RS: I probably read it at the same age you did.
MS: I was about fifteen.
RS: Me, too. It reinforced for me my growing atheism—although that sermon about the length of eternity is a great piece of writing.
MS: Oh, it’s wonderful. In Mean Streets, we put Harvey Keitel’s hand on the flame of eternity—that probably comes from Joyce. But we did hear sermons like that—the sermons about sex, for instance. That’s what we heard in some cases. Other priests, not. There were some priests at Cardinal Hayes that were not that way.
RS: It’s interesting to me that your parents were not particularly religious.
MS: They didn’t buy into it. It’s maybe partly a reaction to the peak of the American Catholic church of the fifties. I mean, you’re coming off of Going My Way, Bells of St. Mary’s.
RS: But they’re Irish versions of Catholicism. Isn’t that a conflict?
MS: Yes. In fact, the nuns who were teaching us had Irish brogues. And that caused some tension.
Marty’s second-grade class photo. He is second from the left in the back row, against the wall.
RS: There is a difference between Irish Catholicism and Italian, isn’t there?
MS: I’m glad you asked that. Because last time Father Principe came to my house he started talking about the difference between Irish and Italian Catholics. I didn’t see any of this at the time, but I think that’s one of the reasons I was so attracted to The Departed. There’s something about [screenwriter] Bill Monahan’s Irish Catholicism, the fatalism of it. And the humor. The nature of how people feel about themselves. I think I was more exposed to the Irish Catholicism because of the elementary school and also Cardinal Hayes.
Father Principe was the one who finally, when he saw Taxi Driver, actually summed up my career. He said, “I’ve always told you, ‘Too much Good Friday and not enough Easter Sunday.’ ” That’s it.
RS: That’s pretty good.
MS: That sums it up. And I think it has a lot to do with Irish Catholicism.
RS: I suppose, just as your spiritual and intellectual life in this period was changing, so was your taste in movies.
MS: When I started to go to high school, I realized my interest in movies was in more than just American films, because having been exposed at the age of five to the Italian neorealist films I also was very, very closely tied to the European sensibility. Obviously, I’m not European, I’m American. But I had Europeans around me all the time, and so I was always pulled in that direction.
Sometimes I would see these films on television when I’d come home from school—Diary of a Country Priest, Jean Renoir’s Diary of a Chambermaid, which was in English, of course, and The River by Renoir. But Beauty and the Beast—
RS: I just think it’s wonderful.
MS: It’s something.
RS: I don’t like fantasies much in movies. But it’s one of the rare fantasies I love.
MS: Boy, that works. So what happened was that when I was going to high school, I would get Cue magazine and I would see these movies that were mentioned. There was Alexander Nevsky, and I would go to this theater called the Thalia.
RS: You didn’t know what you were going to get.
MS: No, I didn’t know what I was going to get. In a way I was aware of the Bergman pictures; The Seventh Seal was the one that was a revelation. I wanted to see it, and I was mesmerized by it; I kept going back to see that. There was Smiles of a Summer Night, and it was condemned. And so I had to ask the priest in confession if it was okay. And he said, “Oh, you’re studying film, it’s all right.” It didn’t do any good because I didn’t understand it. I was too young, much too unsophisticated. And then I saw some of the other ones, but of course I was not able to understand them, either.
And then there was a rerelease of Renoir’s Grand Illusion. Around 1958 or ’59, an intact copy of the film that the Nazis hadn’t burned was discovered. Renoir’s name was very important to me. I knew it had something to do with a painter—his father. When I was a child I saw some of [Pierre-Auguste] Renoir’s paintings in the museum. I’d go to the museum a lot. But I’ve never forgotten The River [Jean Renoir’s coming-of-age tale, set in India, about three girls falling in love with a former soldier] on that big screen. I was eight years old, nine years old. It was an astounding movie to me, and it still is. In fact, I showed it to Wes Anderson about four or five years ago. And I just spoke to Wes two days ago, and he said, That’s when it began, his film The Darjeeling Limited.
RS: Really?
MS: Yeah. He said, while he was watching it, he said to himself, I think there might be something here. And then it opened him up to Satyajit Ray films, and the Merchant-Ivory films they made in India. And so it’s there.
RS: And neorealism? I think of Mean Streets or a picture that I discovered more recently and like quite a bit, Who’s That Knocking at My Door. They’re both in the neorealistic manner. [The latter is about a young man who falls in love with a woman who has been raped and cannot handle the notion that she has been “ruined.”]
MS: Uh-oh.
RS: No, it’s good, Marty.
MS: Well, it’s a rough sketch for Mean Streets, really. If you see them both, you have an idea of what my life was like in those days. Those Italian neorealist films were shown on TV, in 1949, or 1948.
RS: Imagine that.
MS: Yeah, every Friday night they had an Italian film with subtitles: Shoeshine, Rome 11:00, Anna, Bitter Rice. My grandparents were sitting around crying, but it was not nostalgia. It was a hard, bitter truth for them. And the solemnity with which these films were viewed, the solemnity with which they were discussed, by the different generations, made me realize that that was the real world. What I was seeing in those pictures is real. The human condition is that.
But something else was happening in those pictures. I didn’t understand the war. I didn’t know from partisans and fascists. I had no idea. But I did understand the extraordinary communal experience around that little TV screen, watching those scratchy black-and-white images. We had compassion for the people in those pictures.
RS: So that was in your bones when you started to make your first features?
MS: Yes, but what was also in my bones was Singin’ in the Rain. A great experience. My brother and I went to see that in 1952. And at nine or ten years old, we were picking up on all the satire. It’s just so well done, so deftly put together—[Gene] Kelly, and Donald O’Connor and Debbie Reynolds, that was extraordinary. My favorite scene—it’s really about what a director does—is when the director is trying to explain to the actress to speak into the microphone: It goes through the wire and comes through here, and we put it on a disk. But you have to speak into the microphone. It’s also about that extraordinary quiet that you have to have as a director—knowing when to speak and when not to—which goes back to when I was a kid.
Because of being the youngest, whatever conflict was going on, I couldn’t say anything. And I find that in directing: I have to keep my feelings hidden from key crew members or, in particular, from the actors. Because my feelings are uncontrollable. Or can be. So I have to pull back. And it’s an excruciating experience for me.
But there’s the humor in it, too, the humor of being in this situation. Maybe that’s why I loved Sunset Boulevard, because nothing is held back in it. There was nothing like seeing that picture in 1952, when I was ten. To me it was a horror film. An extraordinarily, madly funny horror film. Burying the chimpanzee, and the poor woman in that room with no locks on the doors. William Holden in the pool.
RS: How does that get into something like Mean Streets?
MS: It probably doesn’t—not directly. But by the time I was maybe twelve, thirteen, fourteen, I was asking myself why some film was affecting me, like Force of Evil, which I saw on Million Dollar Movie. Why did certain scenes in that film affect me so strongly? And because it was on Million Dollar Movie, I could revisit it every night for a week. Force of Evil was the big film.
R
S: I have a little bit of a problem with that movie. I kind of appreciate it without fully feeling gathered in by it.
MS: Interesting. It was depicting people that we kind of knew, but in a Hollywood way. It was about the numbers game. And everybody ran the numbers. I used to take the numbers back and forth in paper bags. Somebody would say to me, Hey, take this, go over there and get that, and bring it back. So you’d do it.
I was ten years old and that was basically a way of life. Everybody talked about the numbers they dreamed of. And the number they played. What was the Brooklyn number? What was the Manhattan number? It was easy for us to feed into it, it was like a film being made about people we knew. It didn’t have to win us over. And, of course, John Garfield could do no wrong as far as we were concerned. [He plays a Mob lawyer trying to force his brother into playing along with a scheme to consolidate the numbers racket.]
RS: Well, putting it that way—no wonder it appealed to you more than it did me.
MS: I was trying to figure out the other day: Why does one remember a scene? Like the scene in Force of Evil where Thomas Gomez takes his friend who is ratting him out to a restaurant late at night to have coffee.
RS: It’s been a while since I’ve seen that movie.
MS: You have to watch that scene. Part of its power, I realized, came from David Raksin’s music in the background. And the extraordinary power of the dialogue with Gomez, realizing that he was ratted out, and saying, “What have you done to me?” And as they pick him up, the two guys who are thugs suddenly begin to see him crumple because he has a bad heart, and they go, “No, no, take it easy, take it easy, old pal. It’s okay. We’re just taking you with us. We’re not going to harm you.” And they begin to feel sorry for him, the music building. And then the rat, the guy with the glasses, panics. He trips and he falls. And one asks, “What do you want to do with this one?” And the other says, “Shoot him, kill him, kill him. He knows me.” And the guy screams. It’s a close-up, and the gangster, the thug, fires a gun right in the camera. And it’s a series of cuts and camera moves. But most is achieved with the actors and the dialogue, and the use of music. And Gomez has a great speech in there where he says, “You know, sometimes you feel like you’re dying.” And it’s just beautifully done, because he is about to die of the heart attack and he doesn’t realize it. It was just absolutely extraordinary.
RS: And you were what, twelve, thirteen?
MS: I was about thirteen years old when I saw it, yeah.
RS: Okay. So, you are already at that point committed to becoming a movie guy?
MS: No. No. This is just something—
RS: Well, what were you doing those drawings for if you weren’t beginning to think—
MS: I don’t know what the hell I was doing.
RS: But there’s clearly some instinctive thing going on here.
MS: But you don’t make movies from where I came from; you don’t. First of all, movies weren’t made in New York in 1959, or they were made by people in the Village, maybe.
And I have to say that as a boy I did have trouble with some genres, especially the more romantic genres. I had trouble with Douglas Sirk. I mean, I saw Magnificent Obsession. And I saw Written on the Wind. And I was counting the minutes. I’d walk around the theater, then come back and sit down. The only thing was the color. The color was amazing. Now it’s one of my favorite films, of course.
But I was much more into the western genre because the West had the outdoors, in Technicolor, usually. And it had horses. Horses are beautiful. And my mother’s father, Martino Capa, was in the Italian cavalry, in Sicily. So he loved horses, too, he used to like watching them. I love any horse picture made from 1946 to 1955—you know, Blue Grass of Kentucky, The Red Stallion. There was the texture of the color on the horses. They were in Cinecolor.
Shane was a great experience, for example. I couldn’t wait to see Winchester ’73. But when my father took me to see it, I had trouble with it, because it was more psychologically mean-spirited. It was very disturbing, almost an ugly picture of the West. Blood on the Moon—my parents took me to see that. That was an experience, because of the look of the film. The way they were dressed, it had an authenticity to it, and there’s an extraordinary scene in a bar where Robert Mitchum fights Robert Preston. They’re wearing these heavy coats and the fight is not the traditional cowboy fight that I was used to seeing—the darkness, the low angle, these men sort of tumbling on each other, it was humiliating for the two of them. But it had a truth to it, and it was great how this noir aspect to the movie was really effective.
What was happening was that the noir stuff—mostly set in the cities—started to sneak into these other genres. And I connected with that. In 1953, Pickup on South Street was on the bottom half of a double bill. And the expression in that film, the way it was shot, the way the characters were relating to each other, the extraordinary opening sequence with Jean Peters and Richard Widmark on the subway [where, as a pickpocket, he dips into her purse and comes up with microfilmed secret documents she’s—innocently—carrying to Communist agents], and the fight scene where he hits her—it was pretty shocking, and it stayed with me.
RS: Okay. Let me go back to something I raised before. There must have been dozens, hundreds, of young boys like you, living in places like Elizabeth Street, in situations comparable to yours. How come your situation affected you so powerfully, taking the form of a sort of quiet, unacknowledged rebelliousness?
MS: I don’t know where it comes from. I don’t know whether it’s weakness, or whether it’s strength. I don’t know why that affected me that way. But I really did believe that there could be a transcendence. I hate to use words like that, but the idea is that there is a part of us that would yearn for something that is—
RS: Some of us, not all of us. A lot of people yearn just for what they’ve always known.
MS: Yeah, but I thought, There are some great Catholic artists. For example, Roberto Rossellini and his film Europa ’51. That for me was something that had hope. It has to do with the teachings of the New Testament. I really bought into it, because of what I saw around me. I thought this is the right idea: feeling for the other person and giving something to the other person. Compassion, maybe that’s it.
RS: Well, let me put it another way. Little as you were, and powerless as you were in the situation, there must’ve been some part of you that said, Oh, Christ, Dad, let him alone, referring to your brother or your uncle. Let him be what he wants, let him do what he wants.
MS: Oh, absolutely. Let it go, yeah. But I also knew what he meant. He was afraid that certain things could happen to them. And invariably he was, you know—
RS: Half right, at least.
MS: He was half right. But it’s hard, how you approach the issue. You can hammer it too much, and then they’re not going to listen to anything, you know.
RS: The only direct knowledge I have of your father is from Italianamerican. He’s almost cowering away from your mother. It’s like a Thurber cartoon.
MS: I know. But he wasn’t really that way.
RS: But he’s very reserved. And she’s kind of pushing him.
MS: That was the balance, that was the duo. That was part of a routine they had. She was much more open. He would be more reserved. But once he felt comfortable—if you notice, halfway through the picture, they’re both narrating the same story, and contradicting each other and arguing.
But in the beginning, it was hard for him to be on film, there was no such thing for him as being on film. You never show your personality on film. You’re not going to show people who you are. Imagine when they saw Mean Streets. They were stunned.
RS: Tell me.
MS: Well, that opening night at the New York Film Festival, they were shocked. They didn’t know if it was good or not, but they knew where it came from. They were surprised that that kind of stuff would be on the screen. And my mother went out into the lobby and people ran up to her and they said—I always tell the sto
ry—“Mrs. Scorsese, what do you think of your son’s film?” She goes, “I just want you to know, we never used that word in the house.”
And she was right. She was right. The four-letter word [fuck] was never used in the house. In the most heated discussions I never heard that word used by my uncles, by my brother, or by my father. But it was her first response. She just wanted people to know how my parents raised me. We didn’t raise him to be that. But on the other hand, people seemed to like the film. There seemed to be a good reaction to it. And they didn’t quite understand this.
Marty as cowboy.
RS: Obviously, there was a disconnect between the little Marty they had lovingly tended as a child and young Marty, the explosive filmmaker.
MS: Those formative years between six or seven and until about fourteen were really, really tough years for me. Because I didn’t fit in that neighborhood. I mean, I couldn’t really be the young person I was trying to be. I wasn’t able to take [my studies] seriously enough to go to Regis High School, let’s say, and take Greek and Latin. I couldn’t do it. Or wouldn’t do it.
Even so, my first impulse was to go to the priesthood. It was overwhelming. Especially if you were a kid who couldn’t become a member of organized crime. I mean, you had to have a stone heart. You have to be a stone killer.
RS: Which, of course, your father had no intention of your being.
MS: But he was quite intense, quite intense. He made you realize that everything had a meaning and everything had to be done a certain way. Meaning that there was a reason why people lived a certain way and behaved a certain way. Even though you’re kids, this is the world you’re in.
RS: Whereas your mother was more live-and-let-live?
MS: Yeah, absolutely. If there was a little too much nudity in a new film, my mother would say, “Oh, come on, that’s life.” And my father had to say, “Well, okay.” But he made you aware that there was a code, a morality, that was different from what I was hearing in the church.
Conversations with Scorsese Page 5
