Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  RS: Oh, those are wonderful.

  MS: Yes. But I found that for me, I wanted to do narrative cinema—traditional narrative cinema. And so, if anything, I was influenced by Italian films and English films, certainly. And when the New Wave started in France, you couldn’t help but be influenced by it if you were twenty, twenty-five years old—Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, Chabrol, all of them.

  RS: But aside from that little technical course you mentioned, NYU didn’t offer—at least in your first years—much in the way of hands-on filmmaking instruction?

  MS: No. But as Orson Welles said, You can learn everything you need to know about a movie camera and a movie studio in about four hours.

  RS: I’ve read that often. But, as you know, a lot of mystery surrounds the craft of directing.

  MS: Well, what you know is, basically, This is the lens. This is a longer one, this is a shorter one. A shorter one makes it wider. If you get too close with this, you’re going to have a kind of cartoon effect. But if you lean it against the wall and you go fast with it, it feels like the wall is going faster and therefore you have the corridor shots in all the Welles pictures. Welles says in a documentary I saw recently, “If I used a 40 millimeter lens at this point, and I aimed the camera that way, I knew what the effect would be.” That much I knew, too. And somebody said it wouldn’t work, and I said, I knew it would work. I didn’t even know what a 40 is except that it’s 10 millimeters less than the normal lens, the 50. I rarely use it. I use usually a 32 or something wider. I don’t like long lenses, which I picked up on from the Polish films—Wajda and Polanski.

  RS: It seems to me directors break down into two categories. On the one hand would be Preminger, who almost never used a close-up and didn’t edit a lot. Then there are the other directors, who love to cut.

  MS: I really like cutting. I think a lot of that has to do with seeing Eisenstein’s Potemkin in Haig’s class. I was fascinated by the editing. And it didn’t need sound. It told a story, although Pudovkin [a contemporary of Eisenstein’s in the Russian cinema of the 1920s] became very heavy-handed, especially in Mother. But you had to understand the audience that it was being made for, too. Many of them didn’t even have electric light; they hadn’t seen a movie or heard a voice on the radio.

  So I became interested in the effect that these juxtapositions of images created. That sort of clashed with the classical style from Hollywood films, also with some Italian films from the neorealist period. But the choice of lens feeds into that. And the enjoyment of choosing the lens. You know, if you use too wide a lens it draws too much attention to the camera angle, and it takes you out of the movie to a certain extent. There are a lot of wonderful movies that use long lenses. Kurosawa uses long lenses. But I always feel long lenses are very indefinite. I couldn’t define the actors the way I wanted to. I felt that they were like floating, dreamlike images, and I preferred to have something harder and crisper.

  I didn’t know what that was until I got to school, and Michael Wadleigh showed me a 16 millimeter camera in our second year of college. You were able to take two camera courses in the third and fourth semesters. You had a Filmo camera, which was the 16 millimeter version of the Eyemo, which they used in World War II. And it had parallax and everything. [Parallax is the difference between what the camera lens sees and what the viewfinder sees.]

  RS: You had those little two-minute loads?

  MS: A hundred feet. A hundred feet is about two and a half minutes. And so you’d do your film on that. You had to learn parallax view, which is very complex. But once you learned it and you tried it a few times, and once you got the basic ideas of exposure, you had somebody you could rely on to help you with it. I didn’t really understand too much about exposures. But I began to understand more light, less opening. Less light, more opening. And then I became fascinated with the idea of very fast film and fast lenses, because I didn’t like the encumbrance of the lights on locations.

  That became a big deal. I didn’t have that skill until maybe Taxi Driver, when I got a little better at that. But in Mean Streets we just couldn’t get enough light. For Who’s That Knocking too.

  RS: There’s some very beautiful black-and-white in Who’s That Knocking.

  MS: There is. Michael Wadleigh did the 16 millimeter sections. At the time I was inspired by the use of black-and-white photography by Gianni di Venanzo. And also Giuseppe Rotunno, but primarily di Venanzo. [Both were leading Italian cinematographers at the time.] I mean, I really loved to look at di Venanzo’s films—there was something about the bright white southern Italy in black-and-white, the Mediterranean, those white houses, like Greece. So I tried to get that look for Who’s That Knocking.

  RS: But, since you couldn’t learn it at NYU except for this little camera course, where were you beginning to learn this stuff?

  MS: I’d go to the Art Theater on 8th Street [in Greenwich Village].

  RS: So you were learning just by looking?

  MS: Looking. Always looking. But in the second year with Haig Manoogian, at the end of the semester, we had to do a report on one film that we liked. And I did The Third Man. And he gave me a B+ because, he said, “Remember, it’s only a thriller.” So, that was it. We were at the opposite ends of the pole, in a way. He preferred Paisan and Open City, and I liked everything.

  By the third semester and in the fourth, there were little exercises. You’d do something for exposures. Then you’d do something for editing. And you’d begin to understand what film is. By 1963 Haig gave a summer workshop. In six weeks you’d write a film, direct it, edit it, and print it in the lab. Now, you’d maybe have thirty-six kids join in. And he’d break them into six groups. And he’d say, Okay, you’re director, you’re grip, you’re camera, whatever.

  And people would complain and say, “I signed up to direct a film.” “So where’s your script?” “Oh, well, I thought I could direct somebody else’s.” “No. Come in with your own idea. If you don’t have an idea, you’re not going to have a group,” he said. Another guy said, “I didn’t sign up to be a cameraman.” “You’ll learn from the camera just by putting your eye at the eyepiece.” So there were a lot of people who were very unhappy.

  But what I did was write a script and get it to him as soon as possible, and he okayed it, so I was given a crew, and they all knew that they had to do what I wanted. And so we got it all set up in five days, and then we shot it in six, seven days, and edited it. It was a comedy, based on camera angles and it was very technical—quite silly and childish, all about the idea of clichés, and “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” That was a famous cliché and we used that. But there are some funny things in it. It’s more influenced by Ernie Kovacs and Mel Brooks than anything else.

  Marty directing his first NYU student film, What’s a Nice Girl like You Doing in a Place like This? Made in 1963, it was nine minutes long and shot in black-and-white.

  RS: That’s not so terrible. I loved Ernie. He was great.

  MS: Ernie Kovacs was just my favorite. We all loved him, you know—the total surrealism on television. And pushing the limits, making innovations in television storytelling.

  RS: I came to know him. When I was a very young journalist, I did a story on him. We would meet in his hotel room, and we’d get lavish room service and we’d be there all afternoon, just bullshitting.

  MS: Oh, I loved him. I loved him. Anyway, my little film had all the tricks and the fun of just putting pictures together in slow motion and fast motion and stills, and intercutting with mattes the way Truffaut would do in Jules and Jim. It had no depth at all, but it was a lot of fun. And it won me a scholarship, so my father was able to use it for the tuition for the next year. And then that led to me doing another short film in junior year, the second semester, and that became It’s Not Just You, Murray.

  RS: I’ve never seen it.

  MS: It was basically Goodfellas.

  RS: Huh?

  MS: It’s Goodfellas. I did it in 1964.
Murray was a big epic, as much as I could manage, of two guys who were friends in the underworld, from my old neighborhood. But I did it with very New Wave techniques. It was also a cross with The Roaring Twenties, an attempt at that sort of scale which led eventually to Mean Streets, which led ultimately to Goodfellas, and to Casino and Gangs of New York—the scale of it, the excessive nature of it. I mean, in Murray there’s just a hint of it. We didn’t have the money.

  TURNING PRO

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: Chronologically speaking, I guess we’re coming up to graduation at NYU. And I’m sure your parents are saying, Well, what are you going to do, Marty?

  MARTIN SCORSESE: Well, I was going to make a first feature. As I said, my father kept saying that I should have something as a backup, like teaching. But my parents were heartened by the new world that they were let into—the academic world and Washington Square College. They came to the events, and they met all these very interesting people. And the short films were shown in the New York Film Festival and other people liked them, people from different walks of life.

  RS: That, of course, is very important to parents.

  MS: The problem was, Did I have the maturity to make a first feature, the maturity to be able to say what you want to say, know what you want to say, and express it through cinema? That was the next big step. And that was the thing that they helped me with a little bit. Not money, but helping me, you know, psychologically supporting my ambitions. And then I started Who’s That Knocking at My Door, which came out in 1969. I started shooting in ’65, though. It took four years on and off. I don’t think it’s very good. I mean, Harvey Keitel is good and Zina Bethune is good. And the camera work is good. It was a favorite of John Cassavetes. He liked it a lot.

  RS: Let’s stop there for a minute and talk about Harvey, who was so important in your early career. How did you meet?

  MS: He answered an ad that we put in Show Business for people to come and audition for a student film at NYU. I didn’t tell him this, but I had a friend of mine who was a comedian, Bill Minkin, who is in a number of my films. I had Bill sit behind a desk, up on the eighth floor at the Greene Street building. And Harvey walked in. Bill says, “What are you doing here?” Harvey said, “I came to answer an ad.” “What ad?” Bill says, “There’s no ad. We didn’t take out any ad. Who the hell are you?” And they got into a big argument. I thought it was great! That was the audition I set up, but I neglected to tell Harvey [laughs]. And Harvey got so mad at me. But I said, “You’re wonderful” [laughs]. He said, “Well, why didn’t you tell me it was an improv?” I said, “I just never thought about it.” And so we started working together on Who’s That Knocking. He was a court stenographer at the time. And it was a big problem for him sometimes to get free to work with us.

  But it wasn’t just a matter of Harvey’s schedule: Sometimes I didn’t shoot for three months, which created terrible problems matching scenes. Or we’d go to shoot in the building and we’d blow all the lights and then have to wait for four, five, six hours. It was a nightmare. We didn’t really know what we were doing. And when the film was finally finished, I tried to get it in the New York Film Festival. They told us I was living aesthetically beyond my means [laughs]. Which was true, you know. But I was trying to formulate the narrative of where I grew up and I couldn’t articulate the emotional aspects of the love story. I could not articulate the scenes.

  RS: Do you mean articulate them to the actors?

  MS: Yes. Make it a dramatic narrative. It was kind of pastiche. But Harvey became like family, like a brother. He’d stay at the apartment and sleep over on a cot. He’s a lovely man, and a very sweet guy. We were also able to argue, which was a good thing, without holding a grudge for three years. He has a certain emotional strength that’s powerful, really powerful. And he grew up in Brooklyn. So he came from a similar background. He was kind of the opposite of me, though, in some ways. I tended to pull back sometimes, but he would be much more comfortable around new people, or new women. He was a little more fearless. And he had forced himself to be a Marine. In 1958 he was in the invasion of Lebanon. And I told him I always admired people who had that courage. He never bragged about it. He’s just a person who took the fear and accepted it and went through it, did it. And that’s the same thing he did in front of the camera.

  Marty directs Harvey Keitel and Zina Bethune in what was Keitel and Scorsese’s feature debut. At that point Bethune was a veteran TV actress. She has also had a notable career as a ballerina and choreographer. The film was released in 1969.

  RS: Oh, sure, you can see that.

  MS: The structure of his career is very interesting. He didn’t stop working a day in his life. He still hasn’t. He just kept working. He never bought into the Hollywood situation. He never went with the star system, he never went for the machine. He had a taste of it, and they had a taste of him, and they all decided they maybe should part amicably. But he also developed as an actor. He takes some chances, boy.

  RS: That’s an understatement.

  MS: And he’s a very, very warmhearted guy.

  RS: So you’re still in touch.

  MS: As much as possible. I guess in analyzing what is a friend, it’s simply somebody you can trust. And we trusted each other with what we wanted in film. We trusted each other to make mistakes, to try different things—to go different ways, to be outrageous.

  RS: I know the first version of Who’s That Knocking was as a student, or maybe I should say a sort of postgraduate, film, but you actually undersold that movie to me before I saw it. When I did, I quite liked it. I mean, yes, it’s crude, it’s pretty simple in its development, but there’s something—I don’t know quite what.

  MS: I guess it’s too personal or something. Harry Ufland, who was my first agent—he was at William Morris—saw my short films, then signed me up and tried to get me some documentary work. After he saw the feature, the first part of it, he would bring it around and show it to people, and they would say, This is the late sixties, the sexual revolution, free love, and here’s this guy who won’t make love to a woman because he’s in love with her! People were saying, Where did this picture come from? Are you mad? But I was just being truthful to the culture I knew. It was like kids from a provincial village making a movie about it.

  RS: The trouble in it is the going away from that and embracing the sexual revolution. You know, that nude sex sequence.

  MS: Yeah, yeah, it’s hilarious. Well, that’s the only way we could get it distributed. So we shot that in Amsterdam. By that time Haig and Joseph Brenner had come in to help finish the picture with me. Haig was like my producer. And at a certain point, Joseph, who was this distributor of exploitation films, agreed to distribute it. He was trying to make a crossover at that time. You know, at the time, Brian De Palma’s Greetings was doing well. Joe was a nice man. He had his office on 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue. It was like the worst area you could imagine. And he would release films like White Zombie, and even Birth of a Nation. He had me cut a trailer of Birth of a Nation for him. He did basically public domain things—Reefer Madness, that kind of stuff. So he was going to try to go with this new youth culture. Eventually he pointed out to Haig and everybody, “The one thing that will get this done, and I guarantee to get this in theaters, would be to do a scene with some nudity in it, and some sex.”

  RS: I’ve been going through your stills. There’s something called the Three Penny Cinema. There’s a little picture of the marquee and you’re top-billed above Godard, and his picture.

  Marty’s film got top billing, over a film by Jean-Luc Godard, at the Chicago Film Festival, where it was championed by Roger Ebert.

  MS: Band of Outsiders.

  RS: One of my favorites of his.

  MS: Me, too. That was in Chicago, and that was the first run of the film, I think. And that was on the same street as the Biograph Theater, where John Dillinger got shot. One of my uncles said, “That makes two things that died on that block” [laughs].


  Who’s That Knocking at My Door could not find a distributor—until a nude scene, largely irrelevant to the plot, was added. It was shot in Amsterdam, with Marty hating the task but Keitel obviously enjoying it.

  Roger Ebert was the critic who came out for the picture when it was shown under a different title at the Chicago Film Festival. That was the year before we put the nude scene in. And he gave us a very nice review.

  RS: The stills of the nude scene are great, by the way.

  MS: Yeah, from Amsterdam.

  RS: Harvey looks so blissful in those stills. And there’s little Marty, operating the camera.

  MS: I’m doing it, and Harvey’s having a good time. And the people in Amsterdam at that time were wonderful. I was in Paris in May of ’68 when all the fighting started. I was with a friend of mine named Richard Coll, who was the cinematographer of most of that film and my short films. He had taken me to Amsterdam and London to do some commercials, and I was making a little money working with him. He was one of the two collaborators I gravitated toward—along with my old friend Mardik Martin. It was a wonderful time. It was 1968, from January to June.

  At that time we still couldn’t get Who’s That Knocking distributed. And Haig Manoogian said, “Look, there’s this one guy, Joseph Weill. Could you come to America?” And I said, “We can’t get out of here. There’s trouble. All of Europe is blowing up.” And he said, “Well, what if we fly Harvey over?” And I found a place in Amsterdam that looked like a loft in the Bowery. And I did a storyboard of the scene, and sent it back, and said, “This is what I want to do.” I put The Doors music on it at the end. I had to edit it in Amsterdam, too. I had the track on one side and the picture on the other side. And I put it in my raincoat, and I got it through customs [laughs].