Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  I think after one screening Bob saw with Irwin, Bob suggested using another take for a certain scene. I didn’t think it was right, but I tried it. I still didn’t think it was right. Then later, when we were in California, he asked, Do you mind if I look at the takes again of that particular scene with you before you lock the picture? It was the On the Waterfront monologue at the end. We did nineteen takes. He still wanted to make sure which one he liked better. He made a case again for the one he liked. So we screened it in a big screening room at Warner Bros.—Stage 25, a giant room. There it was up on the screen. It’s the end of the movie. Bob is saying dialogue that comes from an iconographic work by Brando. I had certain ideas about it. Bob leaned to the one that was a little more expressive than the other. We looked at the two takes. I turned him and I said, “I still think the take I have in is the best.” And he said, “All right, let it go!” And that was it. You can only have a conversation like that with somebody you trust, because the bottom line is the actor could say, You’ve got to use that take I want, because the picture was made because of my name.

  RS: Right.

  MS: That’s a big issue. You don’t have to work with that person again maybe, but, right now, in the present, on the picture you’re working on, anything can happen. So I always use that example as a way of working together collegially, because I do like it when the actor brings something to the table.

  RS: Steven Bach, at the end of Final Cut, his very good book about the last days of the old United Artists, tells quite a wonderful story about your screening the picture for Andy Albeck, the studio chief, who was about to lose his job over Heaven’s Gate. He turns to you at the end of the picture and says, “Mr. Scorsese, you’re an artist.”

  MS: That’s right. My father was there, too; he came up the aisle and heard that. I remember he was standing next to Albeck, who was very nice to us. It was very interesting, because my father was rather shaken by the film. He was a little nervous when we showed the picture in Cannes. He said, disapprovingly, “The guy beats his wife.” We were just dealing with who this character was, and what his world is. There is domestic violence. It was the way it was.

  You know, a man goes in a ring, fights, that’s his living. He comes out of the ring and he gets into a fight. I mean, that’s what he does for his living. How do you expect him to behave? There are certain instincts that are nurtured and move him. I’m not excusing it, this was the world he came from.

  My friend Raffaele Donato gave me the novel Journey to the End of the Night by Céline. The way he deals with the poor, and the people who live in tenements, it’s very accurate, very true.

  RS: As far as I know, though I know nothing firsthand about that world.

  MS: That’s the way people were. I’m telling you, some were very nice, but a lot were like that, the way it’s described in that book. When we did Raging Bull and Taxi Driver and even Goodfellas and Casino, that is the world we were depicting. It’s harder now to make a film like Departed, which is insulting to a lot of people. It uses language that’s offensive. And it’s violent. Maybe ten or twelve years before I made those films, it wasn’t that way. Maybe we were a little closer to something like a brutal reality. Or, to put it another way, if you were going to make The Last Temptation of Christ today, you’d be more aware of what the reaction would be.

  THE KING OF COMEDY

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: Is there any way you can relate Taxi Driver or Raging Bull to The King of Comedy, which is ostensibly less terrifying—though not necessarily to me.

  MARTIN SCORSESE: It’s about violation. It’s the way paparazzi shoot pictures of you—not me, but certain actors. It’s an attack. The flashes and the shutters of the cameras are bullets. You see that in Raging Bull. The ring is like a bullfight. There the fighter is. Everything is being photographed.

  King of Comedy was really scary. Bob De Niro gave me that script when I was doing Alice, I think, and I didn’t get it. I just thought Paul Zimmerman, who did the script, was a wonderful writer. The script is hilarious. But I thought the movie was just a one-line gag: You won’t let me go on the show, so I’ll kidnap you and you’ll put me on the show. Hmm. After I took Alice, Taxi Driver, New York, New York, and Raging Bull around the world to different festivals, I took a look at the script again and I had a different take on it. I began to understand what Bob’s association with it was, what he went through after Mean Streets, certainly after Godfather II—the adulation of the crowd, and the strangers who love you and have got to be with you and have got to say things.

  I once wrote Elia Kazan a note asking if I could be an assistant on his set of The Arrangement. I got to meet him for two minutes, because he had come to NYU to speak. He said, No, I don’t take assistants. It’s a good thing he didn’t. I would have been thrown out the first minute. I would have asked, Why are you doing that? Can I see this? When I got to know him later, it was all measured and proper.

  RS: Is what you’re saying that admiration can quite easily cross the line into a dangerous sort of identification and intrusiveness, the whole sad, sick side of our dysfunctional celebrity system?

  MS: The person you identify with, admire, and love—at a certain point, the adulation goes past all bounds. It goes to a level that could go any which way. It can go violent. They can embrace you. They could take you home. That’s what I think Bob was understanding.

  RS: I think it’s among your most disturbing films.

  MS: It’s very upsetting. It was really unpleasant to shoot, in part because I had pneumonia again when I finished mixing Raging Bull. Then Bob said, Let’s do this. I said, Yeah, I’d really like to do it, I understand it.

  By the time I got to shoot it, I found that I didn’t like dealing with the story; it was so unpleasant and disturbing, it crossed so many lines that normally divide private and public lives. And I wasn’t a pro. I don’t know if I am a pro today. You know, Michael Curtiz could do a picture in four weeks, five weeks, Sam Fuller could do it, Ida Lupino did it. But these were real pros, besides being, I think, some of the most extraordinary artists. Every day they’d be there at a certain time, they’d be there before the crew, they’d be there before the actors, fighting through whatever problems a shot or scene presented. I found I couldn’t do that.

  I learned a lot about what a pro is through Jerry Lewis, who explained it to me. Immersed in the subject matter, and seeing how much it was going to affect me, I couldn’t bring myself to really move quickly. The first night of shooting was the scene with Jerry coming out of the stage door, being mobbed by fans and winding up in a car with Rupert [De Niro]. Two nights go by, I don’t use Jerry. I got bogged down in other things, was dragging my feet. On the third night, I got a message that Jerry would like to talk to me. I had said a couple of things to Jerry the night before—asked how he was doing and that kind of stuff. But he was pretty much in his trailer from eight at night until seven in the morning, and I couldn’t go in his trailer, he always smoked at the time. So he came to mine. He said, Listen, we’re about to do the scene. I know we’ll probably get to it tonight. I’m the consummate pro. You tell me to be here at a certain time, then you want me to wait, I’ll do that. You’re paying for my time. The only thing is now, after two nights of it, I have to ask you, If you think at a certain point in the night that you’re not going to get to me, could you let me know? I mean, I could go home early then. I said, Of course. I never thought of it. I had been completely selfish. I had wanted all my toys so I could play with them. And here was this pro.

  I’m not saying Bob De Niro was not a pro. But the thing about Bob and me, we were kind of like siblings in a way. What we did was make movies together. By extension, I just thought we were making my movie, and everybody would wait on me—a complete megalomaniac.

  RS: In that film there are a couple of scenes that I call cringe scenes. Actually, I have to stop the film, go and get a cup of coffee, and then come back to it. One is where he—

  MS: Shows up at the house.

>   RS: Well, that’s the big one. But there’s also the scene with Jerry’s assistant in his office. You know, “You can just leave the tape,” she says. “No, I think I’ll stay,” he says.

  MS: Shelley Hack, who does that, she’s great.

  RS: She is the woman we run into every time we go in to pitch a book or a movie or whatever.

  MS: But she’s right. Within the context of what she’s doing, she’s right. The kid doesn’t understand it, and he won’t take it. De Niro and I had been mining each other for years, maybe not understanding it, not being articulate about it, but by the time we were into King of Comedy, we didn’t know where to stop mining. So there were sometimes twenty-five, sometimes forty takes. For me it was a comedy of manners, walking the fine line between love and hostility. The key line is when she says, We think it’s interesting. What you should do now is go home, work on the act, get it edited, do some more work, and then bring it back.

  And De Niro says, Well, what about Jerry? And she says, I’m telling you that that’s what you have to do. She starts to go, and he stops her and says, Excuse me, are you speaking for Jerry? It took twenty-six takes. One had more hostility between them. One was not hostile at all. One had smiles. One was without smiles.

  We found it excruciating in a way. We also drew upon a lot of things. There was some improvisation in the picture, like between Margo Winkler, Irwin’s wife, as the receptionist. We thought it was like when you’re younger and you go to the William Morris Agency, and you become friends with a receptionist. And they had a relationship, so we improvised with that. Then, when he gets thrown out by a security guy and the embarrassment, the humiliation of that.

  RS: Some of it really is grotesque.

  MS: There is a part of it that’s grotesque, you’re right about that. But I was trying to capture something. As I was making the film, I realized that a part of me was in that story, and I was forced to confront it. I look back now and I realize why I couldn’t make King of Comedy back in 1975 when De Niro first gave it to me. I was too close to it. I didn’t understand it. And I haven’t seen it since I made it. It’s too embarrassing.

  RS: “Embarrassing” seems to me like the wrong word.

  MS: Not embarrassing. It’s—

  RS: It gives you the creepy crawlies.

  MS: Yes, it’s very unsettling.

  RS: At the risk of repeating ourselves, I’ve got to say that’s really true of that scene with Irwin’s wife, Margo, playing the receptionist, not letting the young comic past the gates.

  MS: That scene is great. It took days. I just couldn’t get through it. It took six, seven days to shoot. It was scheduled for two and a half days, and it could have been done in that time. But there was something … For example, in the case of the receptionist relationship: If you’re trying to get to see Jerry, you have to get past the elevator operator. And then the receptionist and then Jerry’s assistant.

  RS: What you’re saying, I guess, is that there are a lot of subtleties in a seemingly simple scene, a lot of undercurrents the characters themselves aren’t fully aware of.

  MS: It was so sad. The poor guy wants to get in there. He can’t get past her. He tries to make himself likable and yet there’s all this extraordinary violence and hostility in him. I can articulate all that now. I couldn’t articulate it then.

  RS: I can imagine why it was very difficult for you to do.

  MS: Oh, it was awful for me, as I said.

  RS: But it’s interesting, that he, too, like Travis Bickle, gets rewarded for his antisocial behavior.

  MS: Turn on TV. That’s part of our culture that is just totally accepted. People have a hard time with drugs, go to rehab, then it’s all over—forgiving magazine covers and everything else. Our values have gotten skewed. I don’t feel comfortable anymore—and probably never did—with the values of our society.

  I mean, I’m a self-centered, selfish person. When I make my films, it’s like Frank Capra said, a disease. It’s not an excuse, either. But I find that I miss those values—the firm lines drawn between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Maybe I’m just getting older and more conservative [laughs], but I think in the early eighties, I began to notice the cult of celebrity. And I like making fun of it. It’s why I like the Letterman show, for example. It has a great deal of tough, ironic humor.

  Psychotic fan Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro) finally fully entraps Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis), the star he’s been stalking in The King of Comedy (1982), Scorsese’s thoroughly creepy meditation on the celebrity system.

  RS: The scene where they invade Jerry’s house, I mean, honest to God, for a minute there I thought it was going to be a fantasy scene. It took me a minute to realize it was actually happening.

  MS: It’s important you say that. You know why you feel that way? Because I made a clear decision when I decided to make the picture to create no difference between the fantasies and the reality. Because if things are going on in your mind, and you can’t go to sleep, and you’re going over discussions and arguments, it’s real. It’s really happening. You can rewind. You can erase. The fantasy is real. You want to be a filmmaker, you want to be an actor, you know, it’s palpable. It’s there. It’s tangible. It’s not a ripply dissolve.

  RS: Was that hard to do, that scene?

  MS: Not for the actors. I was the one who was not getting up to speed. The scene was only scheduled for three or four days and went for seven, because there was something so grating and so upsetting, and so irritating and so embarrassing, I just couldn’t do it. Luckily we had some very understanding producers.

  RS: As I say, I can watch Jake LaMotta, because I never met Jake LaMotta, know nothing of his world. But I do live somewhat in the world of the Rupert Pupkins and Jerrys, and those people. So I have an instant kind of embarrassed understanding …

  MS: I also was interested in television in the 1950s—Broadway Open House, Jerry Lester and Dagmar. The great Steve Allen, who would have amazing guests on, or then Jack Paar, along with Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner and Imogene Coca. It was a golden age, I thought, of American television. And we possessed those people. We loved them. If we saw them on the street, it was as if we’d been conversing with them all our lives. And a couple of friends of mine who were students at NYU were also into that world; they worked on the Paar show.

  I used to try to get into television with them, and do some game shows and things like that. I soon realized it wasn’t for me professionally, but Jack Paar’s psyche out there at night, though it lacked the drama that was going on inside that man, was still fascinating. I was very much into that world, and we’d talk about it, and that’s why we ultimately came to the decision to cast Jerry Lewis if he would do the picture, because who’d better represent the night talk show host? The thing about it, of course, is that Jerry is the comedian, the actor, singer, cabaret performer, director, talk show host, guest—he did everything in that era.

  RS: It’s a very nice controlled performance.

  MS: It is, but I’m afraid I tortured the poor man. I used to be notoriously late until I realized that no matter what time I got there, I still had to deal with whatever I didn’t want to deal with. But I would never be ready until two thirty in the afternoon. The last time I saw Jerry was in Venice. I said, “We should get together more, I’m on time now.” He laughed. I finally got a laugh out of him!

  But King of Comedy is my coming to terms with disappointment, disappointment with the fact that the reality is different from the dream.

  RS: I think I know what you’re saying, but can you try to distill it? Are you saying that you, Marty, had a similar infatuation about movies, about being famous and all that stuff?

  MS: It’s like Rupert going to Jerry’s house, and his girlfriend says to him, “Well, what are we going to do? What are we going to talk about?” Rupert answers, “These people don’t speak the way we speak. They’re very witty. They have wonderful things to say all the time.” That was his dream of th
e celebrity life. When I first went to L.A. in 1970, there was a little bit of that need in me—to buy into, participate in, the dream world of celebrity.

  RS: Sure.

  MS: It’s almost as if they are like gods and goddesses—that’s the impression they make on you from when you’re four or five years old. That’s the old story. I hear a lot of actors talk about this, where people come up to them and talk to them, and finally the actor gets mad and says, Please, leave me alone. Then the fan thinks, Well, actors are a different kind of person, and also, What do you think I am? I am a person, too.

  RS: That’s just grotesque.

  MS: It’s embarrassing now to think about it, being in a way a part of all that back in the 1970s. We did it to so many people. I guess meeting Peckinpah was quite different from meeting King Vidor, let’s say, or George Cukor, who was so encouraging. He and Peter Bogdanovich and Sam Fuller signed my DGA [Directors Guild of America] card.

  AFTER HOURS

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: You’ve said to me that you thought After Hours was your most Hitchcockian film.

  MARTIN SCORSESE: The picture has direct references to Hitchcock’s style, but as a parody. I also mentioned a connection to Kafka, and I got pummeled for saying it. The picture was torn apart by some.

  It was a parody of the visual interpretations of Hitchcock—how guilt plays out a great deal in the camera moves and the cuts.

  RS: Can you explain that?

  MS: Well, in After Hours, when the character walked into a room and it was dark, and he turned on the light, it was important to take a close-up of the light switch turning on—click—as if you expected something to happen but it didn’t. It created a sense of foreboding—until finally he screamed out into the street. He just wanted to come downtown, he just wanted to make love, did he have to die for it? Yes, he did. [Laughs.] He had to die for it.