Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  RS: Yes, of course. But there’s something else about the film. It’s very New York—you see the humor of it within the horror. People from other places don’t see the world in quite that way.

  MS: I see what you’re saying. No, I am an urban person, there’s no doubt, a New Yorker, really, Manhattan.

  RS: In a way, it’s one of the things you had in common with Elia Kazan. He used to say to me, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, how do you live out there [in California]?” I said, “Well, I don’t like it, Elia. But you know …” “Ah!” he would say. “I walk ten minutes around my house and I see more life in that ten minutes than I see in a month in Los Angeles!”

  MS: It’s true. You’re sitting in a car out there, isolated. But I tried to be Californian, I really did.

  RS: You talked about how horrible it was shooting Taxi Driver. And here you are, right back in the same environment!

  MS: You’re right, you’re right!

  RS: I mean, it’s maybe not quite as intense as Taxi Driver. They’re at least a lot of the time up in their cab, kind of at a height looking down.

  MS: Drifting through, and looking down.

  RS: But they have to get out of the cab, and they have to deal with people who are grievously sick or injured.

  MS: I rode with them one night. It was quite something. And the music’s playing, you know.

  RS: Is Nick Cage’s character, or, for that matter, Joe Connelly, fated to be there?

  MS: Let’s say there’s a pattern to life. There probably isn’t, but there’s supposed to be a pattern. And Joe Connelly is out there on EMS right now. It is like fate for him to be dealing with these people.

  RS: Going back to Bringing Out the Dead now, I see much more in it than when it was released. But speaking of fate, it seems to me, looking back, that the movie was sort of fated to fail, both critically and commercially.

  MS: The picture was tough for audiences, and that was a moment [1999] that those kinds of films weren’t being supported by the studios.

  RS: That one was not supported by the studio at all, I believe.

  MS: Not at all. And it was gone.

  RS: But here’s the only thing I know for certain: History is the only judge of movies, books, paintings, anything.

  MS: I know.

  RS: Whatever they said at the moment may or may not be correct. The real truth is revealed when we look at a movie fifty years later and think, God, it really is terrific. And lots of times, of course, the film is really not as great as I remembered it.

  MS: I agree. But you know, it was tough, the film disappearing, but it was also a great time because two weeks after the film came out, my daughter Francesca was born. Bringing Out the Dead was the end of something that was very special, though.

  RS: Was it the end of a kind of New York obsession?

  MS: No, I think it had more to do with a philosophical cycle of my own. It had to do with trying to evade the fact that you’re going to die, we’re all going to die. You know, when I was staying at the Waldorf while my house was being renovated, even forty-one stories up, I heard the sirens constantly, from eight at night until about two in the morning. It got to the point where I had to use earphones to shut the sounds out. It was like the city was screaming in this agony and this pain.

  GANGS OF NEW YORK

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: I suppose the most tormented project you ever did is Gangs of New York.

  MARTIN SCORSESE: Gangs, and Last Temptation. Last Temptation was the worst shoot.

  RS: Gangs at least didn’t present the same kind of powerful religious conflicts that Last Temptation did.

  MS: What I’m referring to is the physical making of the production. Temptation was a matter of shooting time and the weather. We all had a kind of passion for it and just kept pushing through. Whereas in Gangs we had the sets and the actors—everybody was there. It was a different kind of pressure.

  I’m too close to the pictures. A lot of them are too damn personal. I’ll always be negative at first, but then I’ll talk to some colleagues and think, Well, this was pretty good, even on Gangs of New York, which, at times, was nightmarish. Still, some of it was the best time we had in our lives, for a lot of us who worked on it.

  RS: Why was it the best time?

  MS: Just the nature of what we were able to put together, the world we created, and the enjoyment on the set.

  Everybody was exhausted. There were conflicts all around. We had language problems—there were stuntmen from Yugoslavia. We didn’t know what was happening sometimes. Yet somehow it was a wonderful place to be at that moment, whatever you may think of the film.

  A dream realized: Marty developed Gangs of New York for over two decades and finally realized his ambitions in 2002, in a flawed, brilliant film bedeviled by cost overruns and compromises.

  RS: I think the film has brilliant stuff in it.

  MS: But as you’ve said to me, If I could have finished the Draft Riots … But we never got the money to do the Draft Riots [in massive opposition to the Civil War draft laws, which permitted the well-to-do to buy their way out of military service].

  RS: I think it festered so long with you—well over a decade—that something got lost in the festering.

  MS: Yeah, if I had maybe done it earlier. But in any event, even knowing that, still they were some of the best times we ever had. And some of the worst, really.

  RS: What was so hard about making the film?

  MS: The fact that we were running out of money. The pressure to finish. People were leaving, props were being taken away. Extras were leaving. We still had to shoot certain things and I wasn’t sure we could shoot them with only three people or whoever was left. We managed, but it was hard. Did I use those shots? Maybe not, but still … To be honest, I could’ve kept going. It was almost like some of the big films in the seventies where directors just kept shooting.

  But I couldn’t go any further. The studio and my backers tried to help me. But at a certain point they said to me, We don’t have any more money. That’s when I put my money in. And it was swept up within a few days. It was just an obsession for me. I think of the world that I was in when I was making it. And that affects saying whether I like the film or not.

  RS: Why did the movie take so long in the conceptualizing and writing stages? I mean, it became kind of a legend.

  MS: Well, obviously, I grew up in that area. And when I became aware of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral and the graveyard around it, with the names on the tombstones, I realized the Irish were there before the Italians. I became fascinated by the history of the New York City downtown. The cobblestones talked to me. I started doing research on it in libraries—on the church, on Archbishop [John] Hughes, the power of the Catholic Church, the Irish at that time. And in 1970, on New Year’s Day, I was house-sitting with some friends on Long Island somewhere and I found this book called Gangs of New York by Herbert Asbury, and I started reading it. Clearly it related to where I grew up. The section we took from the book was from the 1840s to the 1860s. There also were sections on the Bowery, where I grew up. Raoul Walsh drew on that for The Bowery with Steve Brodie jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge. Everybody still talked about that when I was growing up.

  RS: Seriously? That was a long time before you were a kid.

  MS: Oh, I remember, my father used to talk about Steve Brodie, some guy jumped off the bridge on a bet, and he lived. The whole struggle between the Irish and Italians was part of my youth in that neighborhood.

  RS: So when you were growing up there were still Irish-Italian tensions?

  MS: No. There were no more Irish—but we heard about it. We heard stories of how rough it was. My father was growing up there—he was born in 1913—and there was a lot of fighting, a great deal of tension. When we were living there, the Puerto Ricans were moving in. So it was a similar thing, but not as strong. Elizabeth Street at the turn of the century, after Gangs is set, was the street that had the highest infant mortality rate in the city—cholera, all k
inds of disease. I didn’t know that. Growing up, my father would tell me about different politicians, about Tammany Hall. My father would talk about Al Smith. My father was a Roosevelt New Dealer, until the fifties when he became more conservative.

  What I’m saying here is that I never really was able to focus on how much of the story I wanted to tell, how much the story of that area reflected the overall city, the growth of New York, the growth of America. When I got together with Jay Cocks in the seventies and started working on it, Jay came up with a very beautiful script. It was almost like a novel: 179 pages. At that point, though, I was going through New York, New York, I was going through The Last Waltz, I was going through my own difficulties. I came out the other side through Raging Bull, even though I had thought I was going to come out of it with Gangs of New York. Maybe that was good, because I still hadn’t gotten my hands around what Jay’s story was, I couldn’t quite grasp it. We became very influenced by the way Fellini did Satyricon. He said to Danilo Donati, his great costume designer, “We’re walking in the streets of Rome and we lift one of the stones on the street, and underneath you see crawling around the ancient Romans.” Fellini said about Satyricon, “It’s science fiction in reverse.” And there’s a similar thing with aspects of [Sergio] Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. All these styles were converging in our minds, and there are aspects of them in Gangs.

  It eventually straightened itself out about 1990, when Jay and I worked on the script again and shaped it down to the story of Bill the Butcher and the young boy, Amsterdam, whose father Bill murdered and who wants to gain revenge. Then we came up with the idea that, for some reason, he can’t kill Bill. But we knew that at the end we had to have the Draft Riots, and we moved the killing of Bill back to that part of the story. We made all kinds of adjustments—streamlining the story, developing set pieces depicting the anthropology of the time, the way people lived. There had to be, for instance, a scene in which there was a theater riot. Because there were theater riots all the time. The working class and the gangs had no recourse to newspapers, so they all showed up at the theater to make themselves heard. There was a famous Astor Place riot where something like a dozen bystanders were killed.

  RS: You’ve said to me that however horrendously you portrayed those times in your movie, you can’t touch the reality of it.

  MS: No. Even Dickens, when he came here, in his American Notes, said it was worse than anything in the East End of London. And I don’t think we can even begin to fathom what it must have been like, what was going on in those cellars, in those caves below the streets—the pure evil of that criminal life. There were tunnels under 253 Elizabeth Street.

  RS: Really?

  MS: They’re probably closed off now. But if you go into what used to be old Chinatown, there are still sweatshops below the ground.

  RS: I had no idea—

  MS: You can go there. Jay will tell you, he went with a policeman one night, because he was doing research on something and they took him through these sweatshops—illegal immigrants working there. I mean, that’s a very old part of the city. It’s filled with all these things.

  What if you were really poor and there was no money, there was no work? The girls were dying at fifteen, drunk and having been prostitutes at twelve years old. People were just being washed away like garbage in that world.

  That world was also reflected in the politics of the time, with Boss Tweed and others. So we had to fit those characters in, ending with the Draft Riots, which destroyed a lot of the city. Soldiers came in, howitzers were used. The soldiers had just fought at Gettysburg, you know. Nobody knows how many were killed in the riots.

  RS: It seems to me that Gangs is harmed in a curious way by its greatest scene, which is that huge fight—

  MS: —at the beginning. That was in the script from the very beginning in 1979. You never know where you are, and then finally you realize it’s New York City.

  RS: That fight is one of the great sequences—

  MS: —and maybe we never topped it.

  RS: That’s what I was going to say. The Draft Riots just can’t compare to that fantastic scene.

  MS: Yeah, I know. But as I said, when it came to the Draft Riots, there were tensions with the money. We had focused on violence at the Colored Orphans Asylum in the script and then we couldn’t shoot it. That’s not an excuse; we just didn’t have the dough, and we had to drop it, and it’s therefore flawed. Maybe we should have shot the Draft Riots differently. But somehow it fell together that way, and that’s all we were able to get. We knew it all had to end in some sort of conflagration of the whole city, like the volcano erupting in The Last Days of Pompeii. We did not get enough of that done.

  RS: Whereas I’ve never seen anything better than that opening.

  MS: That was shot at the end of January 2001, and after that, the money ran out. The studio said to just finish up the movie. I’m not blaming them. If I had planned it differently, if I’d rewritten it right, we could have done more. But I took a chance. I wanted to get the opening the way I wanted it, and the pagoda scene, too—the center of the film. That had been shot around Christmas 2000. I knew we would have to fill in the rest and try to get as much of the Draft Riots as possible.

  RS: Is it right to say that intensely action-oriented scenes are much better done in a limited area, and that the Draft Riots are—

  MS: Massive.

  RS: So that’s almost an endemic problem in doing the Draft Riots?

  MS: Right. We had specific incidents—it is all very well documented. But we were only able to shoot a few. That’s not an excuse—we chose them. We had to have the elephant go by, for example.

  RS: Right!

  MS: Harvey Weinstein was very funny about that. At a certain point he said, “Marty, out of these ten scenes, we can only afford three. What do you want to do?” I said, “Three, okay.” But I squeezed another two out of him. He turned to me and said, “Okay. You can have the elephant, although we don’t really need the elephant.” I said, “Yes, we do, because it’s probably the most surreal shot.” When Barnum’s Circus blew up and the animals were running in the streets [an event that occurred two years later but was incorporated into the film]. Can you imagine? But it reminded me of the bombings of Berlin in ’45, when the zoo was hit and the animals ran out. Civilization in Berlin was gone. That’s what it must’ve felt like in the Draft Riots.

  RS: Earlier, you said this was manifestly a movie you just had to do. You said it reflects the history of your people—

  MS: Well, New York. And how it reflected the country overall. As I did more research over the years, people kept saying that if democracy didn’t work in New York, it wasn’t going to work anywhere else in the country. Urban areas such as Philadelphia and Boston had similar gangs and troubles.

  RS: I know you sometimes develop scripts for many long years, everyone does. But this one seemed to go on forever. Maybe it’s just because I knew Jay so well. I think the first time I ever met him I asked, “What are you doing?” And he said, “Oh, I’m working with Marty on Gangs of New York.” And thirty years go by and he’s still—

  MS: It’s a good point. I don’t think I ever wanted to finish it.

  RS: Really? Why?

  MS: I was obsessed with the story of the city. There were so many wonderful elements to it, so many anecdotes, different characters, so much I wanted to show. It just never settled satisfactorily in my mind. I felt I had to sacrifice too much of all that, and I never felt comfortable about it.

  RS: Is it fair to say, no matter how much money you had, how much time you had, that it just had to be some kind of giant epic?

  MS: Yes. It would have been a good five-hour picture. It’s not that odd today. People see things in two parts. There are television shows like that. I mean, The Sopranos goes on and on and you have an almost endless film, really. People like that.

  RS: But Gangs was conceived before the possibility of doing a Sopranos-like development, which mi
ght have satisfied you better.

  MS: It would have satisfied me more. When television films started to be made in the sixties, especially things like Don Siegel’s The Killers, we thought they would explore character: there would be a chance to do a twelve-hour film when needed. But it became a different medium. And, in a sense, not a director’s medium.

  RS: I was thinking of something like Rome on HBO.

  MS: Yes, exactly.

  RS: That has the sweep, and it’s telling the story of that particular place and time.

  MS: Or I, Claudius on the BBC. That would have been ideal for Gangs of New York. You’d just have to conceive the picture differently, like a television film where you shoot ten pages a day. I mean, the amount of money that was going into the costumes, the shooting, the extras, bringing people in from Ireland and from England—this could only go on for a certain amount of time. You have to be incredibly schedule-conscious.

  But I still have part of my mind back in the seventies—when you were able to do an epic film, maybe a three-hour film, and the marketplace accepted it. Apocalypse Now, for instance. That’s what I had in mind. I think The Departed is longer, actually.

  RS: It is.

  MS: There’s nothing that I cut out of Gangs of New York that I would want to put back in the picture. Whatever I cut out I did better in another movie anyway. It’s just very simply, as I said, that I never finished the script.

  RS: It’s almost as if you get trapped in projects. You want desperately to make a given film. You keep thinking of compromises that could get it made. But there’s some part of you that doesn’t want to make those compromises, you hold on to some unrealizable dream.

  MS: Yes. There’s no doubt of that. I mean, you actually said it. The other thing is that at that point we were able to do it, we were able to actually build a lower Manhattan in Rome, where we shot. And it behooved me to try to find a way to pull it together.