Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  But, anyway, the brutality of the flanking movement that is put upon Newland Archer by his wife, and by the heads of the family, the van der Luydens and his wife’s mother, was extraordinary, I thought. There is that wonderful revelation when he finally understands that everybody knows what’s going on between him and Ellen, when he sees his wife smile at him at that party. Everybody’s known all along. Two people are in love with each other, and they think nobody else knows and everybody knows. It’s the slow and agonizing and brutal way in which they undo him—and it’s all done extremely politely. It’s pretty brutal, I think.

  The Age of Innocence was seemingly Scorsese’s most anti-Scorsesean film: an elegant yet large-scaled adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel about a blighted romance in nineteenth-century New York high society. The director, seen here in costume for his small role, saw analogies between the social controls exerted by his muscular mobsters and these more subtle guardians of the status quo in another insular society.

  RS: But he’s so passive.

  MS: That’s what everyone said. You know, that was the last film of mine my father saw and I dedicated it to him. When I was making the film, I was thinking very much about my father’s sense of obligation and responsibility—what he did for us, whether he was massaging me with alcohol to get a fever down or going through all this madness with doctors, not having an education, not knowing how to deal with all this. I thought that Newland Archer, when he decides to stay, is demonstrating that kind of responsibility. The boy says to him at the end of the film he knew they would be safe because his mother told him that when it came down to it Archer would give up the thing he loved most to stay with them. I admire that. Now whether he’s passive earlier in the film or not, that’s something else. But his decision—I admire it.

  So I think he’s much maligned. Jay Cocks said later—he gave me the book originally—that people never forgave the fact that Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer don’t get to make love in the film. But that’s the story.

  Even at the end, when we were shooting in Paris, Michael Ballhaus, my DP [director of photography], looked at me, and goes, Oh, why can’t he go upstairs? When, at last, he could safely embrace Ellen, I said, He can’t. He can’t go up. That’s what she loved about him. What are you going to do, be inconsistent at the last minute? But the thing with the children was very touching, I thought.

  RS: For me, it was something that only had impact when I saw the film a second time.

  MS: Maybe it is too studied, the homage to Visconti. But Jacques Tourneur’s in there. There’s the influence of the beautiful narration of Dorian Gray, and the narration of Barry Lyndon, of course—how the narrator’s voice helps get you to a certain contemplative state, almost like reading a novel from the nineteenth century. You hear the voice of Joanne Woodward, as Edith Wharton, right in your ear.

  RS: It seems to me a beautifully judged and measured film. I seem to recall that its release was somewhat delayed.

  MS: I’ll never forget it. We finished shooting in May, June 1992, around then. The studio would like to have gotten it for Christmas. But it was a tricky film. The energy was held back, the emotion was underlying. And then my father died during that period.

  RS: Right.

  MS: It was too held back. The question was, Did expressive camera moves break the form of the traditional costume movie? We did some things which people considered inappropriate for that type of story, as if that type of story should be told only in one way. We did a two-hour-and-forty-minute cut of it. The studio said the picture was going to come out the following year. An article came out in the papers, Variety or somewhere, explaining that the film was being postponed; there wasn’t anything wrong with the film, it said, it was just that the director has an “obsessive attention to detail.” Excuse me.

  RS: Every worthwhile director has that obsession.

  MS: I usually take things to the reductio ad absurdum. If I’m not complaining, then I’m not thinking it through.

  CASINO

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: When you got to Casino, you said, you’d gone as far as you thought you could go with just plain brutality—the way people kick people around, beat them up, blow them up. It’s relatively speaking a late gangster movie. I have no idea about the origins of that project or why you feel it exceeded what you’d previously done in the realm of brutality—especially when they’re burying poor old Joe alive out in the desert.

  MARTIN SCORSESE: I know, it’s awful. It’s done by his friends. And this is something that is so disturbing.

  RS: This theme of yours of betrayal, right?

  MS: Yes, yes. And the closest people turn on him. Now, he did behave badly.

  RS: Yes.

  MS: And he abused his power. And he was a killer. But it’s the world he’s in. There is no other world. And you have to stop him from breathing. It’s an extraordinary thing how people could do that. But the thing is the calculation. You have to trick him. Then you have to follow through, you have to do whatever you’re doing, whatever violence you’re committing—until he stops moving and breathing. And did he, as a human being, deserve that from his closest friends? From his closest collaborators and family members almost. When I shot the scene, I shot it very straightforward, very flat. And I figured that’s the final curtain in that world. That’s it. That is my final statement.

  The cornfield beating of Joe Pesci in 1995’s Casino, a film about the Mafia’s rise to control of Las Vegas and the decline of Ace Rothstein, played by Robert De Niro, who masterminded it.

  RS: Does that scene at all analogize to the scene in Goodfellas where they’ve got the guy in the trunk? I mean, you know, he’s suffocating before they kill him.

  MS: I think it’s different—I mean, murder is murder. But the murder of Billy Batts in Goodfellas is out of hotheadedness.

  RS: Right. They’re like young heedless guys—

  MS: Yeah, drinking. They’re like barbarians at the gates. I don’t think they planned on doing it. They knew they were gonna beat him up. They knew they were gonna commit an act of punishment on him. But the point is that it’s like many murders, it happens moment by moment. Unpremeditated murder usually happens where it’s almost inadvertent, where you take one step and the other person takes another, and then you have to keep going.

  RS: I see what you mean.

  MS: You have to keep going. The scene doesn’t start that way. The scene doesn’t say, I’m gonna kill you. No. They’re talking and the next thing you know, the gun is around. And then they become angry and passion takes over. But in Casino, it’s planned.

  RS: Just tell me, how did Casino come to you? How did you get involved?

  MS: That was kind of a commission. I had a deal at Universal. We did Cape Fear there and they wanted another film. Tom Pollock and Casey Silver were there. And Nick Pileggi brought this newspaper article to me about the car blowing up with Lefty Rosenthal in it. [Rosenthal was the brains behind converting Las Vegas from a pure gambling center to a kind of family playground.] And the revelation of the story of the triangle between Rosenthal, Ginger (his wife), and Nicky, Lefty’s best friend. In any event, that story seemed so vivid—two friends, one was the brains, one was the muscle. And sometimes the brains would use other people’s muscle. And sometimes the muscle also had brains. But primarily they controlled this empire for the Mob; so it’s a story of empire. And the story of, again, the seeds of destruction in our own selves. And the poor woman who’s stuck in the middle. In fact, quite honestly, everybody who was there in Vegas when we were doing the film liked the Nicky character a lot. They didn’t like the Ace character at all.

  RS: Why didn’t they like Lefty?

  MS: They just felt he was cold, tough, and the feeling was that if he had to use violence, he did it through other people. Whereas Nicky was, you might say, up front, hands-on. And the cops, the policemen, who were part of that task force that was supposedly set to get Tony and all his men in Vegas, the kindest words they had were for
the woman.

  Scorsese and Sharon Stone, as Ginger, the tragically touching showgirl of Casino.

  RS: Really?

  MS: They said that she was the one who got the worst of it all. They treated her badly.

  RS: Of course, she becomes this drunk and—

  MS: Oh, horrible. And she died exactly that way in the motel hallway.

  RS: Is that so?

  MS: Yeah. And that night, I remember Sharon Stone was trembling. She felt she had to channel the woman. And there were so many people who knew her and they were all around us. They were acting in the film. It was kind of strange. I mean, strange in a good way. It worked on her beautifully. And it was quite something—you can’t imagine some of the stuff that went on. We just scratched the surface, and it’s going on now, too.

  RS: I thought the Mob was gone from Vegas.

  MS: It’s just in another place.

  RS: That’s America’s family playground.

  MS: It’s America’s family playground. Yes. What does that say about our values? So the end of the picture is really about us and about our values—that’s what I thought. The last statement on that way of life and that world is the killing in the cornfield.

  RS: I kept thinking—and I reran it just a few weeks ago—I kept wondering: Did you think at all about The Godfather? Because, you know, in this film, whenever they go back to the Mob, they’re sitting around in some garage.

  MS: That’s where the real stuff went on, you see.

  RS: Yeah, right. And I’m really laughing at it, because here are these powerful guys and they’re sitting around—

  MS: This dirty place with the oil, the smell of the oil and the grease.

  RS: Yes, and eating really low-level Italian subs.

  MS: I know.

  RS: And I was thinking, this is Marty making a little comment on the Corleones, who have fancy homes and all that …

  MS: I always said, I just knew the person on the street corner who had just robbed a carton of cigarettes and was selling them to somebody else. I can never imagine the Corleones, I couldn’t even imagine the Sopranos living in a big house in New Jersey. I only saw a few of the shows, and it’s not the world that I knew.

  RS: Do you think these guys, like back when you were a kid on Elizabeth Street, do you think they went home from their social club to wonderful houses like the Corleones’?

  MS: No, they lived in apartments in the tenements. There were a few who had nicely appointed apartments. It was decent, it was nice, especially if they had families. But basically, I got to tell you, it was very plain.

  RS: Well, that’s interesting. The American fantasy is that these guys lived these big lives …

  MS: Even if they lived in those tiny apartments, they were the bosses of the neighborhood. If there was a problem, they’d take care of it. They had a florist shop. Somebody had a butcher shop. So they were part of the family in a way. So it wasn’t that they were the men on the hill. It wasn’t like they were separate from us. They were all mixed in together. There was one who had a house out in New Jersey, and I was friends with his son. And they would take us out there every now and then. It was like an excursion.

  RS: A little outing in New Jersey.

  MS: That was a big deal. And they’d put us in this Chrysler Imperial. It was amazing, with the biggest fins you could imagine. And that was the year that the song “Volare” was out. You heard it everywhere. It was so great to go to the country and to be in a swimming pool just for a day. And all these men were in this house talking, sitting at tables, making phone calls, and, you know, lots of fights.

  By the way, they’re dead now. They were killed two years, maybe four years, five years, later, those people I’m talking about. They lived in the neighborhood, but they were killed. The son was killed first—he was twenty-two or twenty-three years old.

  RS: Let me ask this, kind of drifting back to Casino. It seems to me that its uniqueness in your body of work is that it’s the closest you come to very high-level criminality.

  MS: But that’s about it, I can’t go any further. That’s about as high as I could go, because first of all I’m not that interested in that highest level. It might be more interesting to do a film about the senators’ families in ancient Rome right at the decline of the republic before Julius Caesar, and the machinations of which family worked against the other family causing the death of Caesar. They go into a civil war, and they wind up with an empire. They wind up with an emperor. Okay. But it’s interesting why the republic fell apart. And it has to do with Renaissance politics then. But I’m more interested in the incremental moves. It’s a wonderful thing when Lefty keeps his trousers in the closet, because he doesn’t want to ruin the crease. Person comes in, he puts on his pants. That’s no problem. But that little detail reflects something much bigger that could be very damaging to him. The small moves are what I’m interested in. And the personal relationships. The Godfather I never thought of.

  RS: I think it’s a great movie.

  MS: I do, too.

  RS: But it’s a total fantasy.

  MS: It is, yes.

  RS: I mean, Mario Puzo just made all that stuff up. I don’t think it’s observed reality on his part.

  MS: But does great art have to be reality? No.

  RS: So when we’re talking of a movie like Casino, I think you’re saying that some part of you just doesn’t want to go further up the hierarchical ladder. I mean, there’s something in the relationships at a lower level of criminality than Don Corleone that is more interesting to you.

  MS: It is more interesting because I think ultimately it’s the same mind, only the decisions are smarter. The decisions are better informed at the top.

  But I’m also interested when they make the wrong decision, the wrong alliance. They’re like Cicero in the Roman republic when everything did fall apart, how he had to take as allies his enemies. And he wound up having to kill himself ultimately. He was a great man, yet he made the wrong move. And it’s very interesting, because it’s life and death.

  RS: So did you hesitate at all on Casino? Did you think, This is kind of out of my familiar range?

  MS: Vegas, no. That was okay—the brashness of it. People enjoy it, fine. I just don’t enjoy it myself. I don’t really gamble that way. I’m not very good at it.

  RS: You gamble in other ways.

  MS: Right.

  RS: I’ve often said to people, What does it mean to me to go to a slot machine? My whole life is a slot machine.

  MS: Are you kidding? Every minute I open that door or pick up that phone. And on top of that, I’ve got a family now and I’m getting older. It’s hard, every gamble you take.

  Tilling the field: Marty directs the cornfield scene. He says it is the most brutal sequence he’s ever made and believes he will never make anything like it again.

  RS: It’s absolutely true.

  MS: Okay, it’s all right. We can do it. But the interesting thing was the blast of Vegas, the idea of Vegas, especially in the seventies. In the fifties and sixties, Vegas was for people who liked to gamble. But later you have Sinatra and the Rat Pack and all. And it gains a swagger: Listen, you don’t like it, don’t come here. You can’t take the heat, get out. Fine.

  But by the seventies, it went further, and a lot of it was due to Lefty Rosenthal. He brought in Siegfried and Roy. He made it into one big Crazy Horse Saloon, and also got the place to make a lot of money for back home, for Chicago. But what was interesting to me is that it just reflected a complete embrace of excess. And that’s why the first image in the film has to be this beautiful car. Man walks out in wide-screen and color, he’s wearing salmon-colored pants. In fact, we had to tone it down from the actual clothes that Lefty had. Anyway, he turns the key, and the car blows up. That seemed to me what we’re doing in our society—the values that we have. Anything that’s good has to make money. How is cinema judged today, aside from a few critics or reviewers? Basically it’s judged by how much money you make
on a weekend. Is cinema serious anymore? I don’t know. At the time when I was making certain films, I took cinema seriously.

  RS: You still do.

  MS: Yeah, I still do. But the next generation doesn’t, because of the excess.

  RS: That’s a good point, because of all your movies, this is the one that’s most satirical about excess. I mean, the décor in Lefty’s house is just amazing.

  MS: Toned down.

  RS: There comes a moment where there’s no humor or horror in it for you.

  MS: Nothing.

  RS: No frisson, as we might say.

  MS: There’s no enjoyment.

  RS: I guess it’s saying something that you hadn’t quite said as openly in your previous excursions into this world.

  MS: I think so. And at Universal, Tom Pollock really wanted me to make the film, and Nick had that story. He hadn’t finished the book yet, and so we worked on the script together for about six months, in a hotel, and we ordered transcripts and whatever other interviews we could get. And we had papers everywhere. And I decided it had to be an epic—a three-hour epic, but very fast. Very fast, because in the world that they’re in, things go faster. You get more—it’s consuming, consuming, consuming. It represented to me—I’ve got to say—what we’re doing in this society. It really did.

  RS: But it’s gotten much worse.

  MS: Yes, much worse. In Casino there’s no such thing as law, there’s nothing. It just goes. And then they self-implode.

  RS: One of the things that, again, seems significant, re-looking at the movie, is there appears to be within the city limits of Las Vegas not a single person of any moral stature.

  MS: I agree.

  RS: I mean, who do you tell, what cop do you call?

  MS: Who knows, I can’t even say. It feeds, I think, the worst part of our human nature. But continually. And it’s very hard on the people working there.