RS: Marty the smuggler. Who knew?
MS: I just did anything to get this stuff done. But Who’s That Knocking was a film that was obviously in a European mode, the French New Wave, the Italian New Wave, and Cassavetes, mainly.
RS: Why Cassavetes?
MS: Well, because of the energy and the audacity to pick up a camera, a 16 millimeter camera at the time, the Eclair, and shoot a movie right here—on the East Coast, where there were no movie studios. And the excitement of cinema itself was seductive for me. I wanted to be there. I think part of wanting to be there was to be away from where I was. So, I decided, yes, if there’s any role for me in American cinema, it would be the gangster film. It would be noir. It would be of that world.
RS: In Knocking, the guy attempts to seduce the girl with these heavy film references—
MS: That’s me. I mean, I was stuck. The asthma created a complete lack of confidence, so he doesn’t know how to talk to a girl.
RS: That’s how you would have been?
MS: Probably. If I’d ever found a girl. But what was happening then was interesting. I think what happened was that somehow I related to the Wayne character in The Searchers because of the darkness of his character—how he was exposing his racism, exposing his own inner conflicts, and yet he was a hero.
Marty takes in the sights on his first European trip.
RS: The darkness of Wayne’s character seems to be referenced in the strange darkness of Harvey Keitel’s character in Knocking. But when this guy is almost obsessively talking about The Searchers with the girl he’s trying to seduce, that’s you saying, at least in part, Wait a minute, American film is worthwhile.
MS: Yes. We happened to see The Searchers in VistaVision the night I graduated from elementary school, as I told you. That VistaVision screen, and Monument Valley, and Wayne, and Jeffrey Hunter, and Natalie Wood, Ward Bond, all of them. It’s a film that my friends and I kept talking about and talking about. And then we’d see it on television, in black-and-white, and we’d say, Hey, interesting: Remember that line of dialogue? And the way he moves here, and the way that happens there.
RS: In Knocking Harvey falls for the girl he meets on the Staten Island ferry, and chats her up about The Searchers, as we discussed earlier. But this poor girl has been raped. And that means that, try as he might to understand, she’s ruined for him.
MS: Absolutely.
RS: He seems to understand that compassion is in order, but—
MS: But he’s bred not to understand it. He’s bred not to mature, not to move ahead. Although I try to suggest at the end that it isn’t quite the same with him as it is with his friends, that a seed has been planted in him that is going to make him change. It’s about being selfless, understanding other people—that’s what I was hearing in the church, you know.
This was the key. There are elements in Harvey’s character that I’d say line up directly with Ethan in The Searchers. There’s no doubt about it. And the guilt, whatever the hell Ethan is hiding in himself, whatever he did in that war—he can’t stand himself anymore.
But I couldn’t articulate what Harvey’s character is going through. Harvey understood, though.
RS: Haig Manoogian, and his notion of “Don’t bring a gun in here; we’re not making melodramas, we’re making some other kind of picture,” was terribly influential for you. And yet in a certain way, you are beginning to challenge his austere principles, aren’t you?
RS: Well, yes, but he came from a different world. Five blocks away from where we were editing, that’s the world I was living in.
RS: So he could accept that you had to do this kind of material?
MS: He accepted it, and when I gave him the script of what became Mean Streets, he knew the world I was in. When I was a young student in the early sixties, he didn’t know. But he got to know my parents—as I said, they were very popular around school. And I would live in Haig’s house in Suffolk, New York. And he would come to have dinner at Elizabeth Street. So everybody was happy together. And Haig, by the time Who’s That Knocking came out, began to understand that if it’s a film made with Harvey and made on Elizabeth Street, that world is real to Marty. And then Mean Streets—he said okay. And also by that point, The Godfather had come out. He realized that that world also exists—on a loftier level in The Godfather, of course.
RS: I guess you could call it loftier. But in the pictures you’ve made about gangs and gangsters you are stressing the element of anarchy more than the Godfather pictures do. I mean, it’s perfectly true that in the Godfather pictures there will be upsets in their smooth-running world. But it’s not quite the kind of anarchy that’s going on in your pictures.
MS: Well, I experienced that, too. I had a friend who was killed because he was too wild. He was twenty-one. And then family members of his were taken out. They were in some crime family.
RS: Now it’s the late sixties. What else was going on in your life besides Knocking?
MS: Well, there was my brief adventure—or misadventure—with The Honeymoon Killers.
RS: Let’s talk about that. How did that come about?
MS: Harry Ufland brought it to me. The script was very long and I couldn’t connect with the material. I just couldn’t. And it was more than that: instead of just making the film, I was trying to make a reputation. And I twisted it and turned it in different ways stylistically. I tried to make it something that it shouldn’t have been.
There’s something about not giving oneself over to the material. I was trying to impose my own style. I didn’t have “my own style” at the time. I was trying to make, I guess, a Carl Dreyer film. I was trying to make a simple noir film into a Carl Dreyer picture, in a way. [Dreyer was the austere Danish director of such films as Day of Wrath and The Passion of Joan of Arc.]
It was a very low-budget film and I was shooting long takes. I wasn’t taking any coverage. I didn’t do any editing in it. I decided that it was going to be one long take. I was trying to impose myself as a master of camera and that sort of thing on this material that didn’t call for it. I really didn’t know how to handle a genre, or somebody else’s work, and interpret it. If you’re hired to do a job as a narrative filmmaker, you have to come to terms with the material. And I was fired from that after one week. And rightly so.
It was devastating, but I learned a lot from that. And they made a very good film from it. Truffaut said it was the best American film that he had seen in twenty years. Then around the same time, Haig Manoogian asked me to become an instructor at NYU—that course I told you about with the 16 millimeter film. In that class was Oliver Stone, and a number of other people. Michael Wadleigh, who photographed Who’s That Knocking, the 16 millimeter sections, and me, and Thelma Schoonmaker, were all working on documentaries during that period. And Woodstock came out of that.
WOODSTOCK/HOLLYWOOD
RICHARD SCHICKEL: Talk about the genesis of Woodstock.
MARTIN SCORSESE: Michael Wadleigh had this little place called Paradigm Pictures up on West 86th Street in Manhattan and we edited our films there. Mike and I were in these three or four rooms where everybody was working—Paradigm was doing Hubert Humphrey campaign films [Hubert H. Humphrey was the Democratic Party candidate for president in 1968], and Thelma Schoonmaker was editing documentaries, and we were editing Who’s That Knocking at night. They were all very small rooms on the ground floor of an apartment building off West End Avenue.
RS: Just parenthetically, how connected to NYU was Thelma? You mentioned her briefly in that context. She became such an important collaborator with you later.
MS: The time she went to NYU was that six-week summer workshop when I did my first film. The negative was cut wrong—a complicated A&B roll negative process—and in two days she actually reconstituted the negative for me and saved the picture. I didn’t even know her. But she understood edge coding [numbers on the side of each frame, vital in the editing process] and all that sort of thing, and she pieced it back together. Then
I didn’t see her for a while. And then she helped me put together Who’s That Knocking.
While we were working on that, Wadleigh would work with Bob Drew, or Pennebaker or the Maysles brothers—cinema verité. So sometimes we were all editing documentaries to make a living, though I didn’t make much of a living and that wasn’t a good thing because I was married and had a kid. And so in the evenings we would edit my feature. Jim McBride was there, too, editing David Holzman’s Diary in the next room.
RS: Really?
MS: And Diary was very successful. And then I went off to Europe and came back. Got involved with The Honeymoon Killers, got fired off that, and went to NYU to teach, and that gave me a steady paycheck of $55 a week.
RS: Not bad.
MS: At that time Wadleigh and I were going to do this rock ’n’ roll revival show and shoot it on film, stage it for film. But in the meantime, this event called Woodstock was happening, and I didn’t know what it was. He said, “Let’s go and just do a test up there.” So he went up, and then we all followed him. And it became Woodstock. At the same time, finally, Who’s That Knocking was being released. It didn’t do very well, but as I said, Roger Ebert liked it, at the Chicago Film Festival, before the nude scene was put in. So I got this wonderful review in Chicago, and they still couldn’t get it distributed. So then Haig really felt, everyone felt, let’s go ahead and do it.
RS: You’ve always presented Haig to me as this very austere—
MS: Yeah.
RS: So what’s he doing producing this thing with a nude scene stuffed into it?
MS: Well, the point is if I could have introduced it into the film more artfully, it would’ve been better. But I couldn’t.
RS: It’s just as if one movie stops and another movie starts—
MS: Or maybe I did it on purpose that way, because the reality was we had to put it in. So I just stopped in the middle of the film: Here’s your nude scene, let’s move on.
The whole film had a very loose structure anyway, and at the time I was influenced by Before the Revolution, I loved that. But I don’t have the cultural background of Bertolucci; I just thought I should be able to make a film that had that kind of power.
But there were other things happening, too. This was 1968, and Fats Domino and Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry were kind of forgotten. They were being called fifties primitives. So we said, Mike and I, wouldn’t it be great to do something on film. And we came up with this idea of doing this rock ’n’ roll revival show in 16 millimeter—maybe six, seven cameras, whatever. Instead, he went up to Woodstock, called back and said, “This is wild. There’s a lot of people, it’s going to be a big deal. And the hair is being worn very long,” he said.
I should probably mention that in those days he literally looked like one of the Four Freshmen. I mean, his hair was cut a certain way and he had button-down shirts. And he said, “Come on up, and we’ll just see what happens.” And so I went up on the assumption that I would be co-directing or associate-directing with him. Thelma came up, other people, and we wound up on the stage.
Of course, he’s the director-cameraman. I mean, he’s actually directing as he’s shooting. I was on the side of the stage on the front. There was a lip of the stage and there was a platform for the photographers. And I was on the edge of it. So three days and nights I was assistant-directing. Because once Mike was on the stage, you couldn’t communicate with him. He had earphones on, with five or six other cameramen coming in and out. And Thelma was also doing her thing, associate-directing with the earphones on at the lighting board with the famous lighting designer Chip Monck, who did the best lighting for the rock ’n’ roll shows in those days. He did great shows, but one problem was we needed a lot of light at night, and he would put theatrical lighting on. For example, Sly and the Family Stone—in an episode I was responsible for in the final cutting—are very dark people. And he put lavender light on them. And imagine at that time the speed of the film was slow. And Michael was yelling “Light!” into the earphones, “Light!,” and Thelma was pushing and fighting with Chip to get the light. It was that kind of thing.
It just went on, and we improvised. Friday night we all realized we couldn’t move. Richie Havens in the afternoon came out and sang, and then a few other people. And then by the time it got dark, there was no end in sight. It was a free concert at that point. And we couldn’t even get food. You couldn’t move from your spot. You couldn’t go left, right, down. You were stuck. It was an extraordinary experience because everybody was, in a sense, dependent on the goodwill of the person next to him.
Woodstock (1970). Marty was part of the team that shot the famous documentary, and he worked on it as an editor as well. But there were disagreements with director Michael Wadleigh, and he was fired.
RS: Right.
MS: That’s it. After that I started wearing jeans. Prior to that I wore slacks and that sort of thing. But I loved the music. It was an extraordinary, life-changing experience—mainly because of the way people behaved with each other. Anything could have gone wrong any second with five hundred thousand people crammed in like that.
You know, I was looking back out there and was thinking, What if one person goes crazy? What if some of the drugs don’t work on these people? What if they charge the stage?
RS: A few bad trips and an audience that size can become, putting it mildly, volatile.
MS: In the meantime, you’re stuck and you’re helpless, and everybody else is working together around you, and you’re helping them, and they’re helping you, and the people are trying to get food to you. Finally, I think around ten o’clock at night, I forget who was on, it was Friday night, Arthur Barron, the documentary filmmaker, got us some hamburgers. One each, but that was enough. I’ll never forget those hamburgers. By now, studio people were trying to buy the rights. And at that point, Bob Maurice, who was the producer of the film at that time, was on the phone onstage, basically making a deal with Warner Bros.
RS: That squares with John Calley’s memory. [Calley was then head of production at Warner Bros.] John said, “I figured I couldn’t get hurt. I figured the stock footage would be worth it, even if they never made a film.”
MS: It’s true. Because we were documenting an historic event. It was becoming an historic event that Friday night.
I mean, some people were just not meant for it. I’m not a country person, I’m allergic to everything. I was complaining, a lot of us were bitching and moaning. But still, it was a transcending experience.
There’s a shot in Life magazine of Max Yasgur, giving the peace sign, and right below him, answering him, is me.
I was not shooting on the stage. I was trying to figure out which angles to get, trying to figure out what songs were coming on next.
And it was wonderful, because coming from where I come from, boy, I like seeing people happy [laughs]. I really do. But people have said to me, “Oh, well, they were all drugged.” And I say, “I tell you, if everybody was drugged, it went along very well.”
The only moment when things could have gone bad was when Abbie Hoffman grabbed the microphone. The Who was on stage, Pete Townshend. Do you know the story?
RS: No.
MS: Later, Michael Wadleigh edited The Who and Jimi Hendrix himself. He had a great time because he was up there, close to the performers. Mike started shooting The Who like that. It was nighttime, and that music was loud, and they were very aggressive, as you know, breaking their instruments. But as soon as Michael got up there, he got kicked by Pete, who wanted him—all of us—off the stage, which we all did. Everybody had their lenses right on the lip of the stage, in beautiful position. It worked, because The Who moved around a lot. And so I’m watching, and everybody’s shooting, and we were mesmerized by them. It was extraordinary to be that close to see this energy.
I don’t care whether it’s Paganini or it’s Pete Townshend, I’m sorry. I mean, people did see devils directing Paganini playing his violin. They could swe
ar that they saw them.
RS: I’ve heard that—without entirely believing it.
MS: So we’re standing there. And the next thing you know, they’re doing sections from Tommy. And all of a sudden Abbie Hoffman grabs the mike, and says, You know, you people are here enjoying yourselves, smoking grass, et cetera, while John Sinclair is in jail for two joints. He’s in jail for ten years. And at that point Townshend took his guitar and hit Abbie in the neck. He was like a samurai and Hoffman went off the stage. And everyone froze, because he could have started something, because people started to hoot and holler. But Pete went right back into the music and sort of saved the show. It was the only moment of aggression during that whole time.
RS: And who is John Sinclair?
MS: Sinclair became a major cause because he was arrested for two joints. But it may not have been the right time to bring it up [laughs]. It was like shouting fire in a crowded theater.
RS: The unique kind of editing manner of that film—the split screens and all—did that evolve when you got back? Had you originally planned it to be just kind of straightforward, more or less conventional documentary?
MS: I don’t recall. I think the split-screen idea was Michael’s. They moved the editing room to another room at 86th Street, or off of 86th Street, on Broadway, that used to be a pool hall. It was the second floor of a building and it had arches. It’s still there. And that’s where we were doing the editing.
There was me, Thelma, Wadleigh. We had different groups of editors under us, doing different songs and different sections. I didn’t do any of the documentary stuff. I did some of the songs. And eventually it was cut down to eight or nine hours. And then that was cut down further.
Conversations with Scorsese Page 10
