Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  In the Rolling Stones documentary, I do a takeoff on myself for the first ten minutes. It’s about everything that could go wrong for me as the director. And things do go wrong. And they affect you.

  I remember a priest told my father to come to talk to him and bring me with him to the rectory one day. I wondered why, what I did that was so bad? I must’ve been about twelve. He said something about me going around with the seriousness and the weight of the world on my shoulders. At that age I shouldn’t be that way, the priest said. I should have been enjoying my life. And he told my father something I’ll never forget. He said, “This boy,” he says, “behaves.” I did really, because I always was sick and never got in trouble.

  But then later, when they threw me out of the preparatory seminary, the monsignor told my father, “Your son? There’s a brick wall. Don’t hit your head against it, you’re going to get hurt.” The monsignor gets up, mimes hitting his head against the brick wall, and that was the end of it.

  Everybody cares about what they do. But I tend to get emotionally involved, or let it get to me. I get too emotionally involved with everything. So over the years it became funny. Except when it wasn’t funny. In my mind, whether it’s the stroke of a pen or a bullet, a lot can happen to people. In our America, businesspeople are slaughtered every day. People are robbed every day.

  RS: Well, there’s that whole theory of Robert Warshow, about “the gangster as tragic hero.”

  MS: I was going to mention Warshow.

  RS: I’m not sure I completely buy into that in a movie like Goodfellas; there’s actually nothing very tragic about those guys.

  MS: No.

  RS: What happens to Henry Hill is not tragic; he’s just not having fun anymore.

  MS: Right. Too bad for him!

  RS: And it’s not a tragic ending.

  MS: No, he’s still breathing.

  RS: I guess I need you to explain where you’re coming from with that because it really is a unique movie, I think. You’ve said you can’t see The Sopranos in it, but I see a sort of precursor in it.

  MS: A lot of the wonderful actors in The Sopranos were in my pictures, so we always talk about it. A lot of the people in Goodfellas are not on the upper levels, so they’re not tragic. It’s just everyday tragedy. These guys are dealing on the everyday level. I knew them as people, not as criminals. If something fell off the truck, you know, we all bought it. It was part of surviving, part of living. Some of those guys were smarter than others. Some overstepped their bounds and were killed. That was based on reality.

  There’s a danger in idolizing that world, but many of the police who were down there in that neighborhood were on the take. I was surprised the first time I saw the American system at work, which was in Twelve Angry Men, Sidney Lumet’s film. Today, I credit the priests in the neighborhood who screened a 16 millimeter print of it down in the basement of the church for some of the kids. It was like being on Mars.

  RS: The surrogate in your film, practicing that idolization as a kid, is the Henry Hill character.

  MS: Yes. If you engage in that life, certain things are expected of you. First of all, to make a lot of money for everybody. Or to be the muscle. You have to perform, and you have to be careful: the scene that Joe Pesci asked to be put in, and improvised with Ray Liotta—the “You think I’m funny?” scene—shows that you could be killed any second. They don’t care who’s around. The trick in the picture was to sort of ignore that danger, make it a rollicking road movie in a way—like a kind of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby picture, with everybody on the road and having a great time.

  When the Sicilian police finally broke up the Mafia in the early nineties, they arrested some guy—I forget his name, but he was the second in command—and an Italian reporter asked him if any movie about that world was accurate. And he said, Well, Goodfellas, in the scene where the guy says, “Do you think I’m funny?” Because that’s the life we lead. You could be smiling and laughing one second, and [snaps fingers] in a split second you’re in a situation where you could lose your life.

  RS: Quite an amazing anecdote.

  MS: That is exactly where you live all the time. That’s the truth of it. Now that happened to Joe Pesci, originally, with a friend of his. He got out of it just by doing what Ray did. So when he told me the story, I said, “We’ve got to use that. That really encapsulates it completely. That’s the lifestyle.”

  Remember when Jimmy Cagney got the AFI [American Film Institute] award, he thanked somebody I think was called Two-Times Ernie and the other street guys he knew as a kid. Because they taught him how to act. The kids in my neighborhood who told stories on the street corner, they’d have you enthralled, and often with a sense of humor about themselves. And these were some tough kids.

  I’ll never forget one of the toughest I’d ever met telling a story about losing a fight in such a funny way, and not being embarrassed about it. [Laughs.] Not losing any dignity. I thought, That is brilliant: to accept the fact that he was knocked down so badly, had to get up again, get knocked down again. We were all laughing, and he was laughing. I’ll never forget it.

  In the Wiseguy book, Henry Hill speaks that way, almost like a standup comic. He’s got his own rhythm. There’s a truth to it. Someone owes you money, and he doesn’t pay you. So you go to him, and he says, “Oh, my wife got sick.” “Fuck you, pay me.” “My daughter is—” “Fuck you, pay me,” a guy like Hill says. “My mother—” “Fuck you, pay me.”

  Marty directs Ray Liotta in Goodfellas.

  RS: De Niro in Mean Streets has no conscious sense of consequences, always living in the moment. That’s symbolized in Goodfellas by the great tracking shot into the Copacabana, when they all go out on the town. That’s the privileged moment they pay for in blood and death.

  MS: Well, the Copacabana—that’s the top of the line for Henry—it was Valhalla. When you were able to get a table there, it was like being in the court of the kings. The Mob guys were really the ones in charge. The Copa lounge was always more significant because the real guys were up there. That’s why you have a lot happening in Raging Bull in the Copa lounge. My friend’s father, the one who would read and listen to opera, his father was the head bartender there. We have him in Raging Bull. Nice guy.

  Everyone paid for the privilege eventually. The danger of the picture is that young people could look at it and think, Hey, what a great life. But you’ve got to see the last hour of the picture when things start going wrong in a big way.

  RS: I think in one of the voice-over lines Henry Hill says, You only have it for maybe ten years.

  MS: That’s right.

  RS: That made me think about celebrity. Ballplayers, for example, only have maybe ten years.

  MS: Right. Actors, filmmakers, you’ve got about ten years. Some of the greatest filmmakers had a run for ten years. It’s part of American celebrity.

  CAPE FEAR

  MARTIN SCORSESE: Sometimes I try to make a picture for purely entertainment reasons, like Cape Fear.

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: Cape Fear? But it says so much about the American marriage going to hell.

  MS: Well, that’s what we added. The original script didn’t have that. There’s something that Nick Nolte’s character had done, Mr. Bowden, that he would never be forgiven for by his wife and his daughter: There was nothing that he could ever say or do. You feel bad for him, and for them. That’s the feeling we brought to the film, because it was so awful what they were going through. There was one particular scene when we were laughing because it was so pathetic. Nick says, “I can’t do this scene.” I said, “Well, we have to do it!” He said, “No, now he’s going to ask her to forgive him. It’s never going to happen.”

  RS: Right.

  MS: Then they’re put to this trial by this larger-than-life character, Max Cady. It really did start for me as pure entertainment, but then I changed it to be about the dissolution of the family unit. When you’re coming out of the sixties, as I did, and thought about changin
g society, you had to think about changing the family unit. Does that work? Apparently it doesn’t.

  So here the family unit is being decimated. The husband is trying to hold on. His wife is barely holding on. Watch what she does with those cigarettes, Jessica Lange. The daughter has come of age. The scene in the old version where [Robert] Mitchum chases the young girl in the school? Wesley Strick wrote a very beautiful chase scene, very suspenseful. I said, “I can’t do that, I just don’t know how to do it.” I could try to do it, but other people would do it much better than me. So I said, “What if the scene is about Max Cady just taking whatever last vestige of trust or feelings for her father that the daughter had?” That’s what the scene should be about—spiritual pain as opposed to physical pain. And so Wesley worked on it and worked on it and worked on it. I think we got it. Then we shot it with two cameras. The first take is the take we used. We only shot four takes. And De Niro was wonderful. Juliette [Lewis], too. But I didn’t enjoy a lot of the making of it.

  RS: I gather you really didn’t want to do the big scene at the end, where De Niro is stalking the family, on the boat, in a hurricane? That’s a tour de force.

  MS: The scene that got me hooked actually was the one I just described. Then I said, You know what else? It was in early 1991. I wasn’t even fifty yet. I was still thinking I wanted to make the films being made in Hollywood—big entertainment films with lots of action scenes. I thought there was room for me there, if I ever could enjoy just making a film that is only action. Cape Fear turned out not to be only action.

  RS: I’ll tell you, it’s a lot better than Lee Thompson’s version in 1962.

  MS: Well, there were a lot of people who said that it wasn’t as pure as the original B film. My view is that the B film comes from one time and place, and we come from another time and place.

  RS: It really wasn’t such a B film, not with Gregory Peck and Mitchum starring in it.

  MS: Maybe so. But one thing I can tell you: Now that I’m older, I don’t know if I would do a picture that’s purely action, just for the sake of doing action.

  RS: The family in Cape Fear is your most dysfunctional family.

  MS: They really are.

  RS: She’s miserable. He’s playing around, has played around. Their child is a basket case.

  MS: I just wanted Nick Nolte to play it as a guy who did something once or twice and no matter what he could say or do, it would never be the same. He wanted it to be an “I’m home, honey” kind of life. But the mother and the daughter will have nothing to do with him. He’s trying, but he can’t get it done.

  That was the biggest change we made from the original script. In the original film the family was a very wholesome, together family. They were singing songs together, stuff like that.

  RS: As far as I know, it’s your only WASP family. So I think you’re saying something there, pal.

  MS: Maybe. I don’t really know much about that. I know something about Mediterranean families. I was just relying on what I had observed in WASP families.

  I’d see these movies—you know, Andy Hardy, and his father, a judge, little white picket fence. To me that was fantasy. I’d never met people like that, until maybe when I got out of NYU, and started to meet people who were not ethnic.

  RS: Well, I think this film references those movies to a degree—the white picket fence and so forth. But I think the key scene is the one between the daughter [Juliette Lewis] and Robert De Niro [Max Cady, the psychopath who believes he was wrongly prosecuted by her father] at the high school, so let’s go back to that. What the hell was going on there?

  MS: It was about the betrayal of trust. As I said, it was the final blow against her father. In the original, with Peck and Mitchum and Polly Bergen, there’s a scene where Mitchum shows up at the school and chases the kid through the halls, as I said. In the original draft of our picture, Steven Spielberg, who was the producer, and Wesley Strick, who was the writer, had a terrific chase sequence, a scare sequence. The kid was on kind of a ledge hanging on to a shade and the shade is starting to break off. And I said I could do it, but I’m not the best at that, I don’t really do that as well as other people. Maybe you’re looking at me for the wrong picture.

  I said, I’d like to make that scene about the violation of the kid. It should be quiet. It should not be a chase. You know, a genre film—I always think I can make one and then I always work against its conventions. But Steven said to me, Marty, you can do anything you want. You can rewrite the script if you want with Wesley.

  Did I want the family to live or die? Well, the family’s got to live, Steven said. I said, Fine. I got hold of Wesley, and we started talking about this idea of a scene that was very quiet, but one where he could really destroy the family by taking the last vestige of trust that the kid had in her father, which wasn’t very much, and destroy that. And do it as a sexual violation in a way.

  Right before we shot, Bob De Niro had this idea of putting his thumb in her mouth. I said, Just do it, don’t tell her.

  Cape Fear is a twisted—and far more interesting—remake of the 1962 original, which starred Gregory Peck. Now the family being terrorized by the psychopathic Max Cady (Robert De Niro, shown here with Scorsese) is anything but the loving unit portrayed in the earlier film.

  RS: Everything Nolte does in that movie is a failure.

  MS: He tries, though. He really tries, and it should work. But it doesn’t. He’s completely powerless.

  RS: Because he is up against, what, absolute evil?

  MS: I think so. I think that’s what Bob really wanted to play. And the whole idea of him hanging on to the bottom of that car—I mean, you couldn’t actually do that. But at that point in the movie, it really becomes a heightened kind of reality, particularly ending in the Götterdämmerung of the storm sequence, which I always wanted to try.

  It was a technical thing for me. I wanted to see if I could do a real action sequence with boats, and that sort of thing. It took us quite a while, but we did it—Freddie Francis on camera—and it was quite something. It has a lot to do with King of Comedy.

  RS: How so?

  MS: Well, the intrusion. The violence of the intrusion. You know, in this case Cady was wronged.

  RS: And so was Rupert Pupkin, I suppose, in a way.

  MS: Exactly. Jerry wronged Rupert to a certain extent—in Rupert’s mind, anyway. Jerry talked to him in the car, so therefore he’s his friend. So when he says to the assistant, “Are you speaking for Jerry?” he’s turning toward retribution. He’s got to get even. In Cape Fear Bob was even more interested in the violation of the family—of the Juliette Lewis character in that “theater scene,” where he destroys the last vestige of trust she has in her father. Then he also wanted to play Max—almost like The Terminator, like a machine. Ultimately, at the end of the picture, he’s the incarnation of everything they ever did wrong or felt wrong or thought wrong. He’s putting them through it.

  I don’t know if they ever will be the same after this story ends. Some viewers thought, Oh, the family’s back together. Yes, they’re back together, but think about what they’re going to be like afterwards.

  RS: You can’t quite imagine them, two weeks later, sitting down and having a nice roast beef dinner together.

  MS: Nope.

  Twenty years ago, on television, I saw a British series called Survival, black-and-white documentaries. It was about people who had gone through a great deal of suffering, being stranded on mountaintops and the like. One was about a family being stranded in a lifeboat—a mother, father, daughter, and son. The family was talking about it years later. The parents were divorced. They had been the closest family until they got in that boat. They spent four weeks in that boat, and they described everything they did. Just the matter of moving a foot into one another’s space, for instance, was huge. They are intelligent people, educated, filled with love. But they had to divorce after that. It was absolutely shocking.

  THE AGE OF INNOCENCE


  MARTIN SCORSESE: I think The Age of Innocence is interesting because it has to do with responsibility.

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: But no one in it is in the classic sense nurturing.

  MS: No. If they are nurturing to anything, they seem to be nurturing to their class, their society. Do you see what I’m saying?

  RS: Yes.

  MS: Which is better for Newland Archer [Daniel Day-Lewis, whose passionate, yet unconsummated, love affair with Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer) threatens the comfortable class structure of 1870s New York]. He doesn’t realize that because passion has taken over. In the long run it’s better for him. It goes back to the idea of responsibility.

  RS: But then what about the Polish countess? Does she have any nurturing in her?

  MS: Well, I think so. But would he be able to benefit from that, the kind of person he was bred to be? Would he be able to handle being in Europe with her, and dealing with the situations she would be dealing with?

  RS: Interesting point.

  MS: I don’t think he was meant to be that way.

  RS: The standard line on The Age of Innocence is that its people live by a rigid code of conduct, so intensely that analogies between them and the Mafia have been drawn. These people wouldn’t kill you, but they could isolate you.

  MS: Ostracize you. The more I learned about that world, working on the film, the more shocking to me it became. We tried to get the authenticity of Visconti, even though I couldn’t hope to achieve the beauty of The Leopard or Senso or The Innocent. I loved those pictures, I watched them over and over.