Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  RS: You know, that’s something Andrew Sarris wrote years ago; I think he was writing about one of the Eric Rohmer films, My Night at Maud’s perhaps.

  MS: I liked that.

  RS: It’s a wonderful film. He said, and I think I’m quoting him absolutely accurately, “The cinema has no greater spectacle than that of a man and a woman talking.”

  MS: He’s right. It’s something I hope for in each one of my pictures—somehow to get moments like that.

  THE DEPARTED

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: The Departed was based on a pair of Japanese crime movies that were quite well received critically. And, of course, it eventually brought you your long-delayed Oscar. I gather you hesitated about making it at first.

  MARTIN SCORSESE: For me to make a movie I have to become really enthused about a project. As excited as I was by the script by Bill Monahan, after a few weeks I decided I didn’t want to do it. By that point the studio, Warner Bros., was very interested in doing it and Leo DiCaprio was involved. And they said, We really think you should do it. But it didn’t seem right for me.

  RS: Did you feel that you been here before, done it before?

  MS: To a certain extent. Not on the level of the schematic of the story, the nature of the plot; I hadn’t done that before. And the characters were interesting to me, even though they weren’t fully there yet. But I just didn’t know what I would do with this story.

  RS: What conclusion did you come to?

  MS: I had an anger about the story, about the world it’s set in and how it reflected the world we’re in now. That’s the emotion and the energy that I worked from.

  RS: Explain that a little more.

  MS: It has to do with the nature of betrayal. The nature of a morality which, after 2001, has become suspect to me. I’m concerned about the nature of how we live, how we’re living in this country and what our values are. This new kind of war is going to continue. Our children are going to inherit it. It’s not going to be over with by the time we’re dead. It’s like a worldwide civil war. How does one behave in that context? What’s right and what’s wrong in that war? On the street level of The Departed, no one can trust one another. Everyone’s lying to each other. It fueled me in a way. It got me angry, it got me going.

  Double agent: Leonardo DiCaprio pays a price for the dangerous game he played in The Departed (2006), the film for which Scorsese finally won his directorial Oscar.

  RS: So how nuts was Jack Nicholson by the end of that movie?

  MS: Just as you saw on screen. Jack is very interesting because he will stay that way off camera, in the daytime and nighttime—always coming up with ideas, always pushing and shoving to the point where the other people in the picture come up to that level. That’s where you experiment a lot, you try things.

  He was always inventive. We knew we had to embrace this character in a different way from other characters like him in other movies I’ve made.

  RS: I felt that Nicholson’s work was very underappreciated. I thought he gave a superb performance.

  MS: I thought so, too. Maybe it’s the same kind of thing that happened when some people first saw The Shining. They thought Nicholson’s performance was over the top.

  RS: I thought it was great.

  MS: Me, too.

  RS: It was great in part because he can make you laugh without the laughter yanking you out of your involvement.

  MS: I was stunned by the performance. I must say, though, that the first time I saw The Shining, I was taken aback. I didn’t quite know what to make of it. Then the second time, I was locked. I mean, yes, there are problems in the ending of the film, but the nature of his performance with Shelley Duvall is just … I don’t have the words for it.

  You know in The Departed he found things to use from his own past and his life. Jack’s interesting in the way he’ll go off in different ways. It’s fascinating to try to jump in and hang on and go with it. He always struggles with the issue of whether he’s gone too far. He’s always asking, Should I go further?

  RS: In a way, that’s the art of acting.

  MS: It is.

  RS: I’ll never forget one thing Elia Kazan said to me about Jimmy Dean. You know, I’m not a big James Dean fan—

  MS: Yes, I know. But I was probably the right age to see East of Eden. Maybe you were a little older.

  RS: There’s just something in that performance that I never fully buy. Anyway, Kazan said, “Brando had technique. If he would do something good”— the kind of thing you’re talking about Jack being able to do—“he could go on doing that as long as you needed him to do it.” The over-the-shoulders, the close up, the medium, whatever. “Dean had no technique. He would do a great thing, but that was it. If you came around for the side angle or whatever, he couldn’t do it again.”

  MS: I was surprised when I worked with actors who were able to repeat. I’d always worked with actors where we would just sort of find things together, because I never had any training in acting school or any theories of any kind.

  It’s the actors who taught me. I was in love with performance from Kazan’s films, and from John Cassavetes’s Shadows and Faces, so I just like to be there when I see an actor do something that is so powerful, moving, and surprising—whether it’s Bob De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Jack Nicholson, Leo DiCaprio, or Cate Blanchett, when she says “I’m leaving” to Howard Hughes in The Aviator. “And so there we are.”

  Look at her eyes when she says that. It was a medium shot. I didn’t have to go in close for that. I was stunned when she did that. She’s remarkable. At another point he says, “You’re just a movie star,” and the look in her eyes is just a killer. And there were no camera moves, nothing. It was just the actor, and I just loved it. I don’t come with any preconceived notions. And I’m often dealing with characters in my movies who have a kind of looseness to them.

  RS: Who are also, of course, capable of excess.

  MS: Yes.

  RS: Maybe that’s one clue as to why you keep going back to these people, because ultimately they do act out their hostility, their aggression, their murderous impulses.

  MS: There’s no doubt there’s a kind of catharsis in it for me, as I’m watching it happen, then as we put it together in the editing, and sometimes when I’m watching the film. When it’s there on the set, it’s an amazing thing. Even if it’s Cate and Leo in the bathroom when she’s fixing his foot and she says, “They’ll think we’re freaks.” And he embraces her. It’s very moving to me because it’s very real. I buy it. The actors make me buy it.

  RS: I think it all comes down to the director being an intelligent audience for the actor. You don’t necessarily need to know how they got there. You just have to recognize that they got there.

  MS: Yeah. Sometimes I’m almost honored by an actor, Bob De Niro in particular, because we’ve worked together so often, when he comes up and says, “Do you think I got there? Do you think I was there?” You discuss it, you try to guide, but it’s a very fine line. And I learn by mistakes, by saying too much, by not saying enough.

  RS: When I was writing a review of a biography of Otto Preminger, I was thinking: He was not a good director—in the sense that he made everybody so frightened that they couldn’t do their work. On the other hand, I do very much like Anatomy of a Murder.

  MS: It’s brilliant, it’s really something.

  RS: That may be, in part, because of the star acting of Jimmy Stewart. You know, he’s just going to damn well do what he does. He had been doing it for twenty-five years at that point.

  MS: And what he did worked.

  RS: It’s perfect because the context is perfect for it. It doesn’t feel false.

  MS: It’s a grounded story, so Preminger’s style is simpler.

  RS: The man who wrote the novel had lived in this country all his life, so it has some authentic texture, which got into the film.

  MS: Robert Travers, right? The fishing, everything. Is Arthur O’Connell Stewart’s partner?

 
; RS: Right.

  MS: What he wears, the vest, everything, it’s all just right. And the great Eve Arden.

  RS: Eve Arden is the secretary. It’s all shtick in a way, everyone operating within their long-established acting conventions, which Otto couldn’t terrorize them out of.

  MS: I just learned not to do that from the actors. I learned it from De Niro, Keitel, Ellen Burstyn. I learned it just behaviorally with them.

  The director explains it all on the set of The Departed.

  RS: Well, you know, I’ve talked to a ton of directors now, having made nineteen film profiles of them. And there’s not a single one of them who’s ever been able to tell me anything about how to direct an actor. Howard Hawks: Maybe he would say something to Cary Grant like “Well, Cary, that’s kind of boring. Can you do something else?” And Cary would say, “Let me try,” and he’d do some mad, wonderful Cary Grant kind of thing.

  MS: But that’s Cary Grant. It’s his command of the frame.

  RS: Or maybe Jack Nicholson?

  MS: Well, in The Departed, we were in the fifth week of shooting, I’d say, and suddenly all of it came together. We found the stride, you know.

  RS: You’re talking particularly about Jack? I should think in a way he has to set the tone for anything he’s in. He’s something of a sacred monster.

  MS: Yes, but that’s the adventure of it. That’s what you want. I’ve known him over the years, and I was always looking for a film I could work with him on. This one was tailor-made, in a way, because of the Irish-American underworld, particularly out of Boston. He’s got an Irish-American background. And in one of our first meetings we talked about that. He understood it. He would tell me things like “The Irish have been given the words, the Italians the music.” He’d be quoting Joyce, he’d be quoting Yeats. He’d go on talking about old friends of his. He’d be telling me different stories, tons of stories. Eventually he said, “What kind of a person should my character be? If I do this,” he said, “I need to have something to play.”

  The script was excellent, but the part that Jack played, Frank, and the part that Vera Farmiga played were the ones that we worked on the most. We changed them all with the actors, and the writer, together, although Jack did a lot of his own changes on set, and with me.

  But it was extremely collaborative. For instance, he had a little beard, and he said, “Should I shave this? Do you mind? Or should I keep it?” And I said, “Keep it on.” I came to realize that there was something about this character, this idea of a man slightly coming apart, that was different from my other films. If you think of the way De Niro dresses in Casino or the way the actors dressed in Goodfellas, Mean Streets, Raging Bull—the underworld characters were all impeccable in a certain way. This had to go another way. Once I made the comment about the beard, it sort of set him free. Eventually it led to the scene with Leo and him at the table. We did five takes in one day, two cameras simultaneously, pretty much as written. That night I said to Jack, “You know, we have the setup for the next day. We have the camera. I just don’t see shooting tracking shots of Leo coming in, and exterior shots. It’s just about you two.” I told Jack, “Anything you can think of, come in and we’ll just do a couple of takes tomorrow, and that’ll be it, and then you can go home.”

  So that morning I was walking to the set, and the street was alive—there were all these people rushing around, and it was a hot, hot day. All of a sudden someone comes up next to me and says, “I’ve got ideas, I’ve got ideas!” It was Jack. [Laughs.] And that became the scene that you see in the movie where, basically, he does the sniffing of the brandy. And he sniffs at Leo, and he says, “I smell a rat.” Then he uses the gun on Leo, without Leo knowing. And without me knowing! I didn’t know whether he was going to fire or not. Even if you use blanks, it’s very dangerous, and I didn’t quite know what was going to happen.

  That kind of thing leads to a different level of reality. When he pulls a gun like that, you see Leo’s face and you know that’s the candid reaction—nothing’s edited, nothing’s cut out. I didn’t know where the scene was going to go next. Because Leo was the rat, and he had to get out of that room.

  But how is he going to do it? I was holding my breath. Then he does it. He convinces Jack. Jack as an actor felt at a certain point Leo’s desperation, seeing it in his eyes and the way he asks him, “You know, Frank, how many guys around you want to plug you?” It got Jack back on the rails again.

  That was very interesting to me, being in a situation where I didn’t know what was going to happen. I had a sense. After this take was over—there was one take that was even more extreme—I trimmed it down with the five takes from the night before and recut with Thelma. In fact, that scene took months to cut. People liked it; some felt Jack was King Lear. To me, in reality, nothing satiated the man. Not drugs, not women. Some killing, maybe. And what’s his relationship with Leo anyway? What’s his relationship with Matt? Is Matt really his son, maybe? And, in a way, that was the moment where the picture came together for me.

  DiCaprio and Jack Nicholson in a tense moment from The Departed.

  RS: Really? That one scene?

  MS: That was a long process, maybe five or six months with Jack. Sometimes you don’t know exactly how that story is going to end up, or where it’s going to go.

  RS: Of the major actors you’ve worked with, does Jack present the most radical challenges to you as a director in keeping the film more or less on the track that you intended?

  MS: I think so. But on the film it was mitigated by the fact that we really didn’t work together that long on it. So ultimately, no matter what happened, the tracks were there for me to move along on in the editing. There was nothing wrong with taking chances, trying different things. As long as we had the time. But we only had twenty-five days.

  RS: Yes, right.

  MS: He had to be God the Father gone mad, you know, the whole world coming down around him. And it did.

  RS: It sure did.

  MS: And if it looks like he’s going to go flying off—well, he should. I could pull it back. But you never know with those situations. It reminds me a little of the kind of energy that I saw with Pesci and Ray Liotta in that Goodfellas scene I keep referencing, the “What’s funny about me?” scene.

  I don’t know what would’ve happened if I had made a picture with Jack ten or twenty years ago. I only know his working as he is now. I would have liked to have known what it was like to be with him in the period when he did Five Easy Pieces or Carnal Knowledge. People change in their behavior in their work, you know.

  RS: That to me is one of the more interesting challenges that a director faces. There are certain things Jack can do that no one else can do.

  MS: Right.

  RS: But that’s quite a challenge, because someone like Jack, people with those special skills, also have the potential to wreck your picture.

  MS: Totally. But that’s the battle, that’s the war. In this picture Jack’s character controls everything. He has a power of life and death over everybody around him, Leo, Matt, Queenan [the head of the police team trying to bring Nicholson down, played by Martin Sheen]. Some people feel there is sometimes too much here or there; others feel it all works. You feel your way through it.

  I was around a very powerful man—a boss in the underworld in the old neighborhood in the fifties and sixties. At that point everything was changing in that world. I saw the effect this had on him when he started to fall apart. The first people he killed were his closest friends. They buried the bodies in a restaurant.

  People would come to my father to talk about it. They didn’t know what to do. The fear was palpable. My father’s younger brother, Joe—the one who “went wrong”—worked for this guy. I recall vividly him rushing into our apartment on Sunday morning out of breath, saying, “I just almost got killed. He pulled a gun on me.” Then my father had to go and deal with certain people my uncle had been ostracized by.

  My father always warned me,
“These guys are bloodsuckers. Don’t ever, ever, let them do a favor for you, because you’ll never be able to pay it back. Stay away. Just smile, say hello, be respectful.” He was stuck in that world. He was oppressed by it. But he was apparently a person they liked and listened to. My uncle, by the way, lived, but the boss was killed. Apparently the police took the body out of the funeral parlor to determine the cause of his death. It wasn’t natural.

  That boss had been very nice to me. I was close friends with his nephew. I would play around his house all the time. But when he turned bad, so to speak, the people around him went down fast. Ultimately he was taken out by his own people. All that went into Jack’s character.

  Another scene I really liked was when Jack started singing “Mother Machree” to Ray Winstone, egging Ray on, and Ray was trying to egg him on. But Ray at a certain point pulled back; he had decided that his character, Mr. French, was going to be a wall. And Frank—Jack—was the only one who trusted him.

  Frank is called Francis only by Ray in the picture, if you notice. He is the only one who is trustworthy. Watch what Ray is doing: he’s just staring at other people. When Leo comes in the room, he stares at Leo. Jack starts singing “Mother Machree,” and I thought it was too much, but then in the editing, I said, “Why don’t we cut from ‘Mother Machree,’ ” which gives this wonderful end to the line, filled with energy, and cut to the two bodies of the people he had gotten killed.

  There are some people who say, “Oh, that’s too much.” Well, I’ve seen people sitting in bars who all of a sudden start singing.

  It’s all a matter of how you craft it. And the bottom line with Jack is that I saw him take his role places that were both interesting and liberating.

  His obscenity, his equation of obscenity and violence, was liberating, for instance. He said, “Listen, after I hit the kid, break his hand, why don’t I then go to my girlfriend?” When he does, she goes, “What’s got you all hot and bothered?” He says, “I’ll tell you in a minute. Come in the car, I’ll show you.” It’s the direct relationship between the violence and the sex.