RS: So, even though you made Gangs of New York later and it’s historical, I mean this in a certain sense completes … You have the criminal element of, let’s say, Mean Streets as it’s perceived by quite a young guy. Then you move on to Goodfellas and then this. And one of the significant things about the Casino guys is they’re all mature guys, unlike even the guys in Goodfellas.
MS: In Goodfellas they’re younger and brash …
RS: They’re younger and feistier and unable to recognize consequences.
MS: They never fully become members of the Mob, either, because they weren’t considered sharp enough. They weren’t considered trustworthy enough. So definitely Casino was the final one.
RS: You’re not drawn to doing another one of those?
MS: No; if anything, it would be something that would be from a perspective of somebody who’s in their seventies, looking back.
RS: That would be interesting.
MS: I’m talking about working on something like that.
RS: Because you don’t naturally think of any of these guys living into their seventies.
MS: A lot of them did, though.
RS: But the thought is “Live fast, die young.”
MS: But they do. The ones who think that way get killed right away. You know, they really do. That’s it. It’s like the old Wild West, with the young kids trying to make a name for themselves. Or in Hollywood. Different kinds of producers or studio execs come in and you know what it’s like. They have to make a mark, really, and that’s understandable. It’s just some people go about it in an interesting way.
RS: In ways that are very self-destructive. There are not so many of them, but they preoccupy outsiders looking in.
KUNDUN
RICHARD SCHICKEL: With regard to Kundun, you mentioned earlier your looking out your window, down on some guys hanging around the social club.
MARTIN SCORSESE: Yes, looking down at something going on. God knows what.
RS: Well, the story of the Dalai Lama, from childhood through his exile from Tibet, I saw a lot of you in the main character—the young boy observing life through a telescope like you on your fire escape observing life on the street. That young boy with the telescope is also observing, and I thought, Is that Marty?
MS: Well, yes, that interested me a lot. His always looking through that telescope, through a window. The action he’s observing, when he’s a child, is a little bit removed from him, as in a movie. But he wanted to be part of it. When he left Tibet, he asked who said Tibetan Buddhism was going to continue to exist the way it had the past sixteen hundred years or whatever. It’s now gone from there. He was taking it out to the world—he is taking with him the moral authority of who he is. He is now out in the world, stirring conversation, making people listen. That’s what I thought was so interesting.
Melissa Mathison’s script was mainly told from a child’s point of view, and we tried to make the picture as much as possible like that. For instance, he sees the adults whispering, and the next thing you know, his teacher is gone. It obviously implies a lot about what was going on in Tibetan politics.
The chosen one: The new Dalai Lama takes up his duties as Tibet’s spiritual leader in Kundun (1997), one of Scorsese’s most surprising films.
RS: Another source of information for him is his little movie projector.
MS: Movies.
RS: Among other things, he was watching Laurence Olivier’s Henry V.
MS: He was watching newsreels, too. It has to do with my own puffed-up ideas of becoming a spiritual person and a priest, and of course I hadn’t even gotten to first base. But this boy was raised as a person whose life is a spiritual one. That’s why I was interested in this character. The question for me was and is: Do you have to be religious to be a spiritual person?
RS: The movie has a stately pace.
MS: Yes, it does.
RS: You could say the same thing about The Age of Innocence, but in the form of easily grasped emotions, more familiar elements. I think that in Kundun you were taking a huge chance. First of all, it’s got a Buddhist theme, not exactly in everyone’s top ten. Second, the film is set in remote Tibet. You could say Goodfellas is quite obviously in-your-face daring. This film risks alienating the audience in quite another way, almost the opposite way.
MS: This was much, much tougher. For example, when he’s told that the Chinese have invaded, the camera pans to him, and he just stands there. Its inaction is the action. It’s antithetical to what we know as Western drama. But why can’t there be a film where the drama happens internally? Does a story have to be made the way films are being made in this country? Is there room for a story to be made here a different way? I say yes. In the seventies, you got a fairly good budget for doing it. Now you don’t.
In this case, there was the CIA’s involvement and Chinese intrigue. I wasn’t interested in that. I was interested in the boy’s journey as a spiritual being, when he took Buddhism outside Tibet.
RS: In purely visual terms, a lot is said about that character when he separates the two fighting insects. And there’s not a word of dialogue.
MS: It was a very interesting movie to cut, because I felt ritual was so important in it. I thought by showing the rituals in the film, and by dealing with the color and the texture, the tone of the ritual, the sound of the ritual, the body language, that the movie could build to a point where for some people it might be a kind of religious or spiritual experience.
RS: I love the moment where Chairman Mao leans into him and says, in effect, You do understand, religion is the opiate of the masses.
MS: Yes, he says, “Religion is poison.”
RS: It’s the turning point in the movie, because what he says is very powerful. And we’ve already seen the Chinese marching through. He’s putting poison into his ear.
MS: He’s telling the Dalai Lama it’s over, that his system is no good, that theocracy is out of date. The Dalai Lama says he’s going to institute reforms. Mao says it can’t be done fast enough, it’s not good enough. Everything’s got to go. Because religion is poison. And the Dalai Lama said all he could look at was Mao’s shoes—the shine on his shoes. He watches the shoes go by and he knows he’s finished.
I mean, it was the end of the world for them. I’m always interested in people who lose their world. Like in Mean Streets, or Goodfellas, or The Age of Innocence. Here the Dalai Lama is losing the Tibetan Buddhism of the past sixteen hundred years, wiped away in a very cruel way.
Marty’s storyboards for a key Kundun sequence.
RS: That’s actually a theme I hadn’t thought of.
MS: In New York, New York they lose like mad. But they learn. I mean, we hope they learn.
RS: Henry Hill is a big loser.
MS: Yeah, but he came out the other side.
RS: He should perhaps use some of his extensive free time to see Kundun.
MS: Oh, good Lord. In one of the first two shows of The Sopranos, I was supposedly coming out of a car with an actress going to a preview, and one of the guys from The Sopranos says, “Hey, Scorsese, Marty, we love Kundun!” I loved that.
RS: When worlds collide …
MS: I went to a ceremony in Washington, where the Dalai Lama was getting a gold medal. There was a Tibetan gentleman, a very small man in golden Tibetan robes. I think he was a monk. He had little glasses and a very chubby face and he had written a book. I forget his name. As we were streaming out of the rotunda, he saw me, took my hand, and said, “I thank you so much for making that film. Thank you so much.” He was very sweet. Then he went on: “I saw your other movie, New York, Gangs. Violent, violent.” I frowned, apologetically. “But it’s all right. It’s in your nature.” [Laughs.]
On the Kundun set Marty directs Tenzin Thuthob Tsarong, playing the grown-up Dalai Lama.
RS: Very funny.
MS: I had tears in my eyes.
RS: Really?
MS: The acceptance of it. If it’s in your nature, okay, it’s in you
r nature.
I mean, that’s the movie. That’s the feeling. That’s why it’s dedicated to my mother. The Dalai Lama spoke the next night in Washington and said it doesn’t matter if you’re Christian, Jewish, Muslim. You’re talking about the same thing. It’s compassion. It’s in the New Testament, when they ask Jesus what the most important commandment is. He says, “To love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.”
That’s it. For me, it comes from my interest in the priesthood. That’s why Kundun is so important to me. It’s about the changes in you as a person, as a filmmaker, whatever; the change in your body, the change in your heart and your soul as you grow and embrace new ideas. And the tendency to fight those instead of accepting them.
BRINGING OUT THE DEAD
RICHARD SCHICKEL: Bringing Out the Dead, though it’s radically different from Kundun in setting, style, and subject matter [it’s about emergency medical teams trying to save lives on the streets of Manhattan], has, I think, some thematic relationship to Kundun.
MARTIN SCORSESE: Scott Rudin [the producer] sent the galleys to me and I thought, It’s Kundun, but in a modern urban setting. It was the first contemporary film I had made in years. It’s the same thing that brought me to Kundun: the spiritual nature of the Dalai Lama’s life is the same theme I saw in Joe Connelly’s novel.
RS: The Dalai Lama doesn’t think you can bring people back to life.
MS: No, but there are spiritual figures who can be a bridge between ourselves and the spiritual nature of the cosmos. So you may be able to open a door in our consciousness.
RS: Maybe.
MS: There’s a more searchable longing in Nick Cage’s character, the ambulance driver who can’t save all the victims he’s supposed to attend. And there’s the spiritual conflict in him, expecting too much of himself—his pride, the idea of being able to bring back the dead.
RS: Pound on their chests and they’ll breathe.
MS: I thought that was an interesting state of mind to be in: (A) to have the compassion to be able to do that on the street, and (B) to lose sight of what you’re really there for, which is, as he says, to witness and to share the experience with the victim, learn from it, as much as possible.
RS: But witnessing is different from bringing them back.
MS: Well, yes, you can’t bring them all back. None of us is God.
I think what Joe Connelly is saying is that not bringing somebody back to life is a loss. When you lose them, you feel responsible. Another person may go through it and lose ten, twelve people and still be able to continue, but this particular man—
RS: It’s an interesting risk, isn’t it? On the one hand it offers you the chance to be the person who gives the gift of life. The risk, though, is that you are unable to save them. You’re always poised on that terrible precipice.
MS: That’s why the character’s breakdown occurs. That’s why I was drawn to the story. I wanted to explore what we expect of ourselves.
It’s very difficult for me to fully understand the nature of people who devote themselves to a spiritual life—the kind who deal with their own spirituality and don’t deal with others. But there’s the other kind—like Nick’s character—who, literally, lay healing hands on others.
RS: These are people whom we admire almost in a perfunctory way. We say, A schoolteacher does the most important thing, but is underpaid …
MS: We believe it. But we don’t live it. Yes, you’re right that these people should be paid more, but it’s more than that.
RS: All I’m saying is that that is the conventional way to look at people who do nasty, ugly, underpaid jobs, that often involve them with death, and drugs, and terrible things: We admire them, but we don’t really support them.
MS: Right, we don’t support them. It’s interesting that Joe Connelly, who wrote the novel and the screenplay, went back into EMS [emergency medical service]. He’s still dealing with things we would never go near.
I relate this to my Skid Row experience—my self-criticism for, as a child, thinking of those people as subhuman, while around the corner in the church they were talking about compassion and love. I was frightened and wanted to move away from those Skid Row people as much as possible.
Are we all capable of that reaction? Think of World War II. Think of the genocide. I am amazed by those people who confront the problems, face them, deal with them. Anyway, when I read the book, I thought it was extraordinary— moving, and funny, and tough. And not cynical—they were dealing with life and death. The characters have a certain hard edge to them.
Nick Cage’s character is cracking. At the beginning of the story he begins a three-day-and-night crack-up: it’s been two or three weeks and he hadn’t brought anybody back to life. He knows he’s not God, but there’s a pride because he has the power to bring someone back to life. He thinks he is divine to a certain extent, and it’s very moving when it strikes him that he may not be.
As I mentioned before, at one point he says, “I’m there to be a witness.” Maybe that’s all it is. It’s like the Tibetan who told me what was in my nature. You have to accept it. If you fight it all the time, you’ll be extremely unhappy. I mean, if you have this violence in your nature, it doesn’t mean you have to act it out.
I’ll never forget when Nick says, “You know, I’m a grief mop.” He’s saying, I just stand there and I witness the grief. But there’s too little of that. Coming from where I came from and remembering listening to certain priests who were important to me, I just think there’s too little of it in our society. We’re being inundated with so much information, and yet numb to suffering around the world.
That made it a highly difficult picture to shoot because it put us in dangerous areas, shooting at night—seventy-five nights of shooting.
But Nick Cage was great. All the actors were great—with great senses of humor. It was a good script by Paul Schrader, too, I thought.
Taking back the night: Nicolas Cage, as an emergency ambulance driver, fends off demons, real and imagined, in Bringing Out the Dead (1997).
RS: In some of its tonalities—don’t laugh now—that movie reminded me of After Hours. Do you know what I mean? It’s New York at night.
MS: Crazy things happen.
RS: Well, of course. And it is someone being pushed—
MS: —to the limits.
RS: Yet this movie is not unfunny.
MS: It’s terribly funny, and kind of audacious. I mean, you have the drug dealer impaled on a fence, hanging off a twenty-two-story building. And as he’s talking to Nick Cage—the actor’s name is Cliff Curtis—suddenly there are fireworks over the city. And he just shouts, “I love this city!” [Laughs.]
RS: It’s one of the great crazy scenes.
MS: Yeah, that’s sort of my homage to Manhattan. With the fireworks at the end of Manhattan.
RS: You mean, your homage to Woody’s Manhattan?
MS: No, my Manhattan, but referencing Woody’s film.
RS: That may be the essence of Marty Scorsese right there. [Laughs.]
MS: [Laughs.] He’s crucified! [Laughs.] Twenty-two stories up. Why save a drug dealer—he’s such a creep? But he’s got to be saved.
And Nick is just taking his blood pressure, holding on. “They’re sending up relief, they’re sending up people, relax.” And, actually, this is true, a lot of this really happened.
They had to use acetylene torches to break the wrought-iron fence. They take the guy to the hospital with part of the fence in him. He’s sitting there forever waiting for the nurse to come by. And she goes, Well, hopefully, you’ll go to the ER. He says, Hopefully I’ll go? What do you mean? I’m sitting here with a fence up my ass. Let’s go. I mean, there’s street humor in that.
RS: Absolutely.
MS: But Joe Connelly told me stories that are not that funny. The hell nights in the emergency room when everybody is freaking out. The horror of what he described to me—a terrible subway crash about ten or fifteen years ago, for example.
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RS: I remember it.
MS: Some of the things he described seeing you can’t talk about. And the self-doubt: If you had taken your finger and held it in his heart long enough, you could have stopped the bleeding. I mean, this is real stuff. This is happening every night, every day.
They have patients they call frequent fliers, people who keep coming back, homeless people. Or people who drink too much. “Just put him over there. It’s George again.” We’ve seen those people. I’ve been in hospitals—I tell you, a lot of that film came out of taking my mother and father, my father particularly, to the emergency rooms for over ten years. In and out of hospitals, getting phone calls: Something has happened, come down.
It wasn’t like I was a great son. Somebody had to go down. Then when my father died, the same thing happened to my mother. Three years of that. You walk into an emergency room at two in the morning. I’ll never forget one place, it was run by nuns. One of them must’ve been four feet tall, about seventy years old. She had wrinkles in her face. She was Italian, really tough. It was like the nun who took the guy down from the tree in Amarcord. She just climbed up and hit him in the head and brought him back down. This nun was tough.
It was almost surreal. I walked by a room and I saw a man bandaged, full of blood, who had cut his own throat. It was one of the most horrific images that I ever saw. And these people deal with that every day.
RS: I know.
MS: And nobody wants to know about it. We, as a society, don’t want to know about it. It’s like Europa ’51, the Rossellini film, the woman who tries to help people in different ways. Ultimately she realizes you just can do one thing at a time, the best way you can. I’m not saying everybody has to go out and do these kinds of things. I’m just saying we need to be aware of it.
Conversations with Scorsese Page 24
