RS: Earth is a wonderful film.
MS: And Arsenal. It’s just a remarkable movie. It’s just so moving. They sent me a print from Russia. I have it at the office. It’s beautiful. We have it in 35 millimeter, silent, you know. And it was sent in these old film cans, too. It looks like the cans were made in 1929. But what I caught in Nevsky [about a Russian prince defeating an invading army in a famous battle on the ice; Sergei Eisenstein, 1938] was the editing. The battle scenes were amazing in terms of energy and visualization. And very often it was a mixture of silent cinema and sound cinema with a very, very crude-sounding sound track—Prokofiev on the track, very, very crudely recorded, so that the instruments sounded as if they were recorded in the twelfth century.
Catherine Scorsese’s father, Martin, in his Italian cavalry uniform.
RS: I once saw that with a live symphony orchestra playing, and I didn’t like it—too slick. The orchestra was too big; it dominated the screen.
MS: I became fascinated by the editing, because it seems like sometimes time stops. It doesn’t flow. You’re aware of different positions of people in the frame, and it becomes about something else, about forms, in a way. Not that I could intellectualize it at the time, but that feeling was something I wanted to create. And the only way I could do it was to get the camera angles and cut them together.
RS: Your first two features [Who’s That Knocking and Mean Streets] seem to me to be very, very camera conscious, though not in the way of a conventional Hollywood movie—I mean, a Howard Hawks movie is camera unconscious.
MS: Well, that’s the thing. Now you hit it, because the issue was this: If you look at neorealism, the camera is relaxed to a certain extent. It’s not there. It’s not up front.
RS: Right.
MS: Even in British cinema, except for Powell and Pressburger. The only Powell and Pressburger picture I had seen in its original form was The Red Shoes.
The thing was, the enjoyment of finding the angle, of seeing an image in your mind. I kind of was affected more by editing than by camera movement. And yet I loved camera movement when I became more, what’s the word, cognizant of it. At that point I was seeing The Seventh Seal, I was seeing other foreign films. But I had been used to the American classical cinema—the seamless editing of William Wyler, John Ford.
RS: Unfairly, I think, your name is very heavily associated with gangster pictures in the public mind. But so far, in talking about your formative moviegoing years, you’ve scarcely mentioned gangster movies.
MS: I saw The Roaring Twenties on television. But the older ones that I saw in the theater, when I was ten years old, were Public Enemy and Little Caesar, which my father took me to see. Public Enemy is the one that stays in my mind as probably the more truthful one.
RS: Little Caesar is not a good movie, if you go back and look at it.
MS: No, no.
RS: I mean, there are a couple of shots in it that are great.
MS: A couple of shots are good, right. But Public Enemy, as I say, is probably the most truthful one. I sort of gathered that, I think, from my father’s reaction to it. I mean, as I’ve said, he was not in with those people, but they were around him and he had to behave a certain way with them. And that conditioned his response to Public Enemy—the powerful man, full of hubris, attacked and then falling. The fallen hero.
But the brutality, the toughness, of the picture was something that never left me. Maybe the humor, too. Goodfellas kind of has both—in my mind, at least.
RS: Stop me if I’ve told you this, but Bill Wellman told me this story. They were all at a preview—he, Jack Warner, Darryl Zanuck, and Mike Curtiz all went together. And it was a smash. I mean, nobody had actually ever seen a movie quite like it.
Anyway, it was over, and they were standing around outside or sitting in the manager’s office smoking cigars, and looking at the preview cards. And Jack Warner says, “Look, I don’t care. The ending in this movie makes me sick. You’ve got to cut it.” Zanuck says, “No. It’s the whole point of the movie, for God’s sake. I mean, you can’t cut that.” And Bill says, “Come on, it’s the best thing in the movie.” And Warner turns to Curtiz and he says, “You agree with me, Mike, right? It’s just too brutal for the audience.” And Mike Curtiz goes, “Yeah, Jack, I think you’re right.” And according to Wellman, Zanuck reached out and shoved the cigar down Curtiz’s throat.
MS: It’s something you’d see in a 1930s movie. [Laughs.]
RS: Yeah! And, then Bill said, “Zanuck was a tough little guy. Don’t ever forget that.” And then he adds, “God, that’s what was so much fun in those days!”
MS: Oh, imagine those guys working together. Oh, my God. William Wellman making three films a year. Yeah. What was that one, Safe in Hell?
RS: That’s one of the strangest movies.
MS: One of the craziest movies.
RS: And it’s so sort of un-Bill, you know what I mean? But the opening, that scene where the girl is visibly being called up by her madam saying, “I’ve got a customer for you, let’s go.” She says, “I’ll be there in ten minutes.” Pre-Code picture, of course.
MS: Yeah, it’s a tough movie. But they were doing those things, knocking them out. Boy, it must’ve been great.
RS: There’s a little book that came out recently that Bill Wellman Jr. found, a bunch of letters that his father wrote back from the front in World War I.
MS: Wow.
RS: It’s a wonderful little book. It’s about this kid from Brookline, Massachusetts, joining the Lafayette Escadrille, going over there, the only American, who doesn’t speak any French, and all the French fliers are all bonded up and they’re fine. And then every morning you strap yourself into this plane and you’re so cold, you can’t breathe. And you go up into the sky where you could easily be shot down in five minutes. They’re wonderful letters, because he’s keeping up a front for the people at home: “Oh, everything’s fine over here. It’d be great if you could send me a few more bucks.”
MS: I admire that. I really do.
RS: Well, Bill was, of course, a sensational guy.
MS: A film I like a lot of his that is being shown recently is Island in the Sky.
RS: It’s strangely static, that movie. I mean, they’re up there in the Arctic, they crash and they sit there.
MS: But there’s something very mystical about it—especially the fellow who goes out and dies. He thinks he’s miles away from the plane, and he dies right by the plane. It’s very moving. I watched it again last week on television. Not a great one, but something unique.
RS: Well, I think his great period was the early 1930s when he was at Warner Bros.
MS: I have one of these films here called Other Men’s Women I’d like to look at.
RS: Oh, that’s a wonderful picture. And Heroes for Sale is great. Wild Boys of the Road is great.
MS: Yeah.
RS: And Central Airport.
MS: Oh, really? I haven’t seen that.
RS: It’s very minor, but a real pre-Code-er. You know, she goes to her room, he goes to his room. There’s a door between them and, you know, he walks in and they just start screwing—no preliminaries, no sweet talk. And they’re not married. But it’s a good little story—you know, the cashiered-flier-seeking-redemption story.
THE FORD CONNECTION
RICHARD SCHICKEL: We’ve talked very little about the director I know was your favorite: John Ford.
MARTIN SCORSESE: When I was a kid I liked him because of the cavalry films, and The Quiet Man was very funny to us when we saw it as eleven-year-olds, twelve-year-olds. The look of the original Technicolor of that film is magical. But The Searchers was the key one, because of the nature of John Wayne in that. And the look of it. I saw it in VistaVision. What happened was that I realized there was one way of making a picture, which was the classical cinema. I didn’t call it classical at the time. And then there were these foreign films that just seemed to erupt, almost like comics in their radical angles and their
changes from frame to frame.
Three of us went to see it at the age of thirteen. We graduated from St. Patrick’s. Then we went off to dinner that night at Toffenetti’s, off Times Square, then on to the old Criterion Theater. We walked in in the middle, you know. And there it was up on the screen.
And we never stopped talking about the picture, because of the complexity of Wayne’s character—his anger, his longing for his brother’s wife, his obsessions. We didn’t quite understand it, but we went with it. And then it came on television, and we saw it in black-and-white constantly. And we’d be having something to drink in a bar on Hudson Street, and Joe would say, “Did you notice that scene where John Wayne is standing there and Ward Bond has just talked to him, and he looks over in the doorway and he sees his sister-in-law, and she’s folding his coat? I think there’s something between the sister-in-law and him.” I said, “I didn’t notice—I’ll take a look at it again.” And so the film got deeper and deeper and deeper.
Marty, in cap and gown, graduating from junior high school at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral.
RS: I think Ford was so often careless, and so often sold out to the lowest popular tastes.
MS: I have a problem with The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I saw it on the giant screen at the Capitol Theater the second day after it opened. And I was taken aback by it, because there was a lack of authenticity in it.
RS: There are a number of soundstage westerns. But that’s almost the worst of them in that way.
MS: But it’s got great things in it, great things.
RS: It’s a pretty good story. But Jimmy Stewart is playing a guy maybe thirty years younger than his real age.
MS: Yeah, it’s a great story. I guess it’s a great film. I just missed it, you know.
RS: I don’t think it’s a great film. But I do agree with you that of the three cavalry westerns, Fort Apache is the best.
MS: I think it is, yeah.
RS: I don’t know why it is. Maybe it’s because of Henry Fonda.
MS: I agree. It’s that Colonel Thursday—
RS: It’s an amazingly good performance by him. And it’s not Fonda as we had known him before. I mean, he’s this ramrod hard-ass—
MS: And he brings down total destruction on everybody. And yet there’s something about him. You care about him, particularly in the scene where he has to dance with the, you know—
RS: The sergeant’s wife? At the noncommissioned officers’ ball. It’s a brilliantly staged scene.
MS: Watch the editing in that scene and watch when he moves the camera positions as the people line up. First they come out in twos and then fours—and eventually they’re all marching forward together. It’s just dynamic. It’s like the dancing scene in My Darling Clementine, which is quite beautiful.
RS: Right. Beautiful.
MS: And this is very carefully put together. But the greatest scene is his conference with Geronimo, where he has the nerve to open up that little camp stool and sit down.
RS: And he’s wearing that stupid thing on his head [a kepi like those worn by the Foreign Legion in Africa].
MS: Yes, that French Foreign Legion thing. And Ford has Pedro Armendáriz in the middle. Watch the intercutting of that. It’s just wonderful.
RS: Oh, that’s beautifully shot, that sequence.
MS: He actually has to translate and repeat what he says to Geronimo. And ruin everything. I always find stories about pride taking a fall so interesting.
RS: Oh, absolutely.
MS: Like the Howard Hughes thing, you know. So Colonel Thursday is classic.
RS: But aside from those scenes, what I really hate in John Ford movies are those Irish guys going down to the barracks and singing all their stupid ballads.
MS: Rio Grande.
RS: But there’s one moment like that in Fort Apache: they’re bawling those ballads.
MS: Oh, they are? I mean, I may have blocked it out.
RS: Yes, you did. Because I did, too. Until I saw it again recently. But The Searchers is an infuriating movie to me.
MS: Why?
RS: Because it has greatness, and it has banality.
MS: It has problems in it.
RS: It’s almost like, Oh, Jack, you’re doing it, it’s so great, and then—
MS: Then he has that comedy, and—
RS: And then the fat, horny Indian woman.
MS: I know, that’s a problem.
RS: I mean, it is so close to being a true masterpiece.
MS: It really is. But I loved it as my favorite film, because, among other things, the scenery in that film is a character.
RS: Oh, absolutely.
MS: It’s not just scenery. If you see it on a small screen, it’s okay, but on that giant VistaVision screen—
RS: But those people—how much corn are they going to get out of that land, do you really think?
MS: Nothing.
RS: You couldn’t grow a radish out there!
MS: Desert, red dirt, you know. And then there was a period of time where I realized, too, that the comedy may have been strained.
RS: And the romance—Vera Miles waiting and waiting and waiting for Jeffrey Hunter back home.
MS: But when I saw it again a year and a half, two years ago, I got involved with it again. And the archness of the humor actually wasn’t as arch as I remembered it. I watched their faces. I saw Jeffrey Hunter’s eyes. He really was so earnest, you know. I still have some problems with it in some areas. But for some reason, seeing it on a big screen in the right atmosphere, it seemed to carry itself along in a way. Even the Indian woman has her moments; when he mentions the name Scar, the music score kicks in, and she gets upset. And that changes everything. You actually see it in her eyes and her face. I’m just saying, Give it another chance, if you can ever see it on a big screen.
RS: It comes up in your very first film, doesn’t it? I mean, Harvey Keitel is riding on the Staten Island ferry and trying to pick up this girl, and they’re talking about The Searchers.
MS: Oh, yeah, because he’s looking at the picture in the paper of The Searchers. We just didn’t know what else for him to talk about.
RS: I guess that was generational. I know Steven Spielberg loves it.
MS: Steven grew up the opposite of where I grew up, and he felt that way about it. John Milius, of course, Paul Schrader—both very much the opposite of Spielberg and me.
RS: You were all at the right age for a movie to take you over.
MS: Thirteen, fourteen years old. That was it.
RS: It happens to everyone at that age—“the impressionable years,” I call them. You can never get those movies out of your head.
MS: I remember Leo DiCaprio mentioning to me that Fight Club was like that to his generation.
RS: I never much cared for it.
MS: He’s a very interesting guy, David Fincher [director also of Seven, Panic Room, Zodiac]. I like his pictures. But you’re right about certain pictures hitting you at a certain age. There’s no way to argue about them.
RS: No, you can’t argue those movies.
MS: It’s like you’re stuck. And that’s what was so interesting with Lindsay Anderson’s take on Ford for so many years. I got to know him a little bit in the early seventies. And it was so clear that he rejected The Searchers, while it was accepted by us.
What hit us at the age of thirteen or fourteen was Wayne’s character. I mean, he reflected America. We couldn’t articulate it, but that was the tone of everything around us—the Cold War, the racism, all that was reflected in his face.
RS: Well, that’s a good point I hadn’t actually thought of. In the fifties we knew it was wrong—the racism—and yet we practiced it. And that’s in that movie.
MS: And don’t forget, he was a Confederate, too. Pro-slavery. He was the flawed, crazed hero of the fifties. I guess coming out of the Kazan films and coming out of Preminger’s and Stanley Kramer’s pictures, it was natural for us to accept that kind of character.
OF STUDIOS AND STYLES
RICHARD SCHICKEL: I know you think highly of Warner Bros.’ role in American movie history, and The Searchers was a Warner film. Did that have any influence on your opinion of the film?
MARTIN SCORSESE: No, I don’t think so. But Warners is still a great studio.
RS: Oh, it’s the greatest.
MS: I love that Mean Streets was bought by Warner Bros. And then Alice was done there. And Goodfellas was made there. The Departed was made there, in the tradition of Wellman’s Public Enemy.
See, the thing is, when I was starting out I would get excited by discovering what lens to use to create a certain feeling from another film. You had all this technique, all these choices, at your disposal. And you had to sort of figure out the ones that would tell a certain part of the story, psychologically and emotionally, more powerfully.
But in the sixties, I went against the established filmmakers, wiped them away, and said, If this filmmaker did a track in on that shot and on that line of dialogue, if I ever come across the same thing, I’ll do a track out—just to see what would happen.
Well, sometimes you’d track out, and it didn’t work. Sometimes it did work. So we were sometimes also finding what to do from watching films we didn’t like.
RS: But you must have liked some of the kind of routine American, or seemingly at the time routine, guys, right? Surely you must have liked Howard Hawks.
MS: Sure. But I didn’t realize it at first. I saw the name Hawks and I began to realize certain films I liked all had the same name on them. [Laughs.]
RS: It’s a very unobtrusive manner of his, you know. I mean, it was never something where you’d say, Wow, I’ve never seen anything like that before.
MS: But there was something about the way the people behaved in his pictures in the frame. There’s something about the nature of the relationship—the men, the women. And the men together. Rio Bravo, for example, or going earlier—Red River, of course, is the key one.
RS: There’s something in Hawksian behavior that maybe only a steady kind of eye-level camera can capture.
Conversations with Scorsese Page 7
