RS: At what age did you start doing that?
MS: Oh, I must’ve been about eight or nine until about twelve, or maybe thirteen. They’re in some of the books about me, some of the Roman drawings. But the other ones I don’t show. And some of the early ones I guess I threw away. But I would show them to this one friend of mine because he was a very sweet kid. He was sort of the intellectual of the group. And he would insist, “Marty, these don’t move.” I said, “They all move. See, from one frame to the other.” “Oh, yeah, but the drawings are not moving.” I said, “Why do you have to be literal about it?” But he was an avid reader and he taught me to read, too. Read books. We’d go to the library together.
RS: At what age did you start doing that?
MS: Oh, I guess ten or eleven.
RS: What kind of books would you take out? Kids’ books?
MS: I remember taking out When Knighthood Was in Flower. That was enjoy-able. Then some other books written for young high school students, I think, about the Revolutionary War and that sort of thing. I don’t remember getting through them that well. I found it was very hard, I didn’t know how to read a book, I didn’t know how to live with a book, or read fast. I still can’t read fast. The biggest revelation was when I forced my father to take me to see Julius Caesar. He didn’t want to see it, but he would take me to see anything I wanted to see. And it was the Mankiewicz version. It was Brando, James Mason, John Gielgud. Mason is fantastic.
RS: It was a little stodgy as I recall.
MS: Very stodgy.
RS: And a little underpopulated. There are not enough people in the crowd scenes.
MS: Yeah, yeah. You can see it now, when the camera pulls back. But as a kid I was fascinated by Ancient Rome because of the church. And I liked Quo Vadis when I first saw it. But Julius Caesar was black-and-white and it was Shakespeare. I went with it. It was fun. And I was so taken by the story that I found the book in the library, illustrated by Rockwell Kent. I took it to class. And that particular year the nun who was teaching the class had to leave, so they had a lay teacher in, a woman. And I said, “I saw this film, and I’d like to put the play on right now.” And so I assigned the different roles to different friends of mine in the class that day. I think I got halfway through act one before my friends started walking off. They’d had enough. But I would hand the book to the next person for his part, and the next and the next and so on. I thought it was so amazing.
And then there was Orson Welles’s Macbeth on TV, which I saw repeatedly on Million Dollar Movie [a local TV series that ran old movies every night]. And Olivier’s Hamlet, which I saw when I was six years old. My brother took me; basically, he said, it’s got ghosts and sword fighting. We sat through the whole picture.
RS: It must’ve been around that time that I went to Henry V—a school assignment.
MS: Oh, I got to see that one later. We got to see it at the New Yorker theater. I think it was the first film shown at the New Yorker. But the library was so important, because it, too, was quiet.
RS: You keep coming back to that.
MS: It was pretty quiet—not quite like the movies, which sort of induced a pure dream state.
RS: Except, I guess, if the movie was lousy, and all the kids started hooting and hollering.
MS: Making noise on a Saturday afternoon—yeah. But this was a refuge. Along with the church, the only place where there was some hope.
Marty with his brother, Frank.
RS: You had to get away from the pressure.
MS: You had to get away from the pressure, and there was no place to go except the church. There was one priest, Father Principe—it was his first diocese, he was twenty-three years old—who was the one who presented the idea of thinking ahead to me and my friends. Prior to that, there were some other priests, very nice priests, but they were Italians and Italian Americans who were dealing with the older Italian community. So there was a disconnect with the younger people who were growing up in the mid-fifties to the late fifties. And this young man, he looked at us and he would say, “Look, you don’t have to live like this.” He started to make us listen to certain kinds of music. He was a great film buff. Of course, he liked certain kinds of films that had messages, you know. But he also loved westerns, although he disliked Johnny Guitar. I’ll never forget when he came back and spoke out against Johnny Guitar. He said it’s an impossible film. [Nicholas Ray’s hysterical western has become a cult favorite. Joan Crawford stars as a saloon keeper fighting with Mercedes McCambridge for control of a town.]
He kind of liked The Searchers, but got a little disappointed with John Wayne’s character. But we understood that character—you know, the darkness …
RS: And the towering rage.
MS: That was the thing. When I saw Wayne in Red River—maybe I was six or seven years old—I think that connected with whatever was going on in me, something that connected with my father.
RS: I can see that—very much.
MS: You know, with me, in my situation—it was like a force that overwhelmed me.
RS: Red River revolves almost entirely around a father-son theme—love, hatred, reconciliation.
MS: That was it. When he and Monty Clift separate, when the kid breaks away and Wayne says, you know, you turn around, I might just be there.
RS: Meaning he intends to stalk and perhaps kill him. But there must have been dozens, hundreds of little boys in Little Italy in something like your situation: having intense family relations, struggling to resolve their spiritual lives and their secular lives.
MS: I know.
RS: Yet, you’re the only one who went on to make art out of that experience. Again I wonder, what’s comparable between moviegoing and churchgoing?
MS: I wouldn’t know. I don’t have any other experience, really. Certainly not sports. I couldn’t play sports. I would get asthma, I’d cough and, you know, turn blue [laughs]. Then they’d have to take me to the doctor.
RS: Later, when you went to Cardinal Hayes High School, did you go to the basketball games or any sporting events?
MS: I went to a football game once.
RS: [Laughs.] I see.
MS: It was cold. It was Thanksgiving Day. And I found that I didn’t like the, the—
RS: The violence of it, perhaps [laughs]. Which is a funny thing to say to you.
MS: No, the violence was all right. But there was something about the bravado I saw in the jocks that was similar to what I saw in the streets—bullying from guys who were bigger than you. Or more popular. So I was always the outcast in that way.
But, really, it’s all about the church, my relationship with the church. I went in there, I bought in. And now, at this stage of the game, at my age, it’s almost like you have to apologize for saying, Yeah, I believed in certain things. There are no illusions now.
I finished this book last week by Marguerite Yourcenar, who wrote Memoirs of Hadrian—do you know it?
RS: Yes, I know it.
MS: This book is called The Abyss.
RS: I don’t know that one.
MS: It’s extraordinary. It takes place in the Middle Ages, and deals with an alchemist-philosopher-doctor named Zeno, who’s based on a number of people at the time. And it’s a remarkable book about knowledge, and about ignorance. Particularly the way she lays out the church’s treatment of these intellectuals. And there’re just remarkable things in the book about the love of knowledge and the depth to which the character surrenders to the art of knowledge, so to speak. And embracing and finding himself in the abyss, where we all will go [laughs], and we all come from.
I mean, I can’t do it justice with the words I’ve just said, because it’s quite enlightening just in the way she handles the history of it. It doesn’t read like it’s written by someone looking back at that time. It reads like it’s somebody in that time.
RS: In talking about that book it sounds as if what you were saying about your childhood is that you had a similar lust for knowledge. When you me
ntion your trips to the library it’s as if you’re saying the difference between you, or the potential you, and the yabbos on the street is your quest for information, for knowledge, or wisdom, whatever you want to call it.
MS: I saw it in certain films, too. I saw characters survive with their knowledge. And I remember that priest, Father Principe: he’d get so fed up with some of the kids sometimes, they’d do such silly things. In my case, he even tried to force me to do sports. I wouldn’t do it. And he’d say, “This is good for you. Team sports.” I wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t. I mean, reading about Teddy Roosevelt now, I should have [laughs].
RS: Not necessarily.
MS: The thing about the asthma—I think if you’re told you’re sick long enough, as a child, you begin to take it seriously.
RS: You mean, you think the more people talked about it, the more you embraced sickness?
MS: It could be. When a child is sick he gets attention.
RS: Sure.
MS: But I really was sick. I almost died at two weeks old. I was brought back to life by a doctor, from whooping cough. It was an epidemic or something. It was Dr. Vogel, from Jamaica, Queens, a very nice doctor. I remember him very well because later I was going to his house all the time, every week, for injections for allergies and asthma and that sort of thing. But the asthma—at the time, working-class people didn’t know about it. It was scary to them.
RS: So you were born asthmatic?
MS: I don’t know. But I had my tonsils taken out at the age of three or something, and from that point on the asthma showed up. Maybe for me it came out of the lungs that were wrecked from the whooping cough. One problem was, you couldn’t really enjoy yourself. Whenever I would really get into enjoying myself—laughing, for example—I couldn’t catch my breath. And a terrible attack of wheezing would start. I laugh a lot now, and I think that’s one reason I do. But as a child you start to pass out and you don’t know if you’re going to take another breath. You just don’t know.
So you’re frightened. They put me in one of the bedrooms, with me in a tent on a bed. And there was a little vaporizer inside the tent. People would come and open the tent and see how I was doing, and close it.
But look, what can I say? That’s where I come from, it’s who I am. A lot of time, in my earlier films I was talking about myself, but in those days, in the 1970s, I really couldn’t say certain things. By the time I did Raging Bull, I didn’t care anymore in terms of being silent about where I came from or hiding certain things. Because that world was disappearing and it’s gone now, but what remains in my memory was its atmosphere of fear. That’s something I tried to get at in The Departed.
RS: Fear of what?
MS: Powerful people. Who were above the law.
RS: You mean gangsters?
MS: Yeah. They were like, well, anything could happen. You couldn’t say anything. You couldn’t do anything. You never knew when they might lash out—over things that seemed completely innocent to you.
RS: Because they controlled the neighborhood in all the important ways.
MS: Yeah. Though I was around a couple who were very nice to me, actually, very sweet to me. One of them—he died in 1968—was a very powerful man who was much feared, and rightly so: he was a killer, a real killer. But he was a very nice man—to me.
The guy was sort of the one the uncle in Mean Streets is based upon. I was friends with one of his nephews—hanging out together and playing. We were always there, and to a nine-, ten-, eleven-year-old kid, he was fascinating, because of the power he wielded in that area. The way he moved, what happened when he came out of his doorway—it was the parting of the Red Sea.
One day some young kids who were really sweet were having a basketball game, and a young kid called Moon—nice kid, never any trouble—got into a fight with the other team, from another parish. It was a heated thing, and the police came around. Nothing happened; it was just kids. We went into a bar, and this guy the uncle was based on came in and went in the back, and we all knew that he was there.
So the tone of the room changed. And one of his guys came up and said, “Where’s Moon?” He says, “Come here.” And he took the kid in the back. And the guy looked at him, and he said, “You’re Moon?” And he says, “Yeah.” “No more trouble.” Moon says, “Oh, okay.” It was not like a young wiseguy who was trying to get into the Mob or anything; it was just, You caused a fight at the basketball game, you brought the police down here, we don’t want the police here. We have our own lives here. Just no more trouble. Not mean, not threatening—just be nice. So that was it! There were other kids who didn’t get that. Other kids got shot. It was just, you know, we run this place. We want it nice and quiet. We don’t want people coming down here and checking out what we’re doing.
So there was always an atmosphere of fear. In that, if anybody asked you anything, you always said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know, you must have somebody else in mind.”
RS: So, this notion of silence—it’s a big deal in the Mafia, omertà and all that.
MS: You just pretend not to know anything, see anything, because you have family too and family gets attacked. But it affected me. Yeah, it affected me.
RS: Later, making movies, did you want others to see into this hidden, secret world?
MS: No, not really. I didn’t want anybody to know. I didn’t even want anybody to know I came from there. That’s why I think by the time I did Raging Bull, after having gone through my own difficult period in 1976 and 1978, I didn’t care anymore, because I thought it was my last film anyway in that style. And I figured it didn’t matter. It’s who we are. And when I moved to California, I thought I could be more Californian—a movie director in the old Hollywood style, making genre films at a rapid pace. But the old Hollywood was dying.
And we were looking around, trying to collect things, me and Steven Spielberg, and all these guys, trying to collect memorabilia to keep the old Hollywood alive. But it was a transitional time. It wasn’t like what people said: Oh, well, you kids looked at movies, that’s all you know of life. That’s not so. It’s always with me and never will go away—the way I grew up. That world is always in here. I mean, when I see the world the way it is now, I don’t see much difference from where I came from.
RS: You mean in terms of brutality, stupidity?
MS: Ignorance, and how attitudes, emotions, could switch around in an instant. But the thing about the fear is interesting. An old friend of mine once said it was like being in occupied France. He said if you were asked a question, you were afraid you’d be taken to the Sûreté to be questioned. You couldn’t say anything.
RS: I imagine your parents were saying, Don’t look, Marty; don’t talk, Marty?
MS: Constantly. Constantly.
RS: In other words, you were supposed to be of this world, but not really in this world.
MS: In fact, it was, Please get out if you can. But be decent, be basically a decent person, like my parents were. And, by the way, that’s the reticence I think you see in my father in the first half of Italianamerican [the documentary Scorsese made about his parents]. We just don’t talk. We don’t talk about anything. Though sometimes my father did. He couldn’t resist complaining about how many Irish bars there were in the neighborhood [laughs].
Sometimes Irish people laugh when they see Italianamerican. But when Nicholson’s character says, “I smell a rat,” that’s what I’m talking about. That’s when I suddenly got chills. Even telling you about it, I still get chills. It’s so real to me.
Catherine and Charles Scorsese on set. Both of Marty’s parents appeared in small roles in many of his films.
RS: So you lived in a world where everybody smells a rat. Is that what you’re saying?
MS: Well, I lived in a world where if you did the wrong thing or said the wrong thing, you didn’t know what would happen. I mean, I saw things happen. I saw people be censured. Not censored: censured. I
saw people being slapped, which is worse than being hit.
RS: There’s a lot of contempt in a slap.
MS: And it’s done in front of a lot of people. And that’s the worst. And then I saw people lose their minds. I saw people, good men, turn into complete human wrecks by the end of their lives, because they couldn’t make it in the street. People’s lives just imploded.
I don’t want this ever to be about this me as some sickly kid observing from the sidelines. I’m just saying this is where I come from. It’s the reality. I saw some tragedies. At least, I thought they were tragedies.
RS: You mean, like, a boyhood chum who—
MS: No. Older, older—my father’s friends, people for whom the last twenty-five years of their lives was one bad day after another. The humiliation of it …
I saw a couple of cases where over the years they just came apart. Because before I was born, something happened. They aspired to a kind of street life. They were in the rackets, they were in with the wiseguys. But they didn’t have it in them to hurt somebody. Didn’t have it in them to use their heads a certain way. When the time came for them to do what they had to, they couldn’t do it, and they were humiliated, constantly.
And yet, my father, out of loyalty, stayed with them and took them in as respected people. And so there was that constant discussion: How could you embrace this person, how could you still take this person seriously if no one else took him seriously? My mother didn’t say it, but I heard other people say it. And my father would say, So-and-so, he’s related to so-and-so, he was an old friend of mine, he was loyal to me, I’m going to be loyal to him. And that was it. Until the end. I was fascinated by that.
It’s just the nature of the world I knew. And, as I said, I get excited again to even tell you the story about that scene in The Departed that deals with those issues, a man coming apart who has a lot of power.
But I think who I turned out to be has a lot to do with Irish Catholicism. When I first started bringing books home, one of the first ones I got my hands on was Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. James Joyce. The sensibility of that novel—I was right into it. It was fine with me [laughs].
Conversations with Scorsese Page 4
