Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  So is his concern with betrayal. The picture for which he won his too-long-delayed Academy Award, The Departed, is a kind of festival of double-dealing, with Matt Damon’s and Leo DiCaprio’s characters acting as spies—one in the cops’ camp, one in the criminals’—and a rich variety of subsidiary characters joining in the deadly game the film portrays. Something similar occurs in Goodfellas. In a film as relatively minor, yet darkly farcical, as After Hours, a square young uptown man ventures into downtown New York persuaded that he’s going to get laid by an attractive pickup he’s met in a coffee shop; he nearly gets killed by her and her self-absorbed and heedless friends. And when you come to something like Raging Bull, Jake LaMotta’s suspicion that his wife may be betraying him—she is not—drives much of the story, and a large portion of its violence.

  I don’t believe that Marty is himself particularly paranoid—though he does have mirrors up in the “Video Village” from which he operates on his sets and in his editing room, so that no one can catch him unawares, from behind his back. And he does speak of being taught, as a kid, not to react to the suspicious behavior that went on around him. Eyes front (and blank), lips sealed—that’s how he passed many of his years in Little Italy. Where he grew up, almost all the deadly behavior he observed stemmed from someone betraying or attempting to betray someone else, whether the business at hand was criminal, familial, or something as simple as an attraction to a pretty girl (see his first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, which seems to me underappreciated, especially by Marty himself).

  Finally, there is this irony to contemplate: Marty is obliged to make his living in an “industry” controlled by people who have always wanted to impose rationality on their enterprise, have always tried to tame its wild children. Or ostracize them. Or break them. The idea that making movies at the highest level can ever be a fully reasonable activity has always struck me as laughable. But forget that. The point I am making is that the studio and the filmmaker have different motives and that the relationship between them is bound to be mistrustful, therefore rife with the possibility of—yes—betrayals. There’s this cliché about Hollywood— “It’s high school with money.” But you have to wonder: What if it’s actually Little Italy without gunplay?

  If that’s the case, it becomes possible to imagine that what Marty observed and learned in his formative years was the best possible preparation for the career he later took up. Which, in turn, is a way of saying that in a fairly deep sense he is an autobiographer—not so much an anecdotal one, but one of his inner life, his yearnings, his feelings, his fears in his formative years. Nor is that impulse limited to his portrayals of criminal life. To give just one example that came up in the course of our talks, he observed that the codes of conduct enforced by New York’s upper classes on Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence are as harsh and unforgiving as any administered by the modern-day Mafia.

  His is not the only way to make good movies. There is much to be said for the show of calmness in a line of work where the pretense that reason rules may be the nuttiest idea of all. But I’m here to tell you, there’s also much to be said for sitting up half the night listening to the spiraling enthusiasms—and the occasionally drowned dreams—of a man who cannot help but make the kind of commitment Marty has made to every aspect of filmmaking.

  In a sense, Marty’s passion is his saving grace. It is so intense that when you’re in its presence you have only two choices: embrace it or flee it. The former course is, for me, at least, infinitely more rewarding. You can learn so much from him—not just about old movies you really ought to see, or re-examine more thoughtfully, and not just about how to achieve all kinds of potent movie effects (how to stage a scene or fire up an actor or find a solution to a technical problem). Somehow, as I’ve grown closer to Marty in recent years, that famous formulation of Henry James’s keeps tugging at my mind: “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

  It would be nice someday to apply that grandiose sentiment to a mere moviemaker without feeling a twinge of embarrassment. But there it is—it fits this case. And the case continually redeems himself by knowing what an absurd figure he can sometimes cut. He is also, in my experience, a courtly man—impeccably dressed in his European suits, a generous host, a man widely read in Greek and Roman history (some of those sketch movies he made as a child were epics about the classic age), and in the writings of men and women who share his need to lift himself out of the quotidian, to find something more than the brute reality of everyday life.

  “I’m not an animal,” Jake LaMotta murmurs to himself when he finally touches bottom in a jail cell. And he is not the only such figure in Marty’s films. They may be full of “animals,” but for the most part these are balanced by figures who, following dim and enigmatic instinct, aspire to transcend their ignorance and their circumstances, to find some touch of grace in their grim and circumscribed lives. But there never has been and there never will be “a triumph of the human spirit” in a Scorsese film. He’s too intelligent for that. And too sternly moralistic. What I respond to most in his films is not just that they are unsettling, but that they generally remain unsettled. His stories reach their firm narrative conclusions, but they remain open-ended. You are always left wondering what might happen next to his survivors. And thinking that probably their fates will not be entirely contented ones.

  To consistently achieve that effect, especially in a society that, at least in its entertainments, is devoted to optimism, to the unambiguously happy ending, is no small matter—the onetime altar boy as existentialist. But you get all that, I’m sure. It remains for me to say only that I feel privileged that he has allowed me to hear and record his reflections on his long and still unfinished journey. It has been a pleasure, sir.

  —R.S., July 2010

  LITTLE ITALY

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: Let’s begin with the basics: Where and when were you born?

  MARTIN SCORSESE: I was born in 1942 in Corona, Queens. My parents had moved there earlier from the Lower East Side. The idea was to leave the old neighborhood, for them to better themselves, as they used to say. I loved Corona. We lived in a two-family house. There was a little yard in the back, a little tree. You could go to a park—I saw the trees, I saw something. But then my father got into big trouble with the landlord, and we had to move back to Elizabeth Street, in Manhattan, which was, in a sense, a humiliation—back literally into the same two and a half rooms where he was born, to live with my grandparents, until we found rooms down the block at 253 Elizabeth Street.

  RS: It was obviously a trauma for your family. What happened? I mean, Corona was kind of Edenic for you.

  MS: Oh, it was wonderful.

  RS: What exactly happened with the landlord?

  MS: Well, Nick Pileggi and I worked on it in a script that I’d like to do.

  RS: Really?

  MS: Yeah. I don’t know if I can bring myself to do it. It’s complicated. If you’re not educated and you’re working in a certain area, your fealty is to a certain group. There were different families. My father was assisted by a crime family.

  RS: He was not as a criminal, but he was a—

  MS: A friend. They made it possible for us to have the house in Queens. But my father had many problems with his brother Joe. From what I understand, he had “sitdowns,” where he tried to make sure that Joe wasn’t killed by the Mob people.

  The landlord was a guy who had a vegetable truck in a garage next door. He didn’t like my brother. And he had a chicken. The guy grabbed the chicken and just wrung its neck in front of my brother, and made the kid run and cry, you know. And he started to resent my father, because my father became friends with the landlord’s brother. And he took the brother to get a new suit in New York.

  Anyway, the landlord may have felt that my father was involved with underworld figures, which he wasn’t really, but he be
haved maybe a little bit like that; my father always liked to dress, you know. And this guy was a man of the earth, so to speak. And I think also his wife liked my father. So all this resentment was building up. And then there was a confrontation. Probably my father used some language he shouldn’t have, because I remember he apologized for it. So, next day, my father got back from work and confronted him in the yard. That led to the fistfight, and the landlord picked up an ax.

  RS: Oh, God.

  MS: And my mother’s younger sister literally walked out there and pushed him aside and said, “Stop that. Don’t pull an ax. Don’t do that to my brother-in-law.” And he stopped. [Laughs.] You talk about The Quiet Man [the John Ford movie that contains a similar scene]. I mean, the women just stopped it. And that night there was another fight on the corner. I saw the two of them fighting at the bar. And I came back in and told my mother, “They’re fighting.” And she was ironing clothes and said, “I know.” And then the next thing I knew we had to leave.

  We moved back to the apartment my father was born in, 241—it’s still there—living with my grandmother and my grandfather. My grandmother, my father’s mother, was very tough. My brother had problems there, fighting with my grandmother. There were like seven people living in three rooms, until we got rooms down the block at 253. It was tough leaving a nice place that was idyllic, or at least in my mind was idyllic.

  Marty, age seven months, takes the rooftop air with his mother (left) and Aunt Lena and her son, Anthony (right).

  The Lower East Side was pretty rough. You’ve seen it in the old movies in the thirties and forties and fifties—the Dead End Kids, it was pretty close to that. Kids ran up and down the street. You played with what you had. You know, you had a garbage can, and the top of it became a shield. The orange crates—you’d rip off one of the pieces of wood and it was a sword. A lot of cars. A lot of everybody living on top of each other. And a lot of tension. I was living virtually on the Bowery, which to this day has marked me in a way. Gangs of New York—I couldn’t even get it close to what I saw on the Bowery.

  I had gone to a public school for two years, but the next thing I know I was in a Catholic school, being taught by the Sisters of Mercy, Irish nuns, at the St. Patrick’s elementary school, which is still there. Irish nuns in an Italian, Neapolitan, Sicilian, neighborhood. There was conflict. But the school introduced me to the church, which was St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral on Mott Street. It was the first Catholic cathedral built in America. And I found some peace there, and a little bit of protection.

  In Queens, the house had bigger rooms, and you could always hide out a little bit, kind of disappear. Here you couldn’t disappear. Here I was in the room. And I couldn’t say anything, because I was the youngest. So I’d go in the church, and I became fascinated by the rituals of the mass. It was 1949, 1950, and the image of the Catholic church was the one from Going My Way. Barry Fitzgerald. Bing Crosby. Ingrid Bergman, The Bells of St. Mary’s. You know, it was a pretty good image. And inside that cathedral—the sense of peace. It was quite, quite amazing.

  Marty, happy in Queens, plays Indian without a cowboy in sight.

  And then, of course, my father didn’t know what the hell to do with me. After working in the garment district all day he’d go to my grandparents’ and deliberate with them about family issues at night, and my mother didn’t like that very much. And then he’d come back around eleven o’clock, having picked up the tabloids, the Daily News and Daily Mirror. They’d argue it out a little bit, and then everything was fine. And the next day he’d go back to work. So I didn’t see him much. But he was forced to take me to the movies; he took me to the movies all the time.

  RS: Relating the movies to the church, was there something in the movies that was ritualistic, that appealed to you that way? An analogy between the big picture on the screen and the gorgeous altars of the church?

  MS: I think that’s a good point. My asthma isolated me from everybody else. And so in this isolation, I was made to think that I couldn’t do anything physical. I had to be very careful, and be sort of coddled in a way.

  So the ritual of going to the movies with your father—it didn’t matter what film you saw—became important to me. It was a matter of going to the Loew’s Commodore on 6th Street and Second Avenue, which is now part of New York University, by the way. (In the sixties it became the Fillmore East.) And going to the Academy of Music, which is gone now, on 14th Street. We were always walking into the middle of the film. There was a sense of peace there, too; there really was. You had faith when you went into the church. And you had faith when you went into the movie theater, too. Some films hit you more strongly than others, but you always had that faith. You’re taken on a trip, you’re taken on a journey. The posters outside sell you dreams, you know. And you go in there, and the dream is real, almost. And then if you’re sharing these very strong emotions with your father, whom you don’t really talk to very much, this became the main line of communication between us.

  I mean, he took me to see The Bad and the Beautiful—the first movie I saw about the process of filmmaking. I loved westerns, so he used to take me to westerns. The Day the Earth Stood Still was one of the great theater experiences: a Sunday afternoon at the Academy of Music, a couple of thousand people reacting to that picture. Or The Thing—Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks—that was an amazing experience, the shock of it, the humor of it, the overlapping dialogue, the moment when they open the door, and James Arness [playing the monster] is standing right there—you ever see two thousand people jump at once? That was an amazing experience.

  RS: Movies in those days, because the Code was in place, were judgmental, or, shall we say, moralistic? I mean in a certain sense there is an analogy between the church and the conventional morality of movies. I wonder if we could explore that a little more.

  MS: Around 1954 you started to get the United Artists films—The Big Knife, even Autumn Leaves, with an extraordinary performance by Cliff Robertson. And you have Otto Preminger, Stanley Kramer, producing and directing. One way or another their pictures were addressing serious social and psychological matters. And all of a sudden the whole Code is breaking down.

  RS: Did you like those Stanley Kramer movies? I mean, try and think back to then, not what you may feel now.

  MS: Sure, we went to see them. They were pretty strong and shocking, you know. I don’t know if they hold up over the years. I liked Judgment at Nuremberg a lot. And I’m talking about Kramer’s productions, too, like The Men, Fred Zinnemann’s picture, and Home of the Brave and High Noon, to a certain extent. I prefer the Ford and Hawks westerns. But still, there’s something about Gary Cooper and that music and the editing that’s just remarkable. There’s so much tension in the way the film is developed. [It is about a sheriff forced to capture an outlaw gang alone, when no one in town will aid him.]

  RS: But Cooper was in and of himself a remarkable figure, don’t you think? I mean, he was such a great minimalist movie actor.

  MS: Oh, you’re absolutely right. In the forties he went into a dark period, like James Stewart had with Hitchcock and with Anthony Mann—I think of films like The Fountainhead. But primarily there’s a film, a very lurid melodrama called Bright Leaf. Do you know it?

  RS: I ran it just recently.

  MS: I saw it at the age of about ten. I have been affected by that picture.

  RS: How so?

  MS: The hysteria of it, and his destructive character. And the sensuality between Patricia Neal and him and Lauren Bacall. And the whole way it develops, with him killing his father-in-law, Donald Crisp. And, of course, the whole film ends in a conflagration.

  RS: Yeah, and what’s interesting about it is that it takes you about half the movie to realize he’s nuts.

  MS: The fact that the film was glorifying the making of cigarettes has nothing to do with it. Right? It has nothing to do with it.

  RS: Right [chuckles].

  MS: There’s something about this crazy character th
at was terrifying, and very interesting.

  RS: Because, after all, this is nice, heroic Gary Cooper.

  MS: You know: Come on, what’s happening here? It was shocking. It’s not a great film. But it was a very surprising one.

  RS: He was an amazing actor. I mean, I don’t think he ever consciously acted a second in his life. But there was something in him that could bring you close to tears sometimes.

  MS: I’ll never forget him writing his last will and testament in High Noon. And the last shot, I went back home and I drew a scene from the film. You know what I drew?

  RS: No.

  MS: I drew his boot and the star next to the boot, his sheriff’s badge when he threw it on the ground. Just that. That represented the film to me. Because that boom out [a huge camera pullback, isolating Cooper from the rest of the community] made me understand a little about effective imagery on the screen. Why was that so effective when he was so small in the frame? I went back and studied that one.

  RS: That boom locks him out of the town that has betrayed him.

  MS: And the betrayal idea for me was very powerful. I mean, it always has been, and I still explore it in the pictures I make. So that’s why that image of the star in the dust by his boot was so strong for me.

  RS: It’s funny, it’s a movie that in my head I don’t like, but when I see it, it takes me up in some way. Finally, I think it’s a western for people who don’t really like westerns—I mean westerns that take up more conventionalized stories. This one offers an unmistakable McCarthy-era metaphor for them to chew on.

  MS: And then you had Baby Doll [a comic Southern Gothic film about a virgin bride, her dimwitted husband, and a sexually avaricious neighbor], the Elia Kazan movie that was condemned by the church from the pulpit, which I never got to see then because I always used to check the condemned list—I was a good kid trying to behave. The C list [it stood for “condemned” by the Catholic Legion of Decency] was always filled with titles like Le Plaisir [Max Ophüls’s three-part film examining three aspects of pleasure—in youth, in the pursuit of purity, in the waning years of life], and Letters from My Windmill [directed by Marcel Pagnol, it is also an anthology film—warm, gently sacrilegious, featuring tipsy and devil-tempted priests], and any Ingmar Bergman film.