Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  There was this contrast between the movies and the place I was living. Where I came from was a Sicilian village re-created on the Lower East Side. You know, in Sicily you don’t trust anyone. It’s not very evolved, but the reality is that on a certain level you grow up full of mistrust. And I’m sorry, it was pounded into me. It really was. My parents were good people, hardworking people, weren’t in organized crime. But there was that attitude toward the world. If you see that film, Golden Door, [Emanuele] Crialese’s film [about Italian peasants immigrating to the United States], those are my grandparents.

  Elizabeth Street in Little Italy. The photo, taken by Marty, was shot from the fire escape outside the Scorsese apartment.

  RS: I’ve seen it. I understand.

  MS: There’s a woman in it who’s a healer, could have been one of my grandparents. Now I didn’t say my grandmother did that, but I know a guy who did that. Basically he was the same age as my grandparents, and he was a healer. And if you had a headache, you had something wrong with your stomach, you would go to him. Women would go into his room and he would do things to them. I mean, my mother said, “Yeah, he was a healer,” and she’d wink. She was growing up American.

  But the old ones, I was raised by those people. I was raised by the people you see climbing the mountains in Golden Door. In the fifties, it was very interesting trying to be American and trying to buy into something American. I mean, for instance, I just could not reconcile the nature of authority—of, let’s say, Eisenhower playing golf every day—with my own experience. I came from a world where the reality was “Yeah, sure. Just be careful.”

  And so what happened with The Departed is that what it came down to, dammit, was the same story, the fathers and the sons. I was shooting the scene with Jack [Nicholson] and Leo [DiCaprio] where Jack is at the table and Leo is in the room. We had done the scene, a seven-page scene, the night before, and it was very nice—four takes, maybe, two cameras. But I said to Leo, “There’s something there. I don’t know what it is. Something is not quite pushing it yet.” This was the turning point in the picture for me. I can’t get into how I work with Jack, or how he’d work with me, but there was something about just being around him and making it easy for him to go to certain places. So I just said to him, “Jack, we’re going to do the same scene tomorrow. We’ve got the whole thing. It’s just two angles. But anything you could think of to put him on edge—”

  And then the next day Jack came in, and told me, “I have ideas. I’ve got some ideas.” I said, “Don’t tell me, don’t tell me. Let me see.” And so he sat down. Leo sat down. And the first thing Jack did was sniff the glass and say, “I smell a rat.” If I was that kid, I couldn’t imagine the guts you’d have to have to sit there. And then he pulled a gun on him. He didn’t tell me he had a gun. It was great. And he had all these other ideas. We took a lot out, but Leo’s reaction is in real time. So I said to him, “I don’t know what’s going to happen to you. And he’s capable of doing anything. You have to work your way out of it. You have to make him believe that you are not the rat. And you are the rat.” As we were doing it, I thought it was wonderful.

  And suddenly I looked around and I said, “I’ve done this scene before.” Looking back now I find that theme in other movies I’ve made—Mean Streets, Raging Bull, all the way up through the other movies. They usually have to do with fathers and sons, and what a father owes his son, and what a son owes his father in terms of loyalty. It has to do with trust and betrayal. Growing up in that world, the worst thing you could do was betray. And I felt excited, I’m even excited telling you the story now. I think I should go and make the picture again! I probably will!

  RS: You can make all the gangster pictures you want as far as I’m concerned. But my point is, people say, Well, he could do that theme and they could be two upper-crust guys from Long Island betraying each other over a Wall Street deal.

  MS: That’s true. That’s true. Take something like Casino—there’s betrayal there. And there’s the downfall. It’s interesting that the downfall in Casino is always looked at in terms of people who are of a different nature, so to speak, than we are. But to me they’re just human beings—a downfall in the underworld is just as valid to me as the downfall of a president.

  RS: It doesn’t make any difference at which level of society the betrayal takes place. The interesting thing is that a betrayal takes place and the betrayal doesn’t necessarily mean great matters of state, or even money that the gangsters owe each other.

  MS: No, no.

  RS: Betrayal has to do with—well, you say what it is.

  MS: Well, it has to do with love. It has to do with love between people, and how it’s betrayed. Because there is a bond between these people. Otherwise they wouldn’t really be affected so strongly. I think that has to be it. Maybe I’m just repeating the same ideas and the same things in the end. But—

  Charles and Catherine’s wedding photo. The bridal couple are attended by her sister Frances and his brother Tony.

  RS: Look, every artist repeats themes. Isn’t Hitchcock always making the same movie?

  MS: Oh, that’s true. Yeah.

  RS: I mean, there are different settings, different people, but in the end they are variations on a theme.

  MS: You’re absolutely right about finding those themes. But I found that in The Departed it was more incestuous in a way—we don’t know what Frank Costello’s relationship with Matt Damon’s character was as a boy, raising him. [Nicholson’s Costello is a kingpin in Boston’s Irish Mafia who places his surrogate son in the state police, where he acts as Costello’s spy as the cops investigate Costello.]

  If you read any of the books based on the real characters—it’s very dark, and it has a lot to do with the sex and the violence. That’s why the sex, the obscenity, is up there in front. It has to do with getting thrills that way. The more we read, the more ideas we got. And, sure enough, the human monster emerges, so to speak.

  RS: But here’s my question. My experience is antithetical to yours: no mortal betrayal has ever occurred to me. But when you talk about this film, you immediately go back to that childhood of yours. So the question arises once again, about Sicilians, and their apparently naturally suspicious natures—

  MS: Not all Sicilians but, yeah, suspicious.

  RS: It’s amazing to me that you took from that experience something that has been so controlling in your life as a filmmaker. What is it? I mean, okay, you were an asthmatic little boy and you needed special attention, but you got it from your obviously adoring parents.

  MS: Yeah, I got it from my parents, who were great with me. But it was a little tough. The household wasn’t easy. That’s why East of Eden is such an important movie to me.

  RS: Stop right there. Why is East of Eden so important? You’ve never mentioned that to me in this context.

  MS: The struggle of the father and the son. The good brother and the bad one. And the good brother is—

  RS: The good brother is a schmuck.

  MS: Yeah, I know. But the thing was—

  RS: And we don’t like him.

  MS: In my household, the conflict was mainly between my father and my older brother, Frank. I was supposedly the “good” one. But in reality, when I was watching East of Eden, I realized that I felt like the bad one—the James Dean character. I had the same feelings as the bad one.

  RS: Go into that a little more.

  MS: The thing I felt was what all adolescents felt when they saw James Dean in that movie, whether or not the performance still holds up.

  RS: I’ll reluctantly stipulate, for the purposes of this conversation, it’s a great performance.

  MS: Dated at times, though. But it’s about wanting his father’s love—that tension. Somehow I read into that what was happening in my household, with an older brother and my father who had problems.

  RS: These were really angry confrontations? Big, loud ones like there are in East of Eden?

  MS: Oh, yeah. Basical
ly, there was a period in the fifties, before my brother got out of the house and got married, when pretty much every night there was a confrontation.

  RS: Over what?

  MS: Over how to live. How to behave. Or how to be a man. I’m not saying one’s right or wrong. And the quiet one, the sickly one, me, had to take it all in and couldn’t say anything. And I was getting pretty angry about it.

  RS: Angry on whose behalf?

  MS: I think it was probably against my father. But I also wanted to love my father. And I know he loved me. But he had to be very stern. He had to be very tough. Besides which, of course, he had to be making a few bucks a week and making sure we were fed, and making sure we went to school, and making sure he took us to the doctor. I mean, you know, that’s what you do as a parent. And it’s amazing the stuff that they did that I haven’t done.

  RS: You’ve mentioned it before to me, and with considerable love and respect. Because these weren’t rich people, every doctor visit had to represent a sacrifice of some kind. And yet they did it.

  MS: Yeah, and there was nothing outside, only an extended family. My father was one of eight or nine children—I keep forgetting, maybe seven or eight. My mother was one of seven or eight also. So there were lots of aunts and uncles and cousins. And then there was his respect for his parents, who lived down the street.

  Basically every night, after coming back from the garment district, having dinner, the fighting would start up. Some nights it was okay, but most of the time it was conflict over my brother, whatever the reasons were. He was doing things that my father didn’t think were right, and he was asking himself, “Why doesn’t this kid listen to me?” And he was very excitable, because he had his own problems in the garment district with people he was working with.

  And, finally, at a certain hour, about seven o’clock, he would go over to his mother and father down the street. And they’d convene about the family. His older brother would come over, sometimes the other brothers, and everybody would talk—this shouldn’t be, that isn’t right, going back and forth. My father’s mother was extremely matriarchal. And she didn’t speak English. She was loving, but she was scary.

  My grandfather was very quiet. But apparently in his day he was pretty tough with his kids. There was no such thing with them—with all those children living in two and a half rooms or three rooms—as an independent character of any kind. You know: We just had another baby, you take care of it. You’re the eldest daughter, the eldest son—move. You come and dig ditches for me at Con Edison. That’s it. You can’t be a CPA. And so with that kind of harshness—the conflict with the New World, the conflict with America—they didn’t know how to take advantage of opportunity. They didn’t know.

  But with me they kind of saw a little something. But they didn’t know what the hell to do with me. The problem there in the house was something I’ve been dealing with ever since. It’s very hard for me to talk about, but I put it on film in different ways. It’s in Raging Bull, it’s in Mean Streets. The whole picture of Mean Streets, it’s really him, my father, not me. I mean there’s a part of me in there, but …

  RS: Which part?

  MS: Well, Harvey Keitel signing the notes for Johnny Boy. [Robert De Niro’s character is a wild, oddly lovable kid who needs protection by his more responsible peers.] I didn’t sign any notes, but I had a close friend who, every now and then, vouched for a friend of ours whom we loved, and he got into a lot of trouble. But he was a nice kid, and he survived. He’s still around, but not in this state. In my world, if you borrowed money from somebody, you had to pay it back. Now if you borrowed it from a bank, there was some leeway. But when you’re borrowing it from a fellow on the street corner and he’s a friend of so-and-so’s, and there’s a crime family down the block, you have to pay it back, or at least you have to make an attempt to pay it back. And you have to be well-connected so that powerful people—Mob guys—could talk for you. I’ve heard stories my father told me, I’ve seen things happen. It’s what happens in Mean Streets.

  It’s about the respect issue. It’s a point of honor, dealing with this sort of thing. And even if you have nothing, there’s still got to be the honor of your name. So you can walk in the street. Because there are no other streets. You can’t get on a plane and go to Paris. You’ve only got the streets. There’s about eight blocks, that’s it. And you’re not going to go to the West Side, where you had actors, you had mimes, you had writers, you had intellectuals. There’s no such thing on the East Side. What you had on the East Side was the Bowery, the bums who were dying in the street.

  But we’re getting off the subject. Besides my brother, my father’s youngest brother, unfortunately, was getting in trouble all the time. To the end of his days he would go and deal with everything you could imagine in the criminal world. And the rest of the family sort of threw their hands up, so my father had to go and finesse the issues with different parties and different groups of men. And it was very serious, very serious.

  RS: In other words, your uncle was constantly in danger.

  MS: All the time. But I loved him. He was on the second floor, we were on the third floor. And he had a great sense of humor, he was very funny. But he was also a very dangerous man. Every time there was a crisis, my father would run it with my mother and discuss it and the reasons why my uncle had to behave a certain way, and the reasons why my uncle had to find the money to pay this or that person. And my mother would say, Don’t do it. How many times do I have to tell you? Don’t lend him money. He was in and out of jail. I couldn’t say anything because it was none of my business. You’re the son, you keep quiet. It wasn’t until after my father died in 1993 that I realized Mean Streets was really about him and his brother.

  RS: Obviously, now that you mention it.

  MS: If you borrowed money from certain people and didn’t pay it back, they were dangerous. They weren’t banks. It would be a matter of serious leg-smashing, head-smashing, or whatever.

  But in any event, my father was dealing with my uncle until he was in the hospital and he was getting his second heart operation; he had to sign a check for my uncle for $200—with my mother and my brother telling him not to do it. He goes, It’s my brother, what am I going to do? And my father dies, is laid out in the church, and my uncle is there the night of the funeral; the mass was in St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral. He gets a heart attack. They take him to the hospital and about a month later he dies.

  RS: My God.

  MS: Yeah. Yeah. But that’s the nature of the bond. I’m sorry. I was impressed, and it hasn’t gone away.

  RS: And yet you loved your father unconditionally, at least as you talk about him now.

  MS: Absolutely. I don’t belong in any other place. I don’t belong in a world of writers or whatever. I’ve found that over the years I don’t want to think of myself as anything other than what I am.

  But things were so overwhelming when I was a kid, a little kid growing up down in that place, in those times. The only place I could burst out, I thought, was with stories, drama, ideas.

  RS: So you did a lot of that?

  MS: Constantly.

  RS: As a little kid?

  MS: As a little kid. I would fantasize a lot about that. And I would draw my own movies.

  Marty’s childhood “film,” one of the many epics he drew in what amounts to storyboard form. He pulled the images, one by one, through a little theater he had constructed. His audience was a single boyhood pal.

  RS: Really? Little storyboard-like things?

  MS: Yeah, they were storyboards. They started out in 1.33 aspect ratio in black-and-white, standard movie size. When I was quite a little kid I liked The Little King comic strips. And I would draw my own comic strip.

  RS: Otto Soglow was the cartoonist. That was a cute strip. Yet it was very visually pure, almost austere.

  MS: I remember doing them when we lived in Corona. That was like a movie for me. I must’ve been five or six. And then, when I was in Manhatta
n, in 1950, when I was about eight or nine, I would watch other shows on TV and try to do my version on film, in drawings. And I’d make drawings, and I’d paint them with watercolors. I had a whole bunch of them. And I actually finished them. But then my father saw me one day playing with them and I hid them. He didn’t like the idea. He didn’t know what I was doing, you know. He thought it was too secretive. And so I guess I got embarrassed and threw them away.

  RS: There are none of those left?

  MS: No. As I said, everybody was on top of each other in those three rooms, you know, and I felt ashamed of it, I guess. And I threw them away. And then, a year or two later, I said to myself, You know what? The hell with them, I’m going to do them again.

  I never finished them, though. By that time I was turning into a teenager, and things were changing. And by that time, too, I was going wide-screen. They were like big Roman epics, one of which I called “The Eternal City.” I got into gladiatorial combats. And then they got kind of decadent, I guess—my drawn frames expanded to 75 millimeters, wide-screen; 70 wasn’t enough. Roman epics, you know. The Roman epic I never finished. But a few of the others I finished.

  RS: So you were drawing in little notebooks.

  MS: They were drawn on pads. And then the strips were cut out, and were put into a little screen. I would only show them to one friend—I didn’t show them to anybody else. I hid them in the apartment.