while a house he had purchased was being renovated. We would start in at eight or nine at night and I would stagger out around 1 a.m., exhausted and exhilarated by our exchanges, very much needing the long walk back to my hotel, through the deserted midtown streets, to decompress.
But even if Marty’s days had not been filled with preproduction chores on Shutter Island, work on his documentaries and on film preservation, I suspect we would still have chosen to meet in the deeper reaches of the evenings. For he’s a night bird—always has been; his boyhood career as an altar boy was cut short by his struggle to get up for the 7 a.m. mass.
No one can explain someone’s else’s circadian rhythms and I’m not going to try. But as the day’s activities faded from his mind, as the city far below us fell into fitful sleep, Marty’s memories grew more vivid and freewheeling, including everything from his almost demonic early moviegoing to his grapplings with faith and family matters to his childish attempts to create movielike narratives through drawings to his embrace of professional moviemaking even before he graduated from what would become NYU’s film school. Eventually, of course, we talked in some detail about all the movies he has made in the years since.
Every time we met, we vowed to try to keep our conversations on a rough chronological track. Every time we failed to do so. He’s as breathless and excitable off camera as he is on. At some point every night we would just give up on chronology and go with whatever flow had arisen out of our exchanges. These resulted in quite amazing transcripts—full of repetitions and false starts, to be sure, but also full of fascinating autobiography and astonishing detail about the choices he has made over the course of a career that now extends well over forty years. These were never easy to edit, but they were never tiresome, either.
Like virtually every good director I’ve ever known, Marty is not entirely comfortable at explaining his motives, why he may opt for one project over another— or, for that matter, one shot or edit over another. Movie directors are as instinctive as any other kind of artist except that they have to marshal and control far more numerous and often more recalcitrant collaborators than someone working alone—a writer or painter, say. There is, as well, something hypnotic and addictive in the filmmaking process, something that drives its practitioners to immerse themselves in the work to the exclusion of all else. And it’s quite a long process. Preproduction, production, and postproduction cannot take less than six months. Sometimes, as in the case of a difficult project like The Last Temptation of Christ or Gangs of New York, it can take years, decades. You have no choice but to embrace this addiction—there is no twelve-step program that can cure you—else your picture will fail and eventually your career will fail as well.
You get the sense, when you’re around someone like Marty, that directors are not fully alive unless they give themselves over entirely to the proffered obsession. It may even work the other way. I sometimes think the reason directors occasionally embark on movies that are not up to their highest standards is that the need to obliterate themselves in a project also obliterates commonsense caution. Putting that point less melodramatically, it may, in Marty’s case, account for the fact that he meticulously draws out on paper every shot in his movies before going on set to make them. It’s not quite actually shooting the thing, but it is as close as he can come to that limbolike state that occurs while he is impatiently awaiting his start date.
This is also a reversionary state. It is exactly what he did when he was a kid, not even consciously knowing that he wanted to become a director: drawing his little movies on sketch pads and showing them perhaps to a single friend. I suppose, indeed, that the most important thin
g I learned about Marty—or at least had powerfully reinforced—during the course of these conversations was the power that his past exerts on his work. I’m not just talking about his drawings. Or about the films like Mean Streets or Who’s That Knocking at My Door, which so clearly contain autobiographical elements. I’m talking, for example, about the way violence presents itself in his films. It appears so suddenly. There is rarely much buildup to it, no hint of gathering menace. Some guys will be kidding around in a bar or on a street corner and suddenly, bam, someone is hurt. Or dead. That’s how Marty observed violence when he was a kid. That’s the way he presents it as a grown-up. His deadly confrontations are only rarely blood-drenched. They are more often over before we sense them starting. He wants us to be as shocked—and as wary— as he once was. It is the inbred signature of his sensibility.
I’m also talking about what I’m afraid I have to call his spirituality. In the pages that follow the reader will find much about Marty’s struggles with questions of faith and belief when he was growing up. One thing people with only the most superficial knowledge of Marty’s personal history know is that he “almost” became a priest. That is not true; to his chagrin, he found that he could take only the briefest steps along that path. For some time he counted it as a major life failure (though he seems no longer to feel that). It has also led some people to see his passion for film as a substitute for formal religious belief, which is far too easy an explanation for this career. But just as the kind of violence he observed as a kid is present in his movies, so are his youthful yearnings for belief. It’s obvious, of course, in pictures like Kundun. But there are hints of those aspirations, a longing for some kind of transcendence, or, at the least, relief from reality’s harsher limits, in so many of his secular films. It’s obvious in such early films as Mean Streets, less so in films like The King of Comedy, Goodfellas, and The Age of Innocence. But in one form or another, in small ways and large, his concern with matters of belief is nearly always present in his work.
Conversations with Scorsese Page 1
