Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  MS: Intrinsically American.

  RS: Profoundly and even inexplicably American.

  MS: That’s what attracts me and repels me about the whole story, that it could only happen here. You’re right about it being an American epic—coming off another one, which was Gangs of New York. It was scary to do a picture on Howard Hughes because many people asked why I wanted to make a film on him. He represents certain things that aren’t the best in the world, and about our country, and about what is it to be a human being. But I thought all of that was fascinating, because of the relationship that Hughes had in my mind to the country itself—about power and the corruption of power. It’s also about the dream of the country, as I said.

  RS: There were all those Mormon guys around him at the end, serving his obsessions. They obviously hoped they’d get at least some of his money. I know it’s outside the scope of your film, but do you know where the money went?

  MS: It’s partly in one of the greatest research centers right now in Southern California, where it’s doing great things for diseases like Parkinson’s, and neurological research. It’s amazing: somewhere down in the southern part of L.A. you pass by the Howard Hughes Research Center. There are big pictures of him, his name is all over the place.

  RS: Go figure. But given the way his life ended, there’s something profoundly, ironically right about that happening.

  MS: Absolutely right.

  NO DIRECTION HOME: BOB DYLAN

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: Your Bob Dylan documentary [No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, released in 2005] came between The Aviator and The Departed.

  MARTIN SCORSESE: It was a special one for me.

  RS: I’m not a big Dylan fan, but I think it’s very, very good.

  MS: I love Dylan.

  RS: Did you love Dylan way back when?

  MS: I came late to Dylan. I didn’t go to Gerde’s Folk City, which was literally around the corner from the Greene building, where the NYU group was; he was there at that time. But I didn’t know him. I first heard Dylan when he recorded “Like a Rolling Stone.” Then I listened to the older stuff.

  I wasn’t politically oriented. I become aware of different kinds of politics at NYU. As I said earlier, my father was a Democrat—until he voted for Eisenhower in 1956.

  RS: What changed for him?

  MS: Worried about money, maybe. How to pay for me to go to college. The Cold War, too. We really believed we were going to be bombed any second. The nuns in the school would have us go through that duck-and-cover routine. We had to wear dog tags every day. A nun would tell us whenever you hear a low-flying plane, that may be it.

  RS: I think maybe urban Catholics with their hatred of Communism were more prey to those feelings.

  MS: We were going to get it. We did get it eventually. September 11, we got it.

  RS: Never thought of it that way.

  MS: We’re going to get it again. At some point it’s got to happen. We’re the center in New York.

  RS: Possibly.

  MS: Anyway, that period shaped me. I heard Dylan’s record “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” and I found it so stirring, so beautiful and moving. I get chills even thinking about it now. The lyrics—and musically I liked it. My father said he didn’t have a voice. But my mother would say that he didn’t need a voice, that it was the way he sang. She said it was like Al Jolson, who didn’t have a great voice. “It’s a performance, the way he puts over a song,” she said. She loved “Ain’t Gonna Work on Maggie’s Farm.” She understood it. She was the one who had to go to work in the garment district, where your boss always won.

  RS: Actually it’s a very interesting point.

  MS: Jolson’s voice was kind of odd. It really was the performance.

  RS: Absolutely.

  MS: It was the shape-changer onstage—Jolson himself. Like Dylan, the shape changer.

  RS: That’s right. One of the points Gary Giddins, the jazz critic, made about Jolson in The Jazz Singer was, to paraphrase, You look closely and he’s shimmying like Elvis.

  MS: That’s right. A little later Cab Calloway did the same. When Jolson did “Toot, Toot, Tootsie” in The Jazz Singer, it was amazing. I used a bit of it in Goodfellas.

  RS: I remember.

  MS: I dislike The Jazz Singer in terms of the—

  RS: Oh, it’s an awful movie.

  MS: It’s terrible. But my mother and father loved it. They loved it because they identified with the family, the breaking of tradition.

  RS: It’s old country tradition versus new-style Americanism.

  MS: Yes, and my father was feeling that we were losing the tradition of the family, the Sicilian family. And here were the Jewish people, who lived nearby, sticking to their family. Don’t forget, the immigrant groups—the Jewish, the Italians, especially the southern Italians—had so much in terms of the family as tradition.

  And we’re losing it. My oldest daughter, Cathy, knows, because she was born in 1965. She remembers. She stayed with my parents. She knows the old family. Until Aunt Fanny, who lived in New Jersey, died in 2010, Cathy visited her quite often. She spent Christmas with her. Fanny was the last of the last. My daughter Domenica knows the tradition a little bit. She’s thirty-one. But my little one will never know the world that Mean Streets came out of.

  So I come from that. So when Dylan was singing protest songs, like “Gates of Eden,” I didn’t quite get it at first. But I loved his sound, the music itself.

  RS: I agree with that. My problem with him is that I mix up the persona, which I don’t care for, with the music, which I respond to.

  MS: I didn’t really get involved with the persona that much. So many people were taking it so seriously. That’s what I discovered in the film. That’s why when Jeff Rosen brought it to me, again through Jay Cocks, who is a friend of Rosen’s, it was hard to take it on.

  RS: So what did Rosen bring to you? Just the idea of doing it?

  MS: He brought to me the fact that he is the archivist and the producer of Bob Dylan. He said he would open up the archive to me, all this footage, years and years of footage. He said, “I finally did a ten-hour interview with Bob.” He said Bob told him, “I will do this with you, but I’m not doing it again. I’m not sitting down and going over this stuff again.”

  Jeff said, “I’d like you to see just a little of the interview. I’d like you to see some interviews that we’ve gotten over the years that are in the archive of one of the old Broadway producers, some of the old record producers, Allen Ginsberg’s interview. I’d like you to see a little of that, maybe an hour of it put together.” I looked at that hour, and I loved the idea of Tin Pan Alley clashing with the folk-rock scene, the folk scene, the politics. But, still, I didn’t realize some of the intensity of it, what happened at the Newport Folk Festival, when people reacted so badly against Dylan as a Judas for playing the electric guitar.

  RS: It was quite something.

  MS: It’s betrayal again. Imagine having somebody yell “Judas!” as you’re playing music onstage.

  RS: I never understood what was so terrible about it.

  MS: It’s in the film; they actually have the footage, that moment when the guy yells “Judas!” Apparently it was only heard on bootleg records. But Jeff and Dylan had the footage. It’s in the film.

  RS: All because he was playing an electric guitar. Big deal.

  MS: It was because he betrayed the cause.

  RS: The cause being pure folkism?

  MS: No. The political cause. Woody Guthrie played the acoustic guitar and said his “machine” kills fascists. Dylan had to play what people wanted him to play. He could make a difference, because people listened to him. He started to feel he didn’t want to be pigeonholed. It’s interesting how a man like that had such influence, which disturbed him.

  RS: So it wasn’t just the new technology.

  MS: Not at all. Pete Seeger said, “This is music that’s just for kids to dance to. We’re not going to be able to change the world with this.�
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  RS: He was right, pretty much. A movie, a song, or a poem cannot change anybody in any profound way.

  MS: There is one thing, though, in that film. There’s a scene with Dylan, when Pete Seeger took him down south, playing at the back of a truck. It’s quite beautiful. They’re taking it on the road.

  I didn’t realize that Pete Seeger, among others, had been blacklisted. “Good Night, Irene” was an important song in my house because my brother would play it on guitar, and you could hear it all through the neighborhood through the windows in the summertime, people singing “Good Night, Irene.” My little one— I put it on her CDs, and the other day she said, “I can’t get ‘Good Night, Irene’ out of my head.” [Laughs.]

  RS: Why is that such an important song?

  MS: It just took over the country. Seeger made a big hit of it. It’s in the film. At that point Seeger was blacklisted. He lost ten years of work. People felt Dylan was the new voice in that tradition. But apparently he didn’t want to be that voice. He just wanted to explore what he wanted to explore—his own soul, his own heart, whatever.

  The thing I discovered in watching Jeff Rosen’s footage was that there was something about his face, the way he was answering the questions. He was telling as much of the truth as he could at that moment.

  There’s a story in the film about him stealing some records. It’s quite funny. Well, let me explain about those records, he says. Those records were as rare as hen’s teeth, so me, being a musical expeditionary, I felt it was okay to steal them.

  He had the right. That was his obsession. He was going to do what he wanted. I found that interesting. But really the key was having this footage by D. A. Pennebaker of the 1966 tour. Robbie Robertson is on it. He told me they were playing, and people were yelling, “Trash, it’s rubbish,” that sort of thing.

  So I got the idea that he would start playing “Like a Rolling Stone” and the young English fans would be saying, “Oh, it’s awful, it’s trash, he’s sold out.” Would what happen if we went right into conflict? Like a drama.

  Then we would go back in time. And then he talked about his being in Minnesota, about the cold.

  RS: Believe you me!

  MS: And he said, “It was too cold to rebel.” And then he heard that beautiful piece of music “We’re Drifting Too Far from the Shore,” too far from God, you know, on the Victrola in his house that his father bought. He felt that he wasn’t born to the right family. He thought he came from somewhere else. So we just went on a journey with the movie. We kind of made it up as we went along, in the cutting, too.

  RS: It has that feeling about it.

  MS: We had to find the thread of it, which was that he had to be himself wherever it was going to take him. Ultimately he was going to disappoint a lot of people, make them angry by doing that, but he did it. That’s important, I think, for an artist.

  RS: I’ve been coming around on Dylan. It’s a little like your father said; I don’t like his voice. But now I’m coming a little more to your mother’s point of view: “He doesn’t need a voice.” Still, Dylan doesn’t strike me as a natural fit for you.

  MS: Probably not.

  RS: I mean, he’s this middle-western Jewish person, far from your experience.

  MS: I think of the lyrics, you know. I think of the lyrics.

  RS: That’s it?

  MS: I think of the lyrics. I like the way he sings, too, and I’ve liked his presence in all the different incarnations he’s had over the years. But in putting the film together, I could not bring any preconceived ideas. I didn’t want to listen to anybody else’s opinions.

  That’s very important, because he meant so much to so many different people at different times—they want him to be this, they want him to be that. The hard thing is to follow your own path.

  RS: Especially in the world he lives in.

  MS: And you have all these people pulling at you.

  RS: That’s right.

  MS: You have good people pulling at you—Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, you know. And I wondered what made those other people so angry and bully him from the stage by calling him Judas. What did he do that was so bad? Some of those people were planted, from what I understand.

  RS: Oh, really? So he picks up an electric guitar, big deal. I mean, I still don’t fully understand it.

  MS: The electric guitar actually made me listen to the old stuff.

  RS: Why would his life turn on this one simple, stupid little question?

  MS: Phenomenal. And where did it take him? The motorcycle crash. He just stopped playing then. He realized he had to take care of himself. He wasn’t going to listen to anybody. He didn’t want to be a voice for anybody’s generation. He would do what he had to do.

  RS: Anybody who wants to be anybody’s generational voice is full of crap. There is no such thing.

  MS: I know. But younger people put that on him.

  RS: Obviously he wasn’t part of your growing up musically?

  MS: No. But I did use a quote from him on the title page of the script of Mean Streets—from “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: “Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift.”

  RS: In a funny way, then, the Dylan movie was a learning experience.

  MS: Yes.

  RS: More so than doing the Stones movie?

  MS: Yes.

  RS: Or The Last Waltz?

  MS: Yes. The humor of it. And also then I began to realize, you could re-create for a younger audience what it was like in the late fifties, early sixties, in the Village, in Tin Pan Alley with its characters, on Broadway. They all contributed to the new music of the time.

  RS: That’s probably true.

  MS: But also they’re like Damon Runyon characters. These kids are not going to see people like that on the screen anymore. We only wanted to go up to the motorcycle crash in 1966. We just intimated what was to come. I wanted to show that if you lived that life, this is what you would do. You take chances. Some people make it and some don’t.

  RS: That’s absolutely true.

  MS: You know, I didn’t want to do things about his personal relationships. Dylan, a young boy in his teens, going on the road. Like with The Band: People got very annoyed because Ronnie Hawkins told Robbie, You come with me on the road, you’ll get more pussy than Frank Sinatra. Some people were furious. [Film critic] Penelope Gilliatt was furious about that.

  RS: Was she?

  MS: And the film got an R rating because of that.

  RS: I can’t imagine Penelope Gilliatt—

  MS: I was told a bottle rolled down the aisle at the screening.

  RS: I wasn’t at that one, you know. But Penelope, by the end of her career, was drunk at every screening I was ever in with her. And when she first came here, she was one of the most beautiful creatures I’ve ever seen. She had a beautiful little body and that red hair.

  MS: And she was a great writer.

  RS: Poor old Vince Canby, you know, kind of just holding her together for years.

  MS: But those young guys, there was a bravado to their lives.

  RS: Well, sure. Of course.

  MS: And so the Dylan thing became for me—

  RS: —what you said before: you trying to find this guy.

  MS: The artist.

  RS: And you do find him by the end of it.

  MS: I think so, by the end. Especially that long line of people waiting for him, and finally his saying, “I want to go home. I want to go home.” It’s all there, I think. It’s interesting to me that he was able to follow his own impulses creatively, he seemed to just find his way. Now, you may ask, What’s so great about that? Well, he just evolved and kept working and working and working. In spite of all the criticism.

  RS: There was always a lot of phony piety associated with the criticism.

  MS: I only began to discover that as we were doing the film. But in any event, the Dylan film was a lifesaver for me, because I felt creatively satisfied with that picture.

 
; RS: In a way that you had not lately felt satisfied?

  MS: No.

  RS: This is coming right after Gangs?

  MS: Right after Gangs and all through Aviator, and after Aviator. Even right before The Departed.

  RS: Were you frustrated after Gangs of New York—did you feel you needed to do something somehow purer or more authentic?

  MS: Maybe. I don’t know if I did it intentionally. But I felt good when I finished the Dylan film. I feel that the power, sometimes, of a documentary moves me so much more than a feature. Who knows if they’re better than the features I make? I have no idea. What I know is that I felt emotionally and creatively satisfied having gone through two, three years of working on the Dylan film. It was very exciting to me.

  RS: Well, there is something, I’ve got to say, even in the kind of documentaries I do, where you do an interview, and somebody says something to you that you feel is unique.

  MS: Yes, and you got it. The same thing happened with the Italian film documentary, which we were doing when we were finishing Bringing Out the Dead. It brought out quite terrific stuff, which I was not going to get again.

  RS: That’s correct.

  MS: It’s like when an actor does something in a film—an improvised move or line, or in many cases a written line—and it’s sublime. I’m talking how I feel when I watch it. I’m not talking about critics or the audience.

  RS: You have to have been there.

  MS: Yes. And documentaries do that for me. They free me, in a way, to hope and pray for those moments in the features. It’s what [Elia] Kazan did. In On the Waterfront, where the moments between the actors were so powerful—it’s something I said when I started making films—it would be something just to be on the set, just to be in the presence of a moment like that. That was reinforced by my mother in the beginning of Italianamerican, when I started to run the camera to try to get them used to the film. My parents sort of took over the film. And I went with them. I asked my father a few questions as we went through. I realized once again—I always talk about this—that the close-up of the person speaking, that’s cinema.