Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  MS: Ronnie Wood.

  RS: That was kind of amazing, because you had so little chance to prepare for that.

  MS: There was not one song I feel that we lost. I never had that problem. It’s like dance. Sometimes I’m on the movement in the frame, even if it’s just a hand on a guitar or the string being touched, or the string being plucked. It reflects something at that point in the song that was more important to me than watching one of the people.

  RS: How did you know to be there at a particular moment?

  MS: Great cameramen do that. And great focus pullers. John Toll, Andrew Lesnie, who did Lord of the Rings, and Robert Richardson did all the lighting, designed it, and was on a camera. Ellen Kuras. And Bob Elswit, who did There Will Be Blood. We had some of the greatest cameramen. They just had a great time. And also I was in the back with fifteen or eighteen screens, whatever it was, in front of me. I was saying, So-and-so, see if you can get in tighter. Don’t forget, cover Keith here.

  RS: You were acting almost like a sports director.

  MS: Yes. But sometimes I just sat there and was mesmerized by some of the action, and didn’t say anything. Sometimes I was pointing and saying, “Get me a reverse, get me a reverse, and get it wide.” But the stage was small. And they have a lot of equipment back there. I didn’t realize that. That was our biggest issue. When the Stones go on tour, they have like a medieval village that they take with them from place to place. They set it up overnight, you know. And they have their way of doing things. And you have to fit in with their way. But they had to fit in with what we were doing, too. It’s kind of absurd. Like Mick almost being set on fire because the lights were too hot.

  RS: And you were going, “He’s going to burn up.”

  MS: Yeah! [Laughs.] I said, “Obviously, we can’t have that happen.” Another example: Somebody said, “Well, you need to shoot Mick from behind when he opens the door,” and I said, “But we can’t, he’s wearing a feather coat.” I mean, what are we talking about? On Halloween Mick is going to leave the stage, go out in the alley, and change costumes. I said, “On Halloween night, in New York City? [Laughs.] He’ll never get back to the door.” Anything could have happened. But there were a lot of police, all kinds of security. They had it locked down. You see Mick in the film and he says, “Hmmm, all these cameras.” That was the way it was. There was one point at which he was talking on the telephone, with all those cameras buzzing around. I thought, What happens if the camera moves the wrong way and he slams right into it? What if it hits one of the people?

  RS: He also mentions that all you were doing was going to bother the audience.

  MS: But what could I do? The only thing we could do was put the cameras on the stage and try to work it out in rehearsal. Unfortunately, we didn’t have much rehearsal: a lot of their rehearsals were private.

  Ultimately, I did find out what songs he was going to play that night. I won’t say how.

  But for me the energy was great, like a dance, and the editing was fun. I love watching music films. It could be classical music, it could be opera. I would love to have done an opera on film. But I think I probably would have done too many angles, too many cuts, too many special shots.

  RS: Maybe you should become another Billy Friedkin, go around and stage operas in opera houses.

  MS: I don’t know. People have asked me to do operas, but I don’t even know if I know opera that well. I don’t have the imagination to take advantage of the proscenium. It all seems like a wide shot to me. I would have to be very careful.

  Mick and I had been talking for years about another project. That’s how I got to know him a little bit. He came to me about a project about the music business, which we’re still involved in. The main thing, though, is that when he was on tour I would go and see the show. At a couple of the shows, when I got real close, I thought, I’ve got to get this on film. And I did.

  SHUTTER ISLAND

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: How did Shutter Island come up? Somebody says, “Hey, here’s a Scorsese film”?

  MARTIN SCORSESE: We were going to do The Wolf of Wall Street. It’s an extraordinary true story. Leo DiCaprio as this young man who created this empire on Wall Street with junk bonds and wound up in jail. And it’s a story of excess again. I was hesitant about it, but the script was written by Terry Winter, and I agreed to work on it and in a sense what happened was it wasted about five months of my life.

  RS: On what?

  MS: Waiting for them [Warner Bros.] to agree. I pointed out that although everybody was well-meaning in the situation, it’s just that tastes are very different. And so I said, “You know, there could be a problem,” because we had some problems on Departed. That worked out well, but it was a process. And I said, “I don’t know if I can handle that process again. I’m getting maybe too old for it. I don’t know if I can handle it, if it’s worth it.” But I did try. And they tried.

  But ultimately five months went by. I turned around, nothing had happened. And at that point I had to work. And right around that time, there was talk of this story. [Ostensibly it is about a pair of federal marshals (Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo) who appear on the eponymous island, which houses an insane asylum, to search for a patient who has gone missing. Though shot realistically, this turns out to be pure fantasy, the mad imaginings of DiCaprio’s psychopathic character.] This story of these two men who are going to an island. And I said, “Hmm, yes, I want to do two men going to an island, but in Japan.” [He’s referring again to the long-delayed project Silence.] So, in any event, they sent the script to me and said, “Well, just read it and see what you think.” But, you know, a lot was invested in it.

  RS: It’s not a hugely expensive picture, is it?

  MS: It’s up there.

  RS: Really?

  MS: I was very aware each day of money. And when the weather went against us, halfway through the shoot, it was a very difficult process because every decision we made—based on the best meteorological advice, logistics, everything you could think of—we lost, every choice we made. It’s a miracle it ever got finished. But I read the thing and it was late at night and I was very moved by the ending, the last scene.

  RS: What was so moving in that for you?

  MS: The impact of his decision to go to the lighthouse. He makes a choice to wipe out his false memory, in a way.

  RS: I found myself very lost in this movie. And not in a good way.

  MS: I don’t even want to talk about it because it’s like I can’t handle any more criticism of it. Sorry.

  RS: I don’t mean it as criticism.

  MS: You either go with it or you don’t.

  RS: There was some reality I couldn’t embrace in that movie. I don’t know how to explain it in any other way.

  Shutter Island (2010) is a vision conjured up in the mind of its mentally disturbed protagonist.

  MS: Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s no good. I don’t know.

  RS: I’m not saying it’s no good, Marty.

  MS: No, maybe it isn’t. I really don’t know. All I know is that we’re in his mind, we have to see the world through his mind. And the world in his mind is post–World War II/early fifties paranoia, which is real. Yet it all seems like some scenario from some old story. There is a storm, it is a dark night, there are suspicious doctors. Anyway, I could go on for hours about it or not at all, because it depends on how it hits you. Some people were really stunned by it. Others can’t get into it at all—can’t feel, as you say, the reality.

  RS: Well, he’s not crazy for a long, long time in the movie as far as we can perceive.

  MS: Right. It’s about how you perceive the reality around you.

  RS: It’s a funny movie, though, because it’s not a typical Dennis Lehane novel—compared, let’s say, to Mystic River …

  MS: But from what I understand he did it based on his anger at the time of the Iraq war.

  RS: Really?

  MS: Yes, basically he said, What was the worst period for parano
ia? He looked back and everything seemed to converge in McCarthyism. The Communist Party in America, what that meant about our relationship with Russia, and, psychiatrically, the use of these drugs as opposed to lobotomies.

  RS: And they’re back, lobotomies.

  MS: Yes, I know they are, because you can map the brain perfectly. It’s amazing what they do—whether that’s right or wrong. I’m just talking about the ability to do it now. And also the use of drugs and the use of talking therapy. Drugs, lithium—very important, very important. Thorazine—very important. And the talking therapy. And these converged, especially the paranoia, during the Cold War. I took it at the face value of a man who’s going on an island to find this woman who is lost, who has left, escaped. And then it’s not about that. And then it’s about something else. Then it’s not about that, either.

  RS: In reality, if there is a reality in this movie, he’s a federal marshal. And that portion of the movie where he comes to the island, is that real?

  MS: No, that doesn’t ever happen.

  RS: But it seems so real …

  MS: Well, if you were him, it would be real. If you were mad, it would be real. I grew up amidst homeless people on the Bowery, just a few blocks away. They hear voices, and the voices tell them to do something. They go and kill children because the voices tell them to. They really hear that. So the guy is looking. He’s thinking about all these scenarios, and the scenarios are like films in a way. This is his reality.

  RS: So is it fair to say that this entire movie is only that character’s reality? There is no island reality at all.

  MS: I think ultimately in the top room it’s real. When they explain it all to him.

  RS: Oh, really?

  MS: A lot of people choose not to see it that way. They become so invested in the way DiCaprio played it that they don’t believe he’s crazy even at the very end, when he says, “My name is Andrew Laeddis and I killed my wife in the spring of ’52.” They just don’t believe him. And that’s what the beauty of it for me was, that he takes responsibility for his violence, for his violence in the war, too.

  How do we expect men to live like this, when they come back from war? How many men have come back from Iraq and killed their wives?

  RS: Probably quite a large number.

  MS: We don’t even know the damage that’s been done. Now whether the war is right, wrong, whatever, that’s a whole other issue. But what do we expect from people who are put into a war situation when they come back and try to fit into normal society? Quote, “normal society,” unquote. But the other thing that really surprised me in the script was that the story kept changing. It started as a mystery, then it became a detective story. Then it became Cold War conspiracy theory. Then it became something else. And the next thing you know, they’re in a graveyard. Why are they in a graveyard? We were trying to explain it at one point. We tried in the cut and said, You know, nobody is listening to the exposition. Drop it.

  RS: I suppose, for me, when they’re in the graveyard is when you start thinking, Wait a minute.

  MS: Exactly. You see where this is going. You realize that there’s a doctor with him. He’s getting out of hand in the graveyard. They shouldn’t be there in the storm. Then he disappears. But in any event, what really held me was when he meets Patricia Clarkson in the cave. I really believed it when I read it.

  Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo experience the dark dream that is Shutter Island.

  RS: As a reality?

  MS: As a reality. And I said to myself, Well, it’s okay, this is seriously a conspiracy issue. I was young, but the Cold War made a great impression on me—the sense of being taken over, like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it was worse than being killed in a way because they took your soul. They took your mind away. This is what we were told as children about Communists, because they were “godless.”

  RS: Well, an enormous amount—I hate to say it—of what we call McCarthyism certainly had a fair amount to do with Catholicism. I don’t mean in any narrow religious sense—

  MS: Well, yes, because—

  RS: —but in the sense of their position in society.

  MS: Yes, because if the Communists deny God, well, who’s going to be annihilated? The church. Any religion basically, but primarily the church. I remember that feeling of the soul being taken away, the idea of soldiers coming back from Korea who had been “brainwashed.” It’s best presented in The Manchurian Candidate. And, there was Cardinal Mindszenty, the way they broke him down, the story told in The Prisoner with Alec Guinness and Jack Hawkins, all of these things contributed to living that experience. And I thought, Well, all right. I’ll go with that. So I shot that scene totally real, three angles with a wide shot, that’s it. I thought, So what is our reality in cinema, too? Who do we believe in a film?

  RS: It seems from what you’ve said that the essential trick, if you will, of that movie is that there is no actual reality in it.

  MS: Right.

  RS: It’s all in his mind in some way. But the movie doesn’t have any wavy dissolves—oooh-oooh, we’re into crazy now.

  MS: No, because you can hallucinate, and it seems very real. I mean, I never took hallucinogenic drugs, but more than a couple of times in the seventies, I could swear I saw something that wasn’t there. It reaches its peak really in Raging Bull—the paranoia.

  RS: Well, paranoia is a big deal with you, isn’t it?

  MS: I guess it is.

  RS: I mean, I don’t think of you as at all paranoiac.

  MS: No, not anymore. Again, I guess part of it is where I came from. As I’ve said, we lived in a world where you don’t say anything. To this day, there are people I know—somebody walks up to them in a restaurant and says, “Are you So-and-So’s brother?” He goes, “Excuse me?” “You have a brother who lives on Mulberry Street, name is Al?” And my friend will say, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about. You probably have somebody else in mind.” You become a very good actor. And it’s almost like a friend of mine, a guy I grew up with, who just wrote to me about this thing we’re talking about, and he said, “They don’t understand. You had to reinvent yourself every day. You had to act in the street every day,” and he said, “Also, the church was there. It was basically like being under the Taliban.”

  And it implies a lot. If I were a writer, I guess I could write several volumes about it. But what my friend wrote me last week was true: People don’t get it. They never will. You can’t describe it. You could call it paranoia, but discretion is better. “Discretion” I’m using sarcastically; I couldn’t say anything for the first fifteen years in L.A. about where I came from.

  RS: Really?

  MS: And by the way, this whole thing of me with noir images: Oh, you’re always doing noirs. But when I grew up, when I looked out the window some mornings the light would be beautiful; other mornings it was dirty and filthy. Or I would see life through the fire escape. So in other words, what we consider as noir images is what I grew up with. It was my reality. That’s why I wanted to see the westerns.

  The thing that really is the epitome of it all is the one shot in a tunnel in Raging Bull with Bob and Joe and Egan, Mr. Egan, asking if he was going to throw the fight. And Bob and Joe were wearing these big hats, and they have this tunnel that we shot somewhere in Brooklyn. And I thought, Oh, look at this tunnel. Always shooting in a tunnel, shooting in a hallway, but the narrowest hallways. In my old neighborhood, the hallways were amazing. You could also sing in them. And my friends played cards in them—and a lot of money went down.

  RS: And where were these hallways?

  MS: Everywhere. They’re still there. Now they’re chic. They’re charging a lot of money for them.

  RS: Just to take it back to Shutter Island—

  MS: I want to leave Shutter Island, but okay.

  RS: It feels to me in this movie that Leo’s character is literally among the least rooted characters in the history of the movies, because you don’t know in al
l of this what actually happened to him.

  MS: No. We don’t even know if he really killed that many guards, and if there were that many guards killed in Dachau.

  RS: I understand that, yes.

  MS: But the idea of the madness of the killing at that moment, where the shot goes on just a little too long, was an expression of what it must be like to lose your senses in killing. You’ve had your finger on the trigger for like five minutes, and you’ve killed about forty people, fifty people, maybe more.

  RS: And you believe that is a reality of his life?

  MS: No, but he feels he did it.

  RS: But he did kill the wife.

  MS: Oh yeah. That we know. And also when he says, “I should have helped her and I didn’t. I’m responsible for the killing of the kids too.” He feels responsible for the killing of the children.

  RS: So that portion of the movie may have a bit of reality in it.

  MS: I think it does, yes. At the end, when he decides, I’m checking out. Sorry, Doctor. I know this may ruin your plans, all your theories, all your experiments. But I can’t take the pain anymore. And it’s better to go out this way, you know, and the doctor knows.

  RS: Knows?

  MS: He knows that he’s not crazy at that point. The look in his eyes was that he knows it’s not Teddy, it’s Andrew who’s going out. It’s not Teddy. Teddy is the person he made up. It’s Andrew that’s going out, Andrew Laeddis.

  Mad scene: DiCaprio confronts one of Shutter Island’s inmates.

  RS: So in other words the reality of his war is the reality that totally unhinged him.

  MS: I think that set him off. And that’s why I say it has a lot to do with returning veterans and what they call now post-traumatic stress syndrome. The reality is you can shape a young person into becoming a killing machine. Now, how do you turn it off? But people have come back and have been able to do it.

  RS: Just a crass question while I think of it. Are you astonished by the grosses on this movie?