Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  One of the first films my father took me to see was [Sam Fuller’s] I Shot Jesse James, in which Jesse’s best friend kills him. My father was always talking about loyalty.

  RS: I didn’t see that film till fairly recently, but I liked it a lot—belatedly.

  MS: Me, too. And this betrayal led me eventually to The Departed.

  RS: Would your father have thought Jesse James was a western you might enjoy, or do you think he knew what was going to happen in that movie?

  MS: He just thought it was a western. I wanted to see it. It had a great title. I was about six years old.

  RS: So, were you satisfied when Last Temptation came out? I mean, forget the controversy—did it in some way do what you wanted it to do? Or did the controversy spoil it all?

  MS: Something odd happened. The physical process of making the film, editing it—putting the man on the cross, the crowds coming in—was so intense I feel I just missed grasping it all. It got out of my hands. The process itself removed me from what I thought I would experience.

  But it led to Kundun, which led to Bringing Out the Dead, which is leading to Silence [a film about Jesuit missionaries in feudal Japan—a film Scorsese has been struggling to get made for many years]. As I said, there are certain things I would have liked to have done better. The night I was on Nightline I realized there’s something very special about faith, for everyone. Yet I wasn’t intending to shake anybody’s faith.

  RS: I know that.

  MS: Apparently people felt threatened. To them, there was an issue that was obviously much more important than whether it was a good movie or not. I finally realized that with all this clamor, it would be very difficult for anybody to engage in what I hoped the picture would create. Andrew Greeley tried in The New York Times, and a few other people wrote interesting things about it. But in most cases it was just dismissed. And that was that.

  RS: Still, we shouldn’t forget that in the movie Jesus is an interesting character, and he’s nicely played by Willem Dafoe.

  MS: Willem did a great job.

  RS: Coming to it with my total lack of regard for religiosity—he engaged my sympathy, as does Harvey as Judas in his way.

  MS: Yes.

  RS: And I think there is, if you will, a kind of wonderful screenwriter’s logic to that business. It’s a neat twist and makes perfect narrative sense.

  MS: Yes, and he said, “Oh, by the way, if I represent salvation, you’ll have to represent the antithesis of that for eternity.”

  RS: For all eternity.

  MS: All eternity. You’ll be the one that they claimed hanged himself. And Dante will put you in hell in a certain place. It’s fascinating. You know, I’ve seen parts of it on TV a couple of times. Maybe one day I’ll screen it again. It’s not a film I have bad memories of in any way. It’s just when it opened, when all the controversy developed, that it was a nightmare. There was nothing I could say or do. I also couldn’t be shaken, because I believed in what I did. In the end, I think Last Temptation was out of my grasp because I naïvely thought I was supposed to have taken some sort of a spiritual journey with it. But it may have been the wrong material to deal with in that way—dealing with Jesus as a man, the carnality, the physicality.

  NEW YORK STORIES

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: Let’s talk about your contribution to New York Stories [“Life Lessons,” an episode in an anthology film in which Nick Nolte plays a womanizing painter, both exploitative and needy of his protégée-lover-assistant (Rosanna Arquette)]. There’s a sort of weird charm to that movie, but it also works out pretty brutally.

  MARTIN SCORSESE: It does. It is funny, because he takes himself so seriously. Let’s assume that he’s a great artist—that’s what the story tells us—which means he has to take himself seriously. Yet I think he’s amused by having to do so.

  RS: Oh, really?

  MS: I think the one scene where he looks up to the floor above him, when she’s up there with another young man, and the opera is playing, I mean he’s just enjoying that, I think.

  RS: What’s he enjoying?

  MS: He’s enjoying the emotional turmoil, maybe the pain of the whole situation, which he has induced.

  And ultimately it feeds into his work, you know. At the end, when he looks at that beautiful young woman behind the bar and we sense that he has to make a play for her, Nick Nolte turned to me before we shot it and he said, “Why don’t we give this guy a break?” I said, “No, he’s going to have to go with her.”

  RS: And what was the break he would have imagined giving him?

  MS: To pass that one up and not get into a situation where he gets into a relationship with someone not on his level. It’s simply not going to work. They’re young. The women have a whole life to get through before there’s a chance at an equal relationship.

  RS: You’re talking about his mentoring relationship with Arquette’s character.

  MS: Yes, exactly. I think he’s done it repeatedly. And I think he’s in a cycle in which he’s doing that and which ultimately feeds his work. I think he feels he has to suffer to work.

  Marty’s contribution to New York Stories (1988), an anthology film, was “Life Lessons,” about an egomaniacal, sexually avaricious action painter (Nick Nolte) and his protégée-lover (Rosanna Arquette). The piece was funny and, at times, quite savage. The other directors involved in the project were Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola.

  RS: So he has to have these hopeless relationships?

  MS: Hopeless, yes. I think so.

  RS: That’s an interesting way of looking at it.

  MS: And also, you know, they’re very beautiful young women.

  RS: Yes, they are.

  MS: And it’s very enjoyable, up to a point. And then he has to go through that pain of the separation and find another one. But that’s what Nick meant when he said, “Should we give him a break and not have him go with this new young lady at the end?” and I said, “No, that’s not the story.” He’s not going to learn for a while longer. Maybe he never will. But maybe that’s what he needs to work. Or at least that’s what he tells himself. Maybe it’s about feeling that emotion, feeling that you’re alive, even if it’s negative. And that goes on the canvas somehow.

  RS: So his only real life is on the canvas.

  MS: Yes.

  RS: And his life is not a life at all.

  MS: That’s all used, in a sense, as material. It was enjoyable to do, and I have Richard Price to thank for a really good script.

  RS: Who came up with that idea?

  MS: I did. I had this idea for years. Back in the early seventies I had a copy of Dostoyevsky’s “The Gambler,” because I liked Dostoyevsky a lot, and I thought maybe we can do a version of “The Gambler,” but that wasn’t really for me.

  But we took a scene right from “The Gambler” and put it in there, where he says, “You don’t exist for me,” when she’s in the kitchen. “I can do anything ’cause I’m the invisible man to you,” he says. That dialogue is from “The Gambler.” The diary of the woman, Anna, was the inspiration for that character in “The Gambler.” She was, I think, twenty-one years old and she was the mistress of Dostoyevsky, who was about fifty-three, thereabouts. And we literally followed the diary.

  RS: Oh, how interesting, these—to me, at least—hidden analogies between these two stories.

  MS: And from what I remember he was forced to write “The Gambler” because he had debts to pay, and he took a secretary in the room with him and I think it took about four weeks or five weeks. He dictated it. And at the end of those four to five weeks he married the secretary. And the only thing she says is “I never want to hear the name Anna again.” Because in that room it all came out and went into “The Gambler.” And his letter to Anna was interesting because he’s so apologetic, and he waits until the third page to write that he’s married the secretary. But she’s twenty-one years old and she even wrote a short story; it’s in there, too.

  RS: How amazing.

&n
bsp; MS: It’s not very good, but it’s fascinating because she calls him “F.,” and she says “F. is here again. It’s such a bore.” And it’s Dostoyevsky.

  RS: Possibly he was a bore.

  MS: Yeah.

  RS: Obsessed guys like that can be very boring.

  MS: Boring, you know. She would write: “Oh, he’s going to cry again. I can’t take it.” The poor guy.

  RS: But having said all this, it seems to be a very well-observed look at the New York art world, too.

  MS: Richard did that, because he realized that we couldn’t make the writing process visual. So he said, Well, make him a painter.

  RS: The painting is great, yeah.

  MS: Richard’s wife is a fine painter, and basically that was the inspiration for it.

  RS: One of the things I thought about the movie, too, was that very often in movies about painters, when you get to the painting it always looks faked.

  MS: I know. I agree. Chuck Connolly did those paintings. They’re quite interesting. He’s still painting—in fact there was a documentary on HBO about him.

  RS: Well, of course one of the things about abstraction is you can slather that paint around and it’s very active—it’s action painting literally—and at the same time you don’t know whether it’s good or bad. Whenever you show painting in a film it never feels real. I mean that’s the downside, let’s say, of Lust for Life. What I can accept, though, in your movie is his passion for it.

  MS: Yeah, exactly. But we decided we had to show the paintings. And playing music—you talk to one artist, he says, I never played music; and you talk to another artist and he says, I play music all the time.

  RS: And you opted for the music—which helps the painting scenes immeasurably.

  MS: “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” the elegiac tone of that song.

  RS: And what of her? What will become of her? That interests me.

  MS: I know.

  RS: Will she one day …?

  MS: Maybe. Maybe.

  RS: Because he has certainly insulted her gift or whatever talent she had. But yet she has the passion.

  MS: She’s got it, but does she have the ability, and does she have the toughness? That you can’t teach anybody. You just can’t.

  RS: No.

  MS: The more you do, the worse it gets. It’s very hard.

  RS: You’re talking about protecting—?

  MS: People who want to be artists. I mean whether you’re an actor, whether you’re a painter or writer, whatever. It involves a toughness that you have to have. You stand up and you take the blow, you know.

  RS: It’s true.

  MS: You don’t like it. And you’ve got to do it again and again. And you think, Well, why do I want to do that? But, you know …

  RS: But it goes on and on, your whole life.

  MS: It goes on and on, yes. Constantly. Some people even have the talent, but talent’s not enough.

  RS: No, never.

  MS: You have to have a kind of defiant attitude, I think, in such a way that you cut out everything else. You just work and you do what you do. You don’t listen to anybody, you don’t read any criticism, you don’t take any opinions, and …

  RS: Well, then what comparison and contrast could we make between you, Marty, and Nick Nolte in that movie?

  MS: Well, I guess …

  RS: I mean, you’re tough enough.

  MS: I don’t know. I try to be. I try to be—

  RS: We all try to be.

  MS: Yes, we all try to be. That’s about as close as I can get, you know.

  RS: Isn’t it the truth, though, however much you say “I don’t read the reviews,” or “I don’t pay attention to the reviews,” the truth of the matter is you do notice them. You can’t help but notice them.

  MS: You can’t help it, and there are some people who—in a friendly way—send you some good ones.

  RS: There are also people who write and say, “You’ll be interested in this notice in Memphis,” and it’s a devastation, you know.

  MS: It’s terrible! I learned that the hard way. I did that to a few people back in the late sixties—I said, “Oh, this was written about you,” and I gave it to them and they said, “Thank you. I wish you hadn’t.” I didn’t understand until I started really making my own work. It would happen sometimes, too, with very close friends of mine saying, “You know, what he said about you in the paper,” and then they repeat it and say,“I’m against that, and I really think it was outrageous.” And I would say, “Well, why did you tell me? Let it go. I know it’s not good.” Not everybody’s going to like you. What can you do? You go back and you make another picture. If you can.

  RS: Don’t you feel that’s the one thing they don’t tell you when you’re a kid starting out? You’re aware that people give you good and bad reviews, but they don’t really tell you how much you can be hurt.

  MS: The pain is extraordinary. But I mean some people, some wonderful filmmakers, have asked me, “You don’t read reviews. You don’t pay attention to any of that, do you?”

  RS: Really!

  MS: I don’t want to mention any names, but they’re much more secure than I am, I guess. But the insecurity is part of what I do, and who I am. But I must say that when young people ask me what’s the most important thing, I do use the word “tenacity,” and that means, no matter what, you’ve got to be like Odysseus tied to the mast.

  I can’t say “Don’t listen”—you’re going to hear it, and it’ll be with you for fifty years. You’ll always hear it, even if they change their opinion. But if you get a lot of praise very often, there has to be an attack, or many attacks. There has to be. And then you just weather that, and you have to have confidence in yourself, and that’s the tenacity.

  RS: It is impossible, I think, to sustain a career of any length without that quality.

  MS: Yes.

  RS: You may be tenacious, but nobody’s going to erase the terrible shitty things that have been said about you.

  MS: By people close to you, too. And also then there’s the praise, too—there’s praise, but maybe praise for the wrong thing, for the wrong reason. But praise helps the financing of another picture. Also box office, to a certain extent, depending on the kind of movie you want to make next.

  GOODFELLAS

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: Your next full-length feature after Last Temptation was Goodfellas in 1990, which I suppose with Raging Bull is one of my two favorite movies of yours. Perhaps part of my feeling for that is based on the fact that most of us share a sort of love for gangsters as outsiders, or rebels. I mean, we always sort of sympathize with the gangster Jim Cagney, or people like him.

  They seem to have such a nice, rich life: lovely meals they’re always making for each other, a certain amount of friendship, brotherhood, and all that. They enjoy the good life, and at the same time they get to whack people.

  MARTIN SCORSESE: When I was doing The Color of Money in Chicago, I was reading The New York Review of Books and saw a review of a book by Nick Pileggi called Wiseguy. It seemed like Nick was taking us through the different levels of purgatory and hell in the underworld, like Virgil or like Dante. Irwin Winkler said, “Are you interested in that?” I said yes and he bought it for me. I said yes because I thought Nick was telling the story in a different way. It’s about that lifestyle, and the dangerous seduction of that lifestyle.

  I remember I was talking to Marlon Brando from time to time, and he said, “Don’t do another gangster picture. You’ve done Mean Streets, you did the gangsters in Raging Bull. You don’t have to do that.” I came to feel the same way. So I said to Michael Powell, “I think I don’t want to do this Goodfellas thing,” or Wiseguys, as it was then called.

  Michael Powell went back to his apartment with Thelma Schoonmaker, whom he’d married right after Raging Bull. He couldn’t see anymore, so she read the script to him. I was in the editing room, I remember, in the Brill Building, and suddenly he called and said, “This is wonderful. You must do it
. It’s funny and no one’s ever seen this way of life before. You must do it.” And that’s why I did it.

  Goodfellas was Marty’s masterly portrait of low-level New York mobsters. Among those present in this “rollicking road picture” were Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, and Joseph Bono. The film was released in 1990.

  RS: Well, there’s a William Wellman story on Public Enemy. He found the script and he took it to [Darryl] Zanuck, who was running Warner Bros. It was then called “Beer and Blood.” He loved it—these young writers had lived in Chicago and knew some of the mobsters. But Zanuck said, I can’t do another one of these. I’ve just done this, I’ve just done that. Tell me one good reason to do it. And Wellman said, “Because I’ll make it the toughest one you ever saw.” And Zanuck said, “You got it.” You could argue that, of all the modern gangland things, Goodfellas is the toughest one of all. Was there some aspect of Goodfellas for you that was like Wellman’s attitude, that you could do it tougher?

  MS: I thought of it as being a kind of attack.

  RS: Attack?

  MS: Attacking the audience. I remember talking about it at one point and saying, “I want people to get infuriated by it.” I wanted to seduce everybody into the movie and into the style. And then just take them apart with it. I guess I wanted to make a kind of angry gesture.

  RS: Why were you angry?

  MS: I guess I used to feel I was the outsider who has to punch his way back in, constantly. Some people don’t have to do that, but I do. I’m not just talking about films, but everything.

  I get angry about the way things are and the way people are. I get very involved in stories and the way a character behaves and the way the world behaves. More than anger, I think, maybe it’s caring about how characters behave, how the world behaves. I’m curious about those things. I still get excited by the story. I still get upset by what a character does. And the anger is something to get me working. I have to get sometimes rather upset with myself or a situation before I can really start working, thinking clearly. Some other people can do it very quickly, which doesn’t mean they don’t put energy into it. But they don’t put their heart and soul into it. I’m one of those people who does. It’s every minute of the day and night.