Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  Ellen Burstyn visits Marty on the set of Taxi Driver in 1975.

  RS: Her relationship with her little boy is very funny and charming.

  MS: I loved that.

  RS: Was there a certain amount of improv in that?

  MS: Not really. The wonderful script was there. Alfred Lutter, the young boy, was also pretty good. The main improvisations were with Kris, and with Diane and Harvey a bit. And there’s a little bit of my past in that relationship. My mother was very funny. She had a good sense of humor. I was very close with her, and so a lot of that reminded me of my own relationship with her. She was more Old World, but she had that kind of humor, and irony. Constantly making wisecracks. Constantly hitting your ego. And her own ego—deflating it. You can see a little bit of it in the documentary, Italianamerican: My father’s much more stern and trying to retain a certain dignified air, whereas my mother is very ironic and funny with a lot of warmth. That was the key thing, I think, that drove me to the picture.

  RS: What’s with you and Kris Kristofferson? He’s not only in this movie, there’s that record by him in Taxi Driver. What does he represent to you?

  MS: The record in Taxi Driver was in the script—that’s Schrader—“Silver Tongued Devil,” right? But Kristofferson at the time had the ability to express what he felt in his songs. He was a new voice coming in America. And his performance, he had that gravelly voice, he had a tough voice, but also he had a dignity about him. He had a dignity about him that helped me a lot in Alice.

  We got into some interesting situations where people wanted us out of the buildings where we were shooting, and he would always say, “Having any trouble, Marty?” And I’d say, “Oh, just a little, bunch of people screaming.” And then, they’d say, Well, for you, Kris, we’ll do it. He just had a calming influence on all of us.

  RS: Is he a kind of male that you had never encountered before on the mean streets?

  MS: Well, that’s one of the things, too. Because you know, seeing those western films as a child, and then listening to country western music—that was a direct line to his work, by way of Dylan, of course, and The Band, to a certain extent. I liked being around him. And I liked watching what he did, how he behaved, how he reacted in life. It was very different from the way I reacted.

  When we first met, he really liked Mean Streets, because he had a relationship with a friend of his like the one Keitel had with De Niro. He just wanted to work with us.

  I loved him, of course, in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. I got to see that— a rough cut—along with Jay Cocks on a Sunday afternoon, with Sam Peckinpah. And Pauline Kael came into the screening room. The picture was then taken away from Peckinpah. And it was re-edited to a ninety-minute version. But I loved what I saw that day on that screen. And, luckily, the editors somehow kept the original cut. And that’s what you see now on DVD, and on TCM.

  I thought it was a masterpiece, and I thought Kristofferson was extraordinary in it. He inhabited that film as if he really lived it. He’s just shot the deputy and he’s about to make his escape and he takes the chains off, and he’s getting his jacket, or he’s getting a gun or something, and he’s walking around the room and the people downstairs are gathering—they’re looking at the body. And he sings about what a down, ornery town it is. He makes up a song—“Never seen a town like this”—that was just extraordinary. It reminded me of De Niro in Mean Streets: before he gets in the car, before he’s shot, he dances around the car.

  So I found that kind of authenticity in him, like I saw it in Bob and Harvey Weinstein from the urban areas. I felt really comfortable with that. And Ellen and him with those kisses—I thought that was a beautiful moment.

  RS: Yes. Well, I also liked when he comes in at the end, and he’s in the restaurant, confronting her, trying to force her to make emotional sense of her life. I think it’s a wonderful scene.

  MS: I always get a little nervous with that scene. But I think it’s okay, because the picture really ends there, I suppose, though it literally ends with her walking down the street with her son. It’s really about her and her son, the movie. She finds another man, and she moves on in life. It was not for feminists. They felt that because she took another man, or got involved with another man, it was undercutting the independence of the woman and the empowerment, I guess, of the woman. But that’s the movie I made. And so, the last line of the picture, where she’s holding the boy, and he says, “Mom, I can’t breathe.” That kid improvised that because she was hugging him so tight. But it’s the perfect ending, as I said at the time.

  Which is like my mother, at the end of Italianamerican, in a small apartment on Elizabeth Street, saying, Okay, come on, put this stuff back. She didn’t know we were still filming. The chair can’t stay like this, she says. You’ve got to put the table back, and all. And then she goes, “Are you still shooting this thing?” And we all started laughing, and she goes, “You’ll never get out of this house alive.” And I guess if you look at any family, it’s amazing the kids do get out alive [laughs].

  TAXI DRIVER

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: Taxi Driver is not at all ethnically oriented. But yet it seems to draw on your own urban experiences.

  MARTIN SCORSESE: Yes. I again have to talk about where I came from. My grandparents—coming from Sicily, basically peasants—helped raise me, too. Even though I didn’t understand the Italian, I understood when they said things a certain way. They were extraordinary people, really.

  My mother’s side of the family reminds me of the family you see in La Terra Trema in Sicily, the mother who’s embracing all her sons. [Luchino Visconti, 1948: Sicilian fishermen try to buy their own boat in order to fight off greedy wholesalers.] My father’s side of the family was very strong. His mother was very strong, like Katina Paxinou in Rocco and His Brothers.

  So it was very operatic, very hot-tempered. They had really strong values. When I saw Shadows, or Ingmar Bergman, or going to New York University, I was escaping into another world. That was expressed in Mean Streets. In Taxi Driver, when Brian De Palma gave me that script, I saw in it my reaction against the world I came from, which in a way I wanted to be rid of. I didn’t want to say where I came from. The film had a rage in it that I saw in my grandparents.

  With Taxi Driver, I was going to blast that away, so that I could be even freer. I think the immediate connection, when I read it, was with the anger and the rage, and the loneliness—not being part of a group. I was always on the outside. You grow up in a neighborhood where what a “man” is, quote unquote, is a guy who can go into a room and slam some people around and win, like in a Schwarzenegger film. But on the other hand, I heard my father say different things about what a man is; that had to do with being morally strong.

  Coming from that, not being able to really fight it out in the streets the way other kids were able to do, and having to keep everything in quietly, my feelings blasted on the screen with Mean Streets. Later, with Taxi Driver, we really tapped into the idea of not being one of the group, not being part of anything. I remember Bob De Niro giving a speech at the first Tribeca Film Festival a few years ago, in which at the end he said, I’ve always wanted to belong, and now I feel I do. Something like that; it’s a paraphrase, and it’s the first time I heard him actually say that. In Taxi Driver we didn’t have to say what it was about, why we were connected with it, why we felt we had to make this picture.

  Taxi Driver. Robert De Niro is Travis Bickle. The 1975 film is one of American cinema’s most profound and disturbing meditations on the endemic violence of our culture.

  RS: Wait a minute, this guy’s a psycho. Or isn’t he?

  MS: He comes out of Vietnam. We don’t know what happens to people in a war. Give a seventeen-year-old kid a gun, get him into a battle situation, God knows what happens to him. You know, what makes a hero? Is there such a thing as a hero? I don’t know. I never went to a war, never had that kind of experience.

  But the loneliness, being an outsider, not being able to connec
t with anyone, expresses itself in the film and in the character through violence. Which is acting out the fantasy. [In the film De Niro’s eponymous antihero comes to the rescue of Jodie Foster’s teenage hooker by bloodily wiping out the criminals exploiting her and, ironically, being lauded as a hero for what is essentially a psychotic act.]

  That’s it, you’ve got to accept it. I mean, you have those fantasies. And then this guy crosses the line. The beauty of what Paul Schrader did in the script is that it touches on something that’s very human—also filled with racism and all kinds of unpleasant aspects. But you know, these are aspects of a lot of people.

  You grow up in a certain way—it structures a racism to a certain extent, and you try to come to terms with it as you get older and you see the rest of the world. And you try to say, No, that’s not right. But there are certain things that are inbred that are difficult to overcome.

  RS: At some point in the script, he says, I’m an avenging angel.

  MS: That’s right.

  RS: Are we to understand him as believing that to be almost literal? Because I don’t quite see any system of belief in this character other than what you just described—you know, the free-ranging psycho who can’t really connect with people. I mean, how do you parse that?

  MS: Well, it’s why I wanted to make the film. Because it speaks to the zealousness of this kind of person, someone who will level a village because its inhabitants don’t believe in the God that he believes in. He’ll kill men, women, children, and animals.

  This is the person who would do that when pushed—the outsider who is filled with the zealousness and the righteousness of the Lord. He shoots people who didn’t do anything to him. Why? Because he couldn’t shoot the political candidate who didn’t do anything to him, either. It isn’t necessarily explaining the act, or explaining the character. It’s getting into the mindset of the character.

  As I’ve said, I had trouble reading as a kid. My parents didn’t have books in the house. But for some reason, in the late fifties I began to read, and there were three books that really hit me: The Heart of the Matter, by Graham Greene. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce, and the key one, Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. These books reflected the way I felt. It turns out later that that was one of the elements Schrader worked from. The other was Arthur Bremer’s diary [he was George Wallace’s would-be assassin], and a few other things.

  But those feelings I took away from reading Notes from Underground were a direct connection for me to Taxi Driver. You don’t like the person. But in your deepest, darkest, secret self you realize that’s the way you’ve been thinking as well. It’s also from constantly being pushed aside and rejected, rejected, rejected. It’s not the rational way to be, it’s not the good way to be, but it is human. It’s part of the human condition.

  Jodie Foster is the teenage prostitute, Iris, whom Travis rescues, in the process converting himself from psychopath to media hero.

  RS: Yet there’s very little human about De Niro’s character, no religious feelings, no political ideas, no human connections—aside from the fact that he lusts after the Cybill Shepherd character. Maybe you do get a sense of liberal impotence from the people around her. The candidate is an idiot, basically. And I love the patronizing thing he does—you know, I learn more from talking to cabdrivers than I do talking to other people. The woman—a society campaign worker—is attracted to Travis because he’s so out of her league, as it were. Her Junior League, I guess. Which makes this notion of taking her to a porn movie—

  MS: Oh! I know. Well, you have to remember, a lot of people don’t remember now, but at that time, they were trying to make porn acceptable, with Deep Throat and Sometimes Sweet Susan, and pictures like that.

  RS: I went to a few of those.

  MS: It was okay to go with a girl. But Brian De Palma and I went to see Deep Throat, and he said, Look at the people around us, it doesn’t feel right. There were couples. I said, You’re right. We should be with all these old guys in raincoats. It was a wonderful kind of hypocritical thing that was happening—it opened up the society.

  I’m telling you, 42nd Street, Eighth Avenue, that was hell, shooting in those places. That was like biblical in my mind—hell and damnation and Jeremiah, and someday a real rain was going to come.

  RS: But that character, you know he’s drawn to that. He goes to porn movies all the time. On the other hand, I guess there’s a little bit of you in there.

  MS: I know. It’s upsetting. And it was an upsetting film to make. But we really felt strongly about it. De Niro and I never discussed it this way, by the way. It was nonverbal. It was just understood. I can’t speak for him, but I know he understood certain things about the rejection, about not being part of a group.

  RS: The famous scene, the mirror, where De Niro rehearses drawing—

  MS: It was an improv.

  RS: How much so?

  MS: It’s all improv. In the script, he sort of preens in front of the mirror, to get that maniacal expression on his face, to have the gun sliding in and out of his sleeve, which if you actually did it wouldn’t work that well. But in the film it worked well.

  He comes from a Special Forces unit, in Vietnam. I had a friend, who went to school at NYU with me, who was in Special Forces, and then became a stunt man. Unfortunately he was killed on a movie doing a stunt, a sweet guy, and he showed us pictures of these guys who were going on these special missions. Their haircuts looked to me like Mohawks. That’s how we came up with the idea of that haircut. By that time, it was near the end of the shoot, and I was about five days over schedule on a forty-day shoot. That’s pretty bad. We got hit with a lot of bad weather, all kinds of things.

  Anyway, in the mirror scene, I really thought he had to say something to himself. I didn’t know quite what. But I remembered Brando doing something beautiful in Reflections in a Golden Eye, in a mirror.

  So he just started. It was in an apartment that was going to be torn down on Columbus Avenue at 89th Street. We were in the front apartment on the second floor. You could hear the sounds from the street. I was on the floor, and he was in the mirror. Michael Chapman had the camera, and Bob just started improvising—thinking about people coming up to him, saying things. If they said certain things he didn’t like, he would have to turn and say, Are you talking to me? Because that is not a good thing to say to me. Now you’re going to have to deal with me. Are you talking to me? He didn’t say the words I just said, but he got the attitude.

  I was forcing this into the schedule. Meanwhile, Pete Scoppa, who was the great AD [assistant director] at the time, was banging on the door between takes. “Come on,” he would say, “you’ve got to get back on schedule.” And I’m going, Give us two minutes, give us two minutes, this is really good. It was very noisy. And a couple of times I asked Bob to repeat, that’s all. But he got into his own rhythm. And then got into the wonderful line where he admits that he’s the only one there, so he must be talking to himself. And that did it.

  RS: At the end of the movie, he seems to me to be all right. He’s talking normally with cabbies. She gets in his cab, and she’s sort of sweet with him. And he seems like he’s not going to assault her.

  MS: No, he’s not going to assault her. Schrader very much liked Harry Chapin’s song “Taxi.” I wasn’t that much of a fan of the song: the woman getting into the cab with a guy who hasn’t done well, while she’s done well; kind of sentimental, I thought. I had to find a way not to make the ending sentimental. So when she leaves the cab, I had him look in the mirror again, as if he just saw something happen. I wanted to give the impression that the time bomb is beginning to tick again. And it’s going to happen again. Sooner or later there will be a violent outburst from him. Or, there will be self-immolation. Or God knows what. Because he wanted to kill himself in that massacre scene, but he ran out of bullets.

  Schrader said he would’ve preferred the ending to have been more Japanese—Samurai Rebellion by Kobaya
shi, or Harakiri, where there’s an explosion of sword fighting and violence, and the sacrificial blood is splashed all over the walls of the palaces, and finally the hero dies. I think we added the bit where he tries to shoot himself but there were no bullets. That was the right thing to do, I thought.

  I didn’t think anybody was going to see it. Bob De Niro, Michael and Julia Phillips [the film’s producers], felt that it would reach an audience. For me it was a labor of love, the kind of picture that should be made. Then again, I was going to make this musical that became New York, New York, which, of course, I thought everyone would want to see and nobody saw [laughs]!

  But in Taxi Driver we felt we could say what we wanted to say, and be as honest as possible in the picture. And it was very, very controlled—everything storyboarded, because it was a hard shoot.

  Marty’s sketch for Taxi Driver’s final, very ambiguous sequence.

  RS: How bitter is the irony that Bob’s character is responsible for this bloodbath and becomes a hero, and the papers write him up, and the family of Jodie Foster writes him this weird letter saying if he ever feels like visiting—they’re so grateful to him.

  MS: That’s wonderful.

  RS: Also his bland “everything’s fine” postcard to his own family—

  MS: Oh, that’s Schrader. It was so fun, so extraordinary. And the picture of the parents, looking at the TV set as the camera goes by them. I felt that is the way of the world. People pick up on certain figures and they become very famous, they become heroes. What is a hero?