Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  I was dragging myself through each day on King of Comedy. But I kept pushing, pushing the envelope, seeing what would happen in terms of the work.

  Marty’s sketches for the final confrontation between Sugar Ray Robinson and Jake LaMotta.

  RS: Did it do your work any good?

  MS: No, I don’t think it did. And I don’t look at it as heroic. I just woke up one day and I had survived. That’s it. It’s nothing to be proud of.

  RS: It obviously didn’t do your health any good.

  MS: No. But, as you know, my whole life I had been reliant on asthma medication. My whole speech pattern is based on that. It’s very fast, and there’s no breathing, the breathing isn’t right.

  RS: Does the asthma medicine juice you up?

  MS: Not really.

  RS: You’re saying medicine, doctors, were second nature to you, just part of your life.

  MS: I have friends who say, I’m not going to a doctor, I don’t care what a doctor says. Me, I went to doctors all the time. I felt doctors were interesting.

  RS: Let’s look at the specifics of Raging Bull. What I love about that movie is its utter refusal to explain Jake LaMotta. I mean, with your first glimpse of the film, you think it’s a genre movie, that it’s going to be like Somebody Up There Likes Me.

  MS: I didn’t know anything about boxing. On TV, or in the movie theaters, where they’d show the fight on the weekend, the fights all looked the same. All from one camera angle. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I didn’t understand it. It was sports, which took me out of the picture.

  RS: What I mean to say is that it’s a modernist film, even though it looks like it might be part of a classic Hollywood genre.

  MS: I never thought it was genre.

  RS: There never is one of those explanatory scenes—where we learn his father beat him or his mother didn’t like him.

  MS: I saw too many of those films that came out in the fifties, or late forties, when Freudian psychology was coming in, and every movie explained everything. Knock on Any Door [a tragic 1949 history of a juvenile delinquent], and there’s Nick Romano.

  You can’t explain a human being with one Freudian term. On Raging Bull, I said let’s take all that out. I don’t want to do any of that.

  As you know, I was totally resistant to that picture. But Bob seemed to know that it was a picture that was very appropriate for me to do. My old friend Mardik Martin, a very sweet guy, was working on the script, but I gave him no supervision. It was a very traditional script. We went about it in a very conventional way. Jake starts out as a young man, goes through his whole life to the end. And I wasn’t satisfied. I had no intention of making that picture, none. And I was having my own problems at the time, too; I was finishing The Last Waltz.

  Yet De Niro was very, very persistent about Raging Bull, despite my misgivings. I had had a lot of problems with myself on New York, New York, and I wasn’t even sure I should work with him again at that point. It wasn’t a matter of what he did, it’s a matter of how I was feeling about the whole actor-director process. I had wanted to do Mean Streets, New York, New York, Taxi Driver. And the next picture I felt strongly about was making The Last Temptation of Christ. And so I felt, Can I do this? Can I go through this process? But I tried to do another version of the script, and it still wasn’t right. Eventually, we agreed that if anything could come of this, Paul Schrader was the one who could write a script for us. Paul, to his credit, accepted the challenge one night over dinner. He said, “I will give you six weeks. I will give it to you in six weeks.”

  Paul, of course, had his own career. He was about to go shoot a big movie; I think it was American Gigolo. He had come off Blue Collar, all these really good films. And Taxi Driver won the Golden Palm in Cannes, a Scorsese–De Niro picture with Paul’s name scarcely mentioned. These things get a little touchy at times. He didn’t have to do this for us.

  RS: I understand.

  MS: But it was just what we needed in terms of structure. He started the picture in the middle. He had the scene at the end in the jail which was very interesting, he did a whole thing with masturbation in there. I thought that was interesting. But I still was not determined to make the movie. There was a meeting with Irwin Winkler and me and Paul and Bob. They got into an argument, because Paul was going away. He said, “Look, I did this as a favor. I’ve got my own things to do.” Rightly so. “I’m not doing the second draft.” By that point I was sort of watching from the side. Irwin somehow worked it out. There were a lot of things in the script that I still was not focused on, though; I was still having my own emotional and physical problems. So I wasn’t at the top of my game. And, quite honestly, I wasn’t that enamored of the script, though there were two or three scenes I really liked. Bob had his own feelings about the script.

  It wasn’t like Taxi Driver, which Paul delivered finished, complete. You hardly had to do anything with it. Amazing. This was something different, something he was doing for us as a favor. So we had one more meeting with him, and he said, Look. Go ahead, do it your way. Rewrite it yourselves. You should try this, you should try that. Or he would say, I would suggest doing this, combining two characters, making them one. But do whatever you want. And so, basically, that’s what we did. The whole sequence of events is very different from the original script that Paul gave us. But the structure is there. What Paul did was blast through that logjam.

  Then Bob came to say, “Look, we got the script. Let’s work on it.” He took me to Saint Martin for, like, two and a half weeks—and we wrote ten pages a day, improvised together. I wrote it all in longhand on yellow pads that I still have. Since then, he’s said, You know, there is no script. But there is a script, and it was used by the studio. It’s referred to in the book Final Cut by Steven Bach.

  Everything in that picture was worked out between me and Bob on a little audio tape recorder on the island. We even had an assistant with us, and she would type out the pages at the end of the day. We would work it out in the morning. I’d write pages in the afternoon. She would type them. And we’d go have dinner. There were no phones. It was total concentration. Everything was done at that little table with that silly cabana umbrella, and we’re looking out at the ocean. We had a little golf cart, and we drove into town to have dinners at these small places, and we just talked and talked and talked and talked and talked. And we were totally alone. We saw only two people that we knew while we were on this island. One night we’re having dinner and [New York Times film critic] Vincent Canby is sitting over there.

  RS: No kidding?

  MS: [Laughs.] I said hello. We were just waving. Another day, who’s walking on the beach but Marco Ferrari. I said hello to him, and that was it. For me it was sort of like a spa, like 8½, where I completely cleaned out. I was in good shape, given a clean bill of health by the doctors, finally.

  And I thought, Okay. You know what? Maybe Bob’s right. Maybe this is the right picture to make. Let’s go.

  RS: Now let’s talk about the film you made.

  MS: As I said, when Schrader came into it, he started the film right in the middle, with a man who wanted the title, and couldn’t get it because he wouldn’t play ball with the wiseguys—not necessarily because of any moral indignation, but because he didn’t want to share his money with them. He’s going to get hit in the ring and these bastards are coming in and taking the money. They do it with everybody, the character thinks, but why should they do it with me? I’m tougher than they are.

  What can you say about a guy like that? You’re not giving the audience any reason to like him. He’s not being magnanimous, he’s not being enlightened about it.

  RS: It extends everywhere else. He doesn’t see the world clearly. It extends to the woman he apparently loves. It extends to his brother, where he makes these horrendous accusations that he’s slept with his wife. Does that come not out of this particular familial situation but out of the fact that life is so tough that no explanation of it can possibl
y suffice?

  MS: That anger and that rage was at the level of my grandparents. They didn’t know how to take advantage of the American way. All they could do was try to have some dignity and respect within the neighborhood. And that was the struggle of my father, too. My father always wore glasses. He finally told me why. He said his eye was bad because his father slapped him in the head when he was about five or six. I asked why. He said: “I said something that lacked respect.”

  So they were just lucky to get where they were. And that’s the nature of poor people. It has to do with simply trying to hold on to those old values. But Jake’s a character who can’t hang on to those values because of how he feels about himself. He’s in the dressing room and he says something like “I did some bad things in my life.” It’s this extraordinary guilt that he has, and this anger he has, that he acts out of. We did it as honestly as possible. And it had aspects of my family in there, yes, even though I couldn’t fully explain it.

  Raging Bull also represented something new to me: an acceptance of where I came from. Having made New York, New York, a film that was not received well, I went through a rough period in my life. I came out the other side, and I said to myself, Wait a minute, I can’t deny who I am or where I came from. So I embraced my parents again, and they became a part of my life in the films, too. My father’s in Raging Bull. My mother acted in a lot of the films. They were on the set to help me remember who I am and where I’m from. So I’d been harboring a lot of anger and rage, and I think it just explodes in Raging Bull.

  The essence of Raging Bull: The most visceral—and sometimes sickening—boxing sequences in movie history.

  RS: In other words, Raging Bull is perhaps an expression of not just your own rage, but all that Italian immigrant anger and misunderstanding and desperate struggle to move up. All that is sort of coalesced in this figure?

  MS: I think so. I mean, Jake’s job is to go into a ring and beat people up while getting beat up. And then there’s his own masochism of getting beaten up because he feels so bad about himself. Somebody once wrote that Jake LaMotta fought like he didn’t deserve to live. That’s it.

  RS: Is that at least a little bit like the way you were feeling when De Niro came to visit you in the hospital?

  MS: Maybe. I couldn’t understand Bob’s obsession with it until I went through that rough period of my own. Ever since then—like they always say, but it’s true—every day is special. You always have to remember that every day is kind of a gift.

  So through Bob I was able to find something about myself again—the difference between the genre director and the director who is trying to be a filmmaker. We worked it out in a sort of unspoken way, meaning that we were never articulate about it. We talked about feelings, we talked about a sense of impotence, about how you couldn’t change some things in life, and about trust and what happens when there is a betrayal of that trust.

  Up to a certain point in life, you’ll kill everybody around you. You’re killing yourself. And that’s ultimately what I saw in the picture. Mean Streets and Who’s That Knocking are about who I am and where I came from. Raging Bull was a break from everything else, and sort of a new beginning—an acceptance of everything.

  RS: That’s the most enigmatic thing about that movie, the end, when Jake retires from the ring and puts on sixty pounds and does the worst standup routine I’ve ever seen in my life.

  MS: It was based on his actual routine.

  RS: And at the end, when he’s doing recitations in a little theater—

  MS: Which is based on reality, too.

  RS: And he’s doing—

  MS: On the Waterfront.

  RS: Brando’s “contender” speech. We think, Oh my God, he’s finding redemption in show business.

  MS: Not necessarily show business. No, not at all. I don’t know if I had experienced it myself, I don’t think I did, but I was hoping that by that point in time Jake would be more accepting of himself. That’s all. He’s more gentle to himself and to the people around him. If he gets that far in his life, that would be good. It’s like the line from Diary of a Country Priest: God is not a torturer; he wants us to be merciful with ourselves, just take it easy on ourselves, really. And Jake kind of gets there.

  Originally we were going to do one of the speeches from Shakespeare that he was doing in his act. But Michael Powell read the script and said, Shakespeare’s all wrong for him. I said, But that’s what he actually did. And Powell said, Well, it doesn’t mean anything if he actually did that, not for a film. Bob felt that we should tackle the On the Waterfront speech because that was our iconography, not the Globe Theatre.

  RS: However, it is significant that between the standup routine and “I could have been a contender” he beats his head against the jail wall in an astonishingly brutal way. Is that finally knocking something out of himself, whatever it is?

  MS: I think it’s the old story of having to reach the lowest level with yourself. I always think of the great Bible story of David having to put his hands on the Ark after reaching a point where he can’t get any lower. And then God comes and lifts him up. I felt that was what was happening. We never said that, though; I’m just thinking of it now, because I love the story of David. I always reread it and I’m fascinated at how he could have done so many bad things. He sends Uriah out in the front lines to get killed so he can have the guy’s wife. I mean, it’s an incredible story, and still he’s one of the anointed of God. It has a lot to do with what I feel about humanity: If you’re lucky, there’s some grace. Whether you make that change yourself, or whether you believe in a supreme being, that’s up to you. A lot of it has to do with how you treat yourself.

  I think that’s what happens in the jail scene. That’s why De Niro wanted to hit his head on stone walls. There were all kinds of things we were talking about doing in the jail cell, but he felt that he wanted to do that. Jake had described that to him, acted it out. As I said, Schrader originally was thinking of having him masturbate in the jail. Bob felt that the character wouldn’t do that. By the time it all worked itself out, a lot had changed from the draft that Paul had written. It became a really collaborative experience, all of us working together. Bob slamming his head against the wall that way seemed to have the most power. As did his expression, “I’m not an animal. I’m still human. I’m still human.”

  What he meant, I think, is an animal doesn’t have consciousness, is not aware that it’s alive. I have a friend who, unfortunately, may have to go through a heart operation. He said, It’s like a machine. The machine breaks down, they have to go in there to fix the machine. The only thing is, there’s a spirit attached. You’re a much more complicated creature than just an animal.

  RS: I’ve only met De Niro once or twice. He seems like a very shy guy. Is he with you?

  MS: It depends on the day. It depends on the frequency of our meeting, or the frequency of being around each other. By the time we were doing Raging Bull we were like brothers, in the best and worst senses. You know, we had the same trust, but at the same time, there were annoyances: “Is that your jacket on the floor? Would you pick it up?” I have a brother, and I keep projecting that into all these relationships.

  Now it’s a little different. But in those days he’d be very articulate and get right to the point. “This scene I have a problem with,” he’d say, or “I want to try something here.” Or “What if he moves a certain way?” I’d say, “Well, show it to me.” He’d get up and do it. A number of times I wished I had the camera. I would’ve shot it immediately if I’d had a camera.

  I would say, “The language is the body. The language is right there.” I’m thinking particularly of one scene in the jail at the end of Raging Bull. We were discussing what Schrader had put in, and he said, “I had this idea.” He showed me how he was going to hit his head against the wall. And how he would hit the wall with his hands, punch the wall, in a very slow way. He had done that once before in a room at the Pierre Hotel, but I wasn’t
really focused on it then. On the island he got up and did it again. When I looked at it there, I saw the scene, I saw the shot, what you see in the film.

  The key to that scene, by the way, is how he’s forced into the jail cell by those two guards—those are real guards, incidentally. And when we said, “Action,” the guards weren’t prepared for his ferocity. They got frightened; that’s quite real. They toss him in, and the language is over the top, but it’s because the anger is so strong, the rage is so strong. We just started rolling the camera without him knowing. Then he calmed down—right before he gets up and hits the wall, I think, right after he sits down. [Cinematographer] Mike Chapman and I, we had two cameras. It was just on a little set, and the wall was treated, of course, but still it was very painful what he was doing. But we had total trust between us at that point. He knew I would turn the camera on at the right time. I just felt it from knowing what he was going to do.

  Socially, Bob’s usually very quiet. If you’re in a meeting with him, it depends on the people. In some cases, after an hour he’ll open up and say something. I’ve seen him in meetings be eloquent on certain points, defending certain issues or people in a very strong way. Not like a firebrand, but very articulate and very soft-spoken: You know, that’s the nature of this character, that’s who he is, that’s what he knows. I’ve seen that happen a lot.

  Very often when we meet, it takes about forty-five minutes to get into the real stuff [laughs]. Usually, he meets me for lunch and it turns out to be three hours. But, finally, Raging Bull had a lot to do with trust, even in the editing.

  In the arena: Cinematographer Michael Chapman stands at Marty’s left hand.

  RS: Did Bob remain involved at that stage?

  MS: That process has changed in recent years. Now we may run a rough cut of a picture eight or nine or ten times. In those days it was two times and basically the picture was done. I had one cut of Raging Bull and I looked at it with Thelma. I knew what to do. We did it. Then we showed it to Irwin Winkler, Bob Chartoff [Winkler’s producing partner], and Bob. They looked at it. They had a couple of comments, that was it. Then we screened it one more time.