Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  Jack was saying, That exists, let’s show it. I felt it wasn’t only a film about Frank Costello. It’s the obscenity and the violence that he represents that permeates the picture, permeates that world. But as I say, if I had been able to work with Jack on a twenty-week shoot, I don’t know what it would have been like. Or if I had worked with Jack in this picture ten years ago, maybe it would have been different.

  Sly psychopath: Jack Nicholson as Frank Costello in a rare relatively calm moment in The Departed.

  RS: My impression of Jack, and I don’t know him at all well, is that at his age, he is going to do what he wants to do. You’re hiring him for a certain kind of dangerousness that is completely unpredictable.

  MS: That’s right.

  RS: And you have to give him that privilege.

  MS: You discover that the first day you walk on the set. You think it’s going to be fortuitous for the movie, though, you think the picture’s going to be taken in a better direction—and that you’re going to go with it.

  RS: Well, is that one of the aspects of your nature that sets your work apart from other directors, that you will take those chances with actors who are, let’s put it as politely as possible, unpredictable, and may do things that are very difficult for you to handle, because they are going to push the picture in directions so that you may not actually be able to put it together sensibly?

  MS: Yes. I had to take that chance.

  RS: You’ve done it more than once.

  MS: Yes, I have. And when you do, it’s always a battle. Sometimes a picture gets away from you and sometimes it doesn’t. What I felt about the first four weeks of shooting The Departed was that it was not going smoothly, it was not going as planned. I knew Jack was bringing new stuff in, because we had been working on it before I started shooting. So I was very interested to see what was going to happen when we got to his scenes. But I do like to take the chances, although it can be nerve-racking.

  RS: The language in The Departed is as brutal as some of the action, it seems to me, and even in today’s world, dangerous to employ.

  MS: I’m not going to say it doesn’t exist, because it exists. It’s not about giving a bad image to some ethnic group. That is the reality, that is what happens.

  RS: You know, that fits my theory of what was really so loathesome about movie censorship.

  MS: Oh, my God, it was so crazy.

  RS: Not talking about the sexual revolution on film made it much harder to deal with than if they were just talking on the screen like normal Americans talk.

  MS: I think you’re absolutely right about that. I was part of that revolution, or, to put it another way, I was probably the only one who wasn’t sexually liberated.

  RS: If you say so. And then everybody went nuts about that, as if America was about to fall into moral shreds.

  MS: It’s like what Chairman Mao said, or was it his wife: If the revolution stops revolving, it’s no longer a revolution. Therefore we must continue with the Cultural Revolution.

  It became an obsession, and the next thing you know, town houses are blowing up on 11th Street.

  RS: Two houses from where I lived.

  MS: Geez. This is why I liked a lot of Julie Taymor’s film, Across the Universe. It touches upon all these elements, and you get to see how it all fits together. And somehow the lyrics, the music, give you the period. What a decade! What a time!

  RS: That’s for sure.

  MS: What a time to have gone through. That’s why at the age of thirteen or fourteen, whether you liked the Kramer films or not, he did tackle certain subjects that made you think, subjects that weren’t being talked about elsewhere.

  RS: The censorship was far worse than just sexual censorship. It came up in the course of my history of Warner Bros. For example, in the late thirties they wanted to make movies that warned America about the threat of Nazism. The Breen Office [the censors for the movie industry] said no. Breen wrote a letter to Warners and said, “We feel you can’t make this movie, because how can you say these terrible things about Hitler? Look at all the good he’s been doing for the German people.” To their credit, they told him to go screw himself. It was more than that you couldn’t show a woman’s breasts or you couldn’t say “hell” and “damn.” They were interfering in real issues, political issues. It’s very disturbing.

  MS: Yes.

  RS: Because you keep this lid on.

  MS: Certain philosophical and political points are made in the storytelling, and if they’re softened or skipped—well, it just shouldn’t be allowed to happen. Art is art. So the censorship concept is very important, because we were—many of us are—formed by mass entertainment.

  RS: Of course.

  MS: That’s why when in The Departed Jack equates sex with violence as part of the thrill, that was liberating. I don’t know if there was enough of it in the film, quite honestly, because there was a whole struggle going back and forth with the studio on that. The nature of his language, the obscenity of his language, was different from the kind of vulgar language that we used in Goodfellas or Casino.

  RS: Can you characterize the difference?

  MS: It had kind of a mean edge to it. I’m saying he got something in there that directly equated language with violence.

  RS: There is a specificity in his language. It’s not just a casual “Hey, motherfucker.”

  MS: No. There’s a meaning there.

  RS: What he says is probably literally going to happen.

  MS: It’s going to happen. In that scene when Jack says, “You like little Miss Freud sucking on your dick,” it’s very specific. Jack was saying, If you do your job, these are your benefits. You get them from me. You enjoy it? Good. But where the hell were you? You were supposed to be there, you weren’t there.

  The specificity cuts away all the nonsense. That’s the nature of the world they’re in. What I loved about Matt’s character: he tries to pretend he’s in a somewhat different world—an apartment that’s a little more upgraded, and he buys croissants, you know, and dies.

  That’s why I love what Bill Monahan did in the script at the end, when Mark Wahlberg is there with the gun pointing at Matt Damon, and Matt looks at him and he says, “Okay.” And then he gets shot. Okay, he’s saying, I’m so tired. I made it as far as here. Now just take me out. I’m not up to this. I was never up to it. Just finish me off.

  He even tries to pretend otherwise. In the scene in the theater, he tries to say, Frank, what are you doing? What are you, crazy? And he’s trying to actually talk to him. He’s trying to put on the appearance of a responsible citizen. Yes, I work for you. But I’m still a policeman, and I still have some power.

  Jack pointed out to me, “He’s sitting behind me.” He mentioned the word “confession.” And I realized he made the porno theater the confessional. If you look at it, he’s like a priest. The priest doesn’t see your face when you’re in the confessional. It was wonderful, I told him.

  RS: Did you just instinctively stage it that way?

  MS: Well, he couldn’t sit next to him, so he had to sit behind him. Then we looked at it and he looked like the kindly old priest that Barry Fitzgerald played in Going My Way. Only a slightly more demented version. And there’s this guy, you know, leaning over, recounting his sins, so to speak, to him. And the priest is another kind of priest, really.

  RS: Putting it mildly.

  MS: The whole porno theater takes on a very different aspect—very Catholic—about sex and guilt and confession, and it all seemed to come together there. I think Jack understood that. I don’t know his personal life that much. But some of the stories he told me made me think he understood the impact of Catholicism on the Irish and the Irish American. And also the differences between Irish Catholicism and Italian Catholicism.

  RS: It sounds as if the picture, on the whole, was pretty satisfying for you.

  MS: I was just hoping for some sort of financial success with The Departed. I figured pretty much that that would b
e it for me, that I wouldn’t do any more studio pictures.

  RS: What would you do?

  MS: More independent films. I didn’t see where I could fit into the system anymore, given what the system needs at this point in time. Having come off Gangs of New York and then Aviator, I just didn’t know anymore that I could go on making films under corporate control. I don’t say that the people who made the film with me at Warner Bros. were difficult to work with. It was a matter of whether I have what they need, what the corporation needs. And how much of an effort it will take.

  Yes, ultimately The Departed came out the way I wanted it to come out. But it cost a lot of money, and there were big-name stars in it, and therefore I had to work with the studio very closely. Screen it, argue, discuss it, you know. We stuck to our guns. We got pretty much what we wanted, though there were a couple of things here and there which we didn’t get. That doesn’t really matter. The thing is, I don’t know if it’s worth going through the process again. Because, ultimately, the marketplace for big-budget films means there will be less experimentation in them. It’s the old story. Now, even more so.

  At my age, having gone through what I have, I don’t know whether it’s worth it anymore.

  RS: I understand. It’s a wearing process, even when everyone’s being pleasant.

  MS: When I was finishing The Departed, I said, “I’m out of here.” I barely saw the answer print. I was off shooting the Rolling Stones film, Shine a Light.

  SHINE A LIGHT

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: Shine a Light is pretty much pure heedless performance—it’s not like The Last Waltz or the Dylan doc.

  MARTIN SCORSESE: Pure rock ’n’ roll. They didn’t touch up any of the music, except one note, I think.

  RS: There’s no social commentary in it. Aside from the incredible lines in Mick Jagger’s face, he’s still moving the way he used to. That’s an inspiration rather than a commentary. I mean, my knees ache in the morning when I get up.

  MS: After Jagger saw the first cut of it, he said, “You know, I’m still tired from the film.” He said, “It’s one thing if I did two songs in one day. But I did all that in two hours.” I intended to keep him part of the group—to show how they play off each other onstage, the energy and the exchange of physical and psychic energy, the intimate nature of it all. Keith Richards moving out onstage, bending, kneeling down.

  RS: In some weird way it was, as I said, kind of inspirational. Every once in a while you see the audience and they’re very young as a whole. There are very few old gents like you and me in the audience. The Stones are now kind of old guys, too, so it was good that you put in the footage when they were busted for pot, or whatever the hell it was, in the old days. It reminds you of where they came from.

  MS: I had to balance that. Every time I put too much of that footage in, it took away from the music. It was a very delicate balance.

  RS: I could see that. But the picture needed something to ground it historically.

  MS: Yes. At the end you see Keith Richards, when he finally stops, hanging on to his guitar, trying to catch his breath.

  RS: He was flat out of breath.

  MS: Gone, and then he resurrected himself! It’s just stunning to watch.

  RS: I have to tell you, I have gotten belatedly to like rock ’n’ roll much better than I did back when I was supposed to love it.

  MS: Maybe because it’s not forced on you now, as it was when your peers expected you to love it.

  RS: Maybe. But I like the beat of it. And with better recording, I can hear the lyrics better. So I know what the songs are about. They don’t just sound like a lot of noise.

  MS: There’s something very interesting in what Jagger does, what they all do, onstage—Mick, Keith, Charlie Watts, Ronnie.

  RS: I love watching a drummer like that.

  MS: You know, his back straight, his hands moving, and calm, cool. He’s the very core of the group.

  RS: There’s a moment in there where he just goes [makes whoosh sound].

  MS: We did movie lighting, and the stage was very hot. Jagger at one point is sort of fanning with his shirt on a reverse shot, laughing at Charlie. Basically he was saying he was hot. When they left, they just took off. We didn’t talk after the show. I left a message for Mick saying it was wonderful, that kind of thing. The next day he called me from San Francisco and said, “Have you recuperated yet?” I said, “No.” He said, “We’ve been working arena shows, and stadiums. So imagine if you had been shooting a spectacle film for a year, and then you were told to do a play by Eugene O’Neill for two nights on Broadway.”

  What drove me in this film is just the nature of the energy itself, which can’t be stopped. Primeval almost.

  RS: That comes through very strongly.

  MS: I sort of forgot about their age. I just saw this movement.

  RS: Let’s talk a little about coverage. How did you assign it among your fifteen cameras?

  MS: Just by luck and determination. I drew up all kinds of shots but basically I didn’t use any of them.

  RS: But you had cameras assigned, right—one on the group, one on the drummer, one with a side angle?

  MS: Yes, but because Keith moved a lot and, certainly, Mick did, there had to be several cameras assigned to each guy. And the cameramen asked, “Aren’t you going to be shooting yourselves, shooting each other?” I said, “It doesn’t matter.”

  RS: I think it was fine to see a few of those cameras. I’ve seen a lot more cameras in other docs.

  MS: I said, “Just go with it. Don’t worry about picking up other cameramen, don’t worry about it.” Sometimes we were able to carry out our design. There was a big camera in the center, on a crane. And at certain points in songs it would pull back, or it would come in. That was rehearsed, and we were able to get some shots I really wanted—especially the one where Mick got Keith to sing into the same mike with him.

  RS: Right.

  MS: There’s always been something special between Mick and Keith. The people who really know the Rolling Stones love to see Keith and Mick singing at the same mike again. Mick said, “I think I could do ‘Faraway Eyes’ if I get him on the stage, but I don’t know where he’s going to be.” He said this in a very sweet way: “You’d have better luck predicting the Grand National.” If you ever look at the film again, you’ll see he’s looking for Keith.

  RS: Yes, that’s quite clear. It makes you think about all the years they’ve shared.

  MS: The “making of the film” material we managed to get on there I thought was good.

  RS: I loved that stuff. I wanted more of it.

  MS: Me, too. I tried, I tried. But we had to stay onstage.

  RS: There’s a little contentiousness going on there.

  MS: Yes, actually.

  RS: Between you and Mick.

  MS: Yeah.

  RS: I mean, first of all, he obviously wanted the film to be made.

  MS: Yes.

  RS: But what did he think you were going to do, sit in the corner with a little handheld camera and shoot?

  MS: They’re flying around the world. I’m busy. I’ve got cameramen coming in. I don’t quite know what songs they’re going to play. In other words, I can’t control what they’re doing onstage. But I have to control. So does Mick. He controls what he does onstage, I’m controlling what I’m doing. Somehow the cameras and the performers had to meet. And it was a wonderful kind of chaos. I just started shooting everything. You know? It’s not designed. There was literally a rhythm we developed. And the rhythm of the world today, certainly in America, is that images can’t stay on for more than a few seconds.

  RS: Right, I know.

  MS: Still, you’ve got to stay on somebody for a while, let it play, to feel the effectiveness of it.

  RS: That is what I felt watching the film.

  MS: Me, too.

  RS: There is in the preliminary stuff where you’re getting hassled—

  MS: You know, the funny thing was when Mick
finally saw it, the telephone sequence with his voice coming through like the voice of God, he said, “Well, Marty, you know that conversation was over an hour.” I said, “Yes, I know. But I cut it down.” It may have been over an hour, but there was still frustration because the two of us could not get face-to-face in a room for any period of time.

  RS: It mystified me that you keep asking, “Could I see the playlist?”

  MS: They wouldn’t let me see it. You know why?

  RS: Why?

  MS: Because, ultimately, they have to gauge the audience, gauge how they were all feeling. We never, ever went backstage or dealt with them later than twenty minutes before they went on. I just let them do it. Most performers do it. They tend to make it up at the last minute. I’m feeling this tonight, I’m feeling that.

  The second day was generally the same as the first night. I knew Mick was going to make changes. And if he was going to make changes, I needed to know what those changes were. On the other hand, because I’d already shot the earlier concert, I could wing it. You know, what the hell? Okay, oh, it’s a different song, all right. I had a little bit of a problem getting a camera to cover somebody, but basically I was okay. It wasn’t that bad.

  RS: Okay. But here’s my point, applying to both nights: You’ve got your fifteen cameras. Obviously, at least ten of them have a specific thing they’re covering, right?

  MS: I think so, yes.

  RS: Someone is on Mick from the front of the stage. Someone is on Keith from wherever—

  MS: Keith. Somehow, yes.

  RS: But I was struck by the fact that at very, very crucial moments, you chose a close-up of the strings of a guitar—not necessarily Mick’s or Keith’s—but some other musician’s in the back somewhere.