Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  RS: Tell me.

  MS: That’s my question for most of my pictures. What is a man, and what is a hero? Does might make right? Or is it somebody who makes everybody reason things out and work it out? I think that’s harder. Hit somebody long enough, they’re going to stop. It works. For a while.

  RS: Well, how much of Taxi Driver is really coming out of that period in New York where a lot of us who loved the city and loved living here were just disgusted by it.

  MS: Oh, it was horrible.

  RS: I mean, there was a sense of the city just spiraling down into hell at that moment.

  MS: That was just beginning. But I’m a New Yorker, so when it starts to go down, it seems part of the cycle. I mean, I knew that 42nd Street and Times Square was hitting a new low. It was not a safe area. But being a lover of the city, I knew that the city was just going through a phase and it would come back.

  I was more aware of, and more attracted to, this new expression of open sexuality. Where I came from, sexuality was restricted and repressed. I tried to understand and tried even to join in—as a person. But I always say, when I try to be amoral, I turn out to be immoral. So it wasn’t for me. In Taxi Driver, I didn’t enjoy shooting in those X-rated areas. The sense of wallowing in it was, for me, always filled with tension and an extraordinary depression.

  And the film is very, very depressing. The key is when De Niro tries to open up to Peter Boyle [playing a fellow cabbie]. The guy can’t talk to him. He’s not a philosopher. He just isn’t. And Bob did an improvisation, and he said, You know, I have these thoughts, and Peter says, Oh, you’ll be okay. And he said, No, I’ve got these bad ideas in my head. And that for me was as close as he’s going to get to it. What are these bad ideas? His feelings of rage, his feelings of anger, his feelings of acting out. He did act out before, when he was in the war. But what’s the next step? To pick up a gun again? Or kill someone? He’s trying like hell to keep those feelings down, but they’re coming out, and the guilt over that, too, is strong.

  Marty riding the boom on Taxi Driver. Exploring New York’s lower depths in the mid-seventies was, Scorsese says, among the most troubling experiences of his directorial career.

  RS: So he does have a measure of what you could call moral self-consciousness.

  MS: Yes.

  RS: He is truly struggling with these impulses.

  MS: I think so. I can’t speak for Paul. I’m just saying what I felt, that he didn’t want to do what he does at the end—commit multiple murders. But he does. He’s driven to it. It’s just dealing with the human condition; that’s what we’re dealing with in a Travis Bickle.

  RS: On the other hand, Pauline Kael did call this a comedy.

  MS: That’s pretty funny.

  RS: Well, she liked the movie, of course.

  MS: Why is it a comedy? Okay, there are some funny scenes …

  RS: It is funny, in a cringing sort of way, when he takes her to the porno movie.

  MS: I remember Cybill Shepherd that night got nervous shooting there. We were shooting fast and moving quickly, but she, I believe, identified with that character so strongly that she really got upset. I tried to get her in and out as fast as possible, but I couldn’t. Poor kid—she really felt it, and didn’t like it.

  A very bad date: Travis seriously misjudges Betsy’s cinematic tastes. Cybill Shepherd was genuinely disturbed by the milieu to which the film exposed her, and Scorsese did his best to get these scenes done as quickly as he could.

  RS: Let me ask you about the character you play—this psychopathic guy talking about all the terrible things he’s going to do to his ex-wife. What about him? Is he the rock bottom, worse than De Niro?

  MS: I don’t know. All I know is that a good friend of mine was going to play the part, but he was shooting another film. It was the last week of shooting. I had gone through all the actors I knew in New York who I liked for that part. So Bob and I talked, and the next thing I know, I agreed to do it. I don’t know if he convinced me, or what. But I thought I could do it. And that’s it. What came out, came out. It was honest, open—and extremely unpleasant. Also, I think, funny at times, because he got me to do a couple of things. He’s very good at that. I learned all about acting there.

  But it was very simple. We stopped the cab, and I say, “Put the flag down, stop here.” After the rehearsal, he turned to me and said, “Make me put the flag down. I’m not going to put it down unless you mean it.”

  Okay. So then, the improv came. I realized, Wait a second, why is this guy not putting the flag down? I am the passenger. I have control of his life in the next fifteen, twenty minutes. That’s one of the crazy things about driving a cab in the city. A passenger gets in the cab; you don’t know where he’s going to ask you to go, or what’s going to happen. Passengers control your life.

  Anyway, all the dialogue was there. And then we improvised some. But the improvs came from bouncing off Bob. It was the back of his head that did it all. I’d say something a little more outrageous and he still wouldn’t move. I was getting him crazy. Because what I was saying was going to instill in him the violence. That was the idea. So I kept thinking of more outrageous things to say, and the words came out, and that was it.

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  MARTIN SCORSESE: I had a very chaotic style, on purpose, on New York, New York. And I found it didn’t work for me. [The film is both a tribute to old-fashioned MGM musicals and a dark love story between a bandleader, Robert De Niro, and his singer, Liza Minnelli.]

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: What do you mean by a chaotic process?

  MS: I improvised. I tried to improvise within scenes. I had a script, but I kept pushing the limits of the scenes. Then at a certain point, I was able to improvise a scene with the actors based on the script, video it, or audiotape it. A good example of it is in Goodfellas—that “You think I’m funny” scene with Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta that I referred to earlier. We did four or five takes. It was typed up, I had it transcribed, all the takes. Then I constructed from the takes a scene, and had them memorize that scene. That’s what we did in some of the better scenes in New York, New York—the ones I think worked.

  Then I decided, let’s go further. Let’s not write down anything, let’s just improvise it—whatever feelings you may have, go there. And we literally started improvising ourselves out of the sets we were shooting on. I would say, “Well, what are we going to do now? The other set isn’t ready.” I tried to have no idea at all what I was going to do, as much as possible, on the day of shooting—as opposed to having a fairly strong idea of what I was going to do. I was really testing the limits.

  One long headache: New York, New York (1977) was a bold attempt to meld an improvisational acting style on the structure of an old-fashioned, big-studio musical, but it failed to fulfill either ambition.

  RS: That’s a weird picture to do it on. You’re on the street with Harvey Keitel or De Niro, and interesting stuff happens, and you take advantage of it. But this is a big Hollywood studio picture—

  MS: I know! That was the idea! The convention of the Hollywood studio film meets, or crosses with, a new style, the Italian cinema, the French cinema, Cassavetes—Kazan, of course, going back to him.

  RS: So you just dumped that into a big formal setting. Maybe that’s why the movie disconcerted me.

  MS: I’m not happy with it. But the thing about it is that I still think the idea of mixing a modern foreground with an artificial background, like the old Hollywood, was a good idea. More than homage, it was a re-creation of the old Hollywood, even though I realized that the old Hollywood was gone. So maybe it was a way for a young kid who loved old Hollywood movies to try to hold on to it.

  RS: And you’ve got Liza Minnelli in it—kind of a throwback personality.

  MS: She comes from a Hollywood family.

  RS: The picture looks somewhat like one of her father’s films.

  MS: Minnelli and George Cukor, really. I really tried to combine the styles and see what wou
ld happen, holding on to the old Hollywood artifice that I loved. I didn’t want the old Hollywood to die. But of course we were the new Hollywood, so we were part of the demise. It was just the natural order of things.

  But I didn’t know that until I got there, until I was working on the picture. But, yes, and other movies like The Man I Love and Blues in the Night—and add to that Cukor’s A Star Is Born—were certainly in my mind at the time. [Vincente] Minnelli, that use of color. But primarily it was meant to be more drama with music, and not musical drama. That was the idea.

  And, again, like Age of Innocence, it was meant to be an homage to the old style of filmmaking, meaning the studio system and the studio look of the picture. But with the influences of the newer cinema that was around me.

  RS: It’s a contradiction in terms, and I think it does affect the movie in an adverse way.

  MS: It probably does. I was thinking lately of why I have a negative feeling about the picture. One thing is that I didn’t control the improvisations the way I normally do. The best example is the moment where she and he are rehearsing, and she counts down the band. He takes her aside and says, “Don’t ever do that. I count down the band.” That was done the same way we did other improvisations, but things got too loose. I didn’t guide them. And if I have a criticism of the film as a whole, it is that it is repetitious. I think I could have been more concise. Other people have said it’s tantamount to watching a car crash, or whatever, because of the two styles together. And I said, I don’t know if that’s necessarily a bad thing.

  So I think, ultimately, the negative aspect is that I didn’t clarify or distill the drama between the two of them. It’s really about the love between two people who are extremely creative, and their jealousies, their competition.

  RS: But also, they are two people who don’t really belong together.

  MS: Right. They don’t belong together. I’m not defending the picture, but our generation may be focusing on problems that won’t mean anything in ten years’ time.

  I also have problems with the picture because of my memory of the actual work, which was very, very hard for me at the time. I don’t like to think about it, so I don’t really see the picture that often.

  RS: When you were doing New York, New York, were people like Irwin Winkler, the producer, or people at the studio aware of what you were trying to do? Or did they say, Oh, Marty wants to do a musical and that’ll be fine?

  MS: They were aware of it. They were hoping I could pull it off.

  RS: I don’t know if you recall this. I think it’s the first time I ever met you. You were in Los Angeles. Irwin ran the picture for me. And then we all went to dinner.

  MS: Didn’t I meet you before? Because I think we were in your apartment, to screen His Girl Friday with Jay Cocks one time in 16 millimeter.

  RS: Is that true? It could be.

  MS: In 1970.

  RS: Maybe a little later, because I was starting to work on The Men Who Made the Movies [a PBS television series, consisting of interviews with the great American directors of the classic age]. But what’s so vivid to me was that dinner in L.A. being so awkward because I didn’t know what to say to you about the movie, because I kind of liked it and didn’t like it.

  MS: Your first reaction to Mean Streets was also not good. Alice was good. Taxi Driver I don’t remember.

  RS: On that one, I wrote a review and it came back from the managing editor with a note scrawled on it: “You don’t like this movie as much as you say you do.” He was probably right. Now, of course, he would be wrong.

  MS: For New York, New York, Irwin was really good. He went along with this idea of combining the styles. He fought for it. He knew what I was trying to do. I was also trying to pull it from being too dark. I mean, in effect, we could’ve gone and made The Man I Love. [The 1947 film noir in which Ida Lupino’s nightclub singer falls in love with a former jazz great now on the skids.] By the way, the shot of New York City that’s used for the credits, that’s taken from the credits of The Man I Love. The bridge and everything.

  I’m not defending the film, as I say, and I think if I have any negative thoughts about it, it has to do with more personal stuff. But now the film is looked at in a more forgiving context.

  Marty attempting to turn his back on the production, something he could manage only momentarily. Its strain sickened him to the point where many of his friends feared for his life.

  RS: One of the things that struck me looking at it recently was the very opening sequence, where they meet. It just seemed to me it went on too long.

  MS: Actually, we had it longer.

  RS: I’m sure.

  MS: How many times could she say no.

  RS: Right. I had a feeling all along as I watched it that there was a thinner movie struggling to get out of it.

  MS: Exactly. That’s what I mean about being more specific—if I had practiced the craft better, the way I had in Alice and in Mean Streets with the actors. We were trying new things. But, still, the artifice of the old has truth to it.

  RS: You know, in my mind, I may be more committed to the artifice of the old than you are. I mean, they can go on making movies like that forever as far as I’m concerned.

  MS: Me, too [laughs]. Those are the only images I watch on TCM, the old images. If a newer film comes on, I turn it off. Even films from the seventies. I don’t watch them that much, you know. But even more so for you, because you saw more films on that big screen in 1.33 aspect ratio than I did.

  RS: Well, naturally I did.

  MS: You’re a different generation. When we screened Out of the Past for Leo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo when we were making Shutter Island, it was stunning. At the end of Out of the Past, I was wondering if these younger people would go for it. All of a sudden I hear applause behind me. It was Leo, and he said, “That was the coolest movie I’ve ever seen.” I think he was responding to the authority of these figures on a big screen. But you were saying you prefer the artifice.

  RS: If you had gone more for the artifice and less for the improv in New York, New York, I would’ve preferred it, if you had stylized the hell out of every single shot in it. That would have given it a coherence that I think it lacks.

  MS: Yes, it might have. But it’s interesting that younger people don’t see that in New York, New York. They don’t deal with that at all. They accept it for what it is. I still think about it as an experiment. But when you look at a musical like The Glenn Miller Story, directed by Anthony Mann, it has an authenticity to it that’s quite extraordinary. It’s beautiful to watch even on television. But he came from that period. So did James Stewart. Also, he shot it in the real places. I could have. I could’ve shot in Roseland. I didn’t because I chose to go with the whole idea of a film called New York, New York made completely in Hollywood. Which was the New York in our heads when we saw it as young people. I don’t think I could have directed the actors in the stylized way of classic Hollywood cinema, because I wouldn’t know how to direct that.

  RS: You mean, getting an actorly stylization that would match the visual stylization.

  MS: Exactly, exactly—see how we could force the issue somehow.

  RS: The things that worked best for me in the movie were when they were on the bandstand; all those mannerisms are so beautifully done. I mean, I remember those not from movies but from seeing those bands live onstage at the Riverside Theater in downtown Milwaukee: You know, Tommy Dorsey holding his trombone and waving his fingers as if he’s directing the band.

  MS: Exactly.

  RS: I loved that stuff.

  MS: Me, too.

  RS: And yet it is a truly conventionalized romantic story. I mean, we saw that story lots in those days, you know.

  MS: The Man I Love is more like a noir.

  RS: Right.

  MS: And yet there were films in Technicolor, like My Dream Is Yours, which had implied noirish elements in the relationship [between a cruel singing star, Lee Bowman, and the young woman, Do
ris Day, who is hired to replace him]. That’s the film I wanted to make, trying to imply what was darker in the relationship.

  RS: Oh, very dark. It’s really a bummer of a movie.

  MS: I know. So I wondered why they put some sort of happy ending on it. I mean, if you’re going to do it, go all the way—

  RS: Here’s how desperate they were: It’s one of the very few movies where Jack Carson gets the girl. He usually did simple comic relief.

  The musical that is really like your film, in that it’s more a drama with some music, yet, I think, does fulfill its implicit darkness, is the one with Ida Lupino, Jack Carson, and Dennis Morgan.

  MS: The Hard Way [a dark show business romance of 1943, and something of a lost treasure].

  RS: That’s it.

  MS: It’s like The Breaking Point [a fairly faithful 1950 adaptation of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not]. These two are really standouts. They did lack Technicolor, though. Technicolor made such an impression on me when I saw Duel in the Sun. It was the first time I remember seeing it. Technicolor promised happiness, light. It promised something transcendent, an experience of joy. And yet a lot of these films that I was beginning to become aware of had elements that were darker. Living in the world that I was living in, I asked, So why can’t we do that in Technicolor?

  RS: But in the early era of three-strip Technicolor, I think it was very hard to do because the colors are just so glaringly bright.

  MS: Some are so strong you’d have to duck. They’d come flying at you. Especially when 3-D came out. Maybe I could’ve done it in black-and-white.

  RS: Well, you couldn’t have by that time.

  MS: No, by that time you couldn’t. Especially accepting it as a way of doing homage to the old studio system.