Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  MS: Absolutely. Like Ealing Studios in the old days, or the way Raoul Walsh worked at Warner Bros., or William Wellman, and Frank Capra and Harry Cohn at Columbia.

  RS: They had the same crew, the same cameramen. Very often the same actors. There was a familial feeling.

  MS: You know, some of the best times are on the location scouting; everybody has lunch together, you all talk, everyone gets to know each other. There’s Fellini wanting to make a series of films on the actor, the producer, and so on. One of the lines in his treatment was that the location scout is very important. It was always important, he said, to scout a location near the best restaurant. It was just an excuse to get to those restaurants. Very Italian.

  But a familial feeling is a very important thing. Henry Fonda and John Ford, or Anthony Mann and James Stewart—these were extraordinarily complex, important relationships. When there’s a rift, the fallout is very upsetting. For example, Irwin Winkler told me in 1994 that Michael Chapman didn’t like Raging Bull [which came out in 1980].

  Lining up a shot in Raging Bull.

  RS: Didn’t like the story?

  MS: Didn’t like the way it turned out. Just that. I don’t think he ever told me that. Now everything is fine. Paul Schrader doesn’t like it, either. I was surprised, because we worked so closely on it. But Michael—the film didn’t hit him. He didn’t get it. He didn’t like it. [In later years, Chapman came to regard the film much more highly.]

  RS: He did a beautiful job on it.

  MS: Absolutely. It’s one of my best-photographed films. But not everybody has to like what you’re doing. Very often it’s hard to know what goes on around you. In many cases people are being polite and just not telling you what they don’t like.

  RS: I know that happens very often.

  MS: A funny thing happened on Raging Bull. I was on the set waiting for a shot to be ready. There were some crew members there, real Hollywood pros. Nice guys. They were sitting there talking behind me; they didn’t know I was there. One of the guys asked of the others, “What are we doing next?” Somebody answers, “Who knows, who cares? It’s all a bunch of crap anyway, Jesus.”

  That guy was so nice to me on the set. He was a real pro, but he hated everything we were doing. He couldn’t care less. [Laughs.] They were called to go back to work, and they went at it like men on the chain gang.

  RS: Let’s talk more about cinematography. You’ve said you’re not as confident about lighting as you are about some other aspects of your work. Yet your pictures seem very well lit to me.

  MS: I don’t have it.

  RS: What do you mean, you don’t have it?

  MS: I don’t think in those terms that much. Yet, it’s true, when I look at something, I’ll think, My God, it’s far too bright, or too dark, or whatever. But then I’ll look at, let’s say, The Informer—the streams of light, the dust particles in the light—and I’m in awe. I’m not talking about sentimental value. You look at any Ford picture and there’s a depth to the imagery, a power to the lighting, even in the one that’s considered a failure, The Fugitive. It’s more than being pictorial—no matter who the cameraman was.

  RS: I actually like that film, no matter what its reputation is.

  MS: Me, too. Gabriel Figueroa’s lighting was great. I’m talking also of Kazan’s lighting of the whorehouse hallway in East of Eden, or the lighting of Boris Kaufman in On the Waterfront—that scene at night where you see Brando running in the back alley, the truck is about to get them, and he breaks in the window—the way the cobblestones are lit. It became an iconic image for me; I always wished I could take that image and put it up on a wall.

  RS: Are you saying that you feel you have never, or rarely, in your pictures gotten that kind of depth?

  MS: No, I think I may have. I certainly tried on Mean Streets, I can tell you that. I knew that the red gels had to be a certain way. There are a couple of scenes in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore where Alice walks into bars to do auditions. Look at the light. I said to Kent Wakefield, the cameraman, Let’s do it like John Ford. And he said, Absolutely. But I don’t tend to think of it, unless I go to a location and I have a fairly good rapport with the director of photography. Then it becomes something I focus on. I had to be very specific on Mean Streets and Alice. And with Michael Chapman on Taxi Driver. I guess it’s something I focus on when I’m doing it, rather than thinking about it beforehand. Whereas editing, I tend to think of it way beforehand—the framing, the blocking.

  RS: In other words, you sort of look ahead to the edited film; a vision of that is tentatively in your mind.

  MS: More than tentatively. Shot number one will cut to number two, and number three, and number four, and that should give you a movement based on the images. I was startled sometimes by the editing in Eisenstein’s films—October, and of course Potemkin. There was some editing in Carol Reed films that I liked, and Orson Welles. And I really liked the way certain things were edited in Force of Evil.

  Moments come to mind, and I think, How was that done? Then I use that insight. Remember that scene of Howard Hughes seeing an old man sweeping up in the factory, and he says, “Who is that man? Get rid of him”?

  RS: Yes, of course.

  MS: Well, what I tried to do was to intercut moves in on Leo’s face. I do that all the time; I move in on somebody, then you cut back to what he or she is seeing. I tried to do something simple in this scene, but it didn’t quite work. I wanted to intercut it with a tilt up on the old man with the broom. A camera is focused on the broom, then you’re moving in on Leo, then back to the broom. You’re seeing a little more of the broom, you see a hand with these funny fingernails. You’re moving in on Leo tighter. You cut back, and you reveal the face of the old man. By that point you should have moved in on Leo fully. The problem was that the motion was too jagged.

  I think I shot the man with the broom for about four hours one night. The crew was laughing at a certain point. And I said, I’m not sure about that tilt. I don’t know. And Thelma and I tried it different ways. Finally Thelma had the idea of intercutting Leo’s hand from the scene in the future, in the screening room, putting on the tape recorder, and then it worked. That’s an example of something that didn’t work exactly the way I wanted.

  RS: Right.

  MS: All the fight scenes in Raging Bull were basically filmed that way—except for the big moment when Sugar Ray Robinson finally beats up Jake, who is hanging on the ropes.

  I designed all those scenes. I was given a black-and-white video. I broke it up into parts, like music, like for The Last Waltz. Two or three of the fight scenes were cut in a couple of days. We put one shot next to another; they were very easily put together.

  That Sugar Ray Robinson scene I just referred to, by the way, was based on the shower sequence from Psycho. I had every frame of that. And I designed corresponding shots of what it would be like in the ring, based on those elements. I shot it in about ten days. And then when we edited, we moved shots around, because each one had its own energy. A glove coming into frame is different from a knife. So in the process of trying to make the glove have a similar effect to the knife, the use of undercranking and overcranking and other techniques came into play. Unpredictable things happen when you’re doing that. In this case, the glove has a certain amount of light on it, and there are sprays of water and sweat flying. It created things in the frame I just didn’t expect. One frame of light cuts better to another frame of light. That sort of thing. So basically, I feel much more comfortable designing the editing than the lighting.

  There were lighting ideas in the storyboards for Raging Bull, but then I listened to the cameraman and sometimes that’s when I had to ask, Can we do this? What about that?

  I always tell the story of Spielberg making Empire of the Sun—that incredible shot of the sunrise, the last kamikaze silhouetted against it. I asked him, “How did you get that? It was so beautiful.” Well, he told me he got there an hour or forty-five minutes earlier, before the cr
ew, and he looked around the set. He saw that there was mist on the ground and knew how the sun would come up, and that was the effect he wanted. He got the assistant cameraman and shot before anybody else got there. He grew up in Phoenix, Arizona.

  Michael Powell was able to tell the time of day by where the sun was. But he grew up in the English countryside. For me the elements were inhospitable. I don’t understand natural light. So I never really thought of lighting in those ways.

  It changed with Michael Ballhaus, by the way, whose lighting for the Fassbinder films interested me.

  RS: How so?

  MS: They had a kind of almost neorealistic look, though the films were framed very carefully. But the lighting was higher key. And yet it was a very dramatic film. I don’t know if I understand a lot of the Fassbinder pictures. I’m not quite that kind of person. But Merchant of Four Seasons influenced me a lot—the toughness of the whole, the toughness of the frame, particularly in the scenes where his wife is making love to another man, and he comes in. Or he has a fight with her. It was done with such unflinching honesty. The lighting was so honest. Yet there are other moments where the lighting was almost like Douglas Sirk. I wanted to work with Ballhaus. He could be amazing.

  King of Comedy is another good example of lighting that gave me a different look. Coming off the extraordinary work Michael Chapman did in Raging Bull, I was rethinking how to make movies—going back to no camera movement for the most part. I mean, no reviewer shots. There are about two or three shots that have movement in them. Basically, everything is medium shot, close-up, medium close-up, wide shot. Functional tracking.

  RS: Who shot that one?

  MS: Frederick Schuler, who was the operator for Michael Chapman for years. Freddie was able to give me the look that I wanted, which was almost like a television film.

  It took me a long time to come around to the film for many different reasons. Each day I had problems working on it and shooting it. The actors were all great. There were no problems with the actors. But it was very difficult for me to be there. And part of the Rupert character, I realize, I had in me. Part of Jerry [Lewis] I had in me. And I didn’t want to face it at that moment. As I mentioned earlier, I was struggling personally when I was making that film, so I designed it so the shots would be hermetically sealed frames. Rupert was in Jerry’s frame a lot of the time. He’s after Jerry, he wants Jerry. That was my thinking. And I wanted it to have kind of a flat, high-key lighting.

  RS: It’s appropriate to that film.

  MS: That was a good example of being very, very specific about lighting in a picture.

  RS: When you’re working away on your script, I would think, it’s primarily on where the camera will be placed, where the camera is going to move in the shot, that sort of thing.

  MS: In a lot of cases. Although sometimes you’re just planning on what you need to do to really cover properly.

  RS: So as you’re doing that, vaguely, even specifically, is the overall look of a film coming into your mind?

  MS: Yes, it is. I definitely have images in my mind’s eye. But you get on the set and you have to adjust—suddenly it’s brighter than you imagined, for example. That’s always a problem for me. In the old days, before there was video, someone would give me the filter to look through. I would be told, “That’s the way it will look.” I didn’t want that many things overlit.

  RS: I always find looking through the viewfinder that it looks brighter than I thought it was going to be.

  MS: I agree with you! And I’m almost embarrassed to say at times, Is this a little too bright in the corner here? No one will see it. It’s barely going to register. But I have to ask. I go through a constant process of question and answer: Should we try this, how about that?

  Kundun was a whole other experience with Roger Deakins, who is a master. His lighting was fantastic.

  RS: It’s a beautiful film.

  MS: I’d watch him work—meticulous. We talked about style. We talked mainly about the lighting—we always do a lot of screening of films for lighting. For example, for Taxi Driver I screened The Wrong Man and also Salvatore Giuliano [Francesco Rosi’s 1962 drama about mobsters in politics in 1940s Sicily], Gianni di Venanzo’s photography in that film. I told Chapman, I want that in color, the philosophy of it. Michael understood that. We got it for Taxi Driver, I think.

  Anyway, for Kundun I remember we talked a lot about the lighting in Zhang Yimou’s films, and Chen Kaige’s films. We also talked about the lighting in Fat City, which he liked a lot.

  RS: Really? I would never have thought of that film in this context.

  MS: Those were our touchstones. I didn’t see a lot of the rushes for Kundun. I saw most of them when I came back. I just had total confidence in what he was doing.

  RS: At what point in your career did you start using monitors?

  MS: There was a one-inch monitor on King of Comedy. For After Hours there was a black-and-white monitor. There was definitely a monitor, black-and-white, for The Color of Money. I tried to use a color monitor on The Age of Innocence for a few shots, but I didn’t like it, so I stopped using it. For Goodfellas, I think the monitor was black-and-white, too. Then we started using color monitors and that’s what we’re using now.

  Prior to that, you would design the shot, work it out. And then I’d physically ride the shot, frame it, say what I wanted, and then they would do it. You really had to have a lot of confidence in the camera operator, because he would eventually be the one who could tell you what you got, what the best take was.

  The director overcome by Michelle Pfeiffer’s beauty in The Age of Innocence.

  RS: A lot of directors still don’t always use monitors.

  MS: I think that’s good.

  RS: So then what’s the advantage of using a monitor from your point of view?

  MS: The exact framing. I can tell the energy of the camera movement that I want. I can tell if I have the right cut points.

  As far as acting is concerned, it helps a little, too. But, believe me, when you screen the rushes, that’s when the acting pops out. And it’s a dangerous thing. Some actors like to look at the tapes, and that can be a problem. There are a couple I trust. Nicholson, though, never looked at a take. He had total trust that way. There are a couple of actors who see the rushes and know how to handle it, how to assess them and move on.

  I don’t think I’ve ever been involved with an actor who wanted to study them over and over and redo things. I point out to them, That’s a tape. It’s a small monitor. Even if the film is on television later on, it’s not going to look like that.

  There are pictures of Kubrick working on Eyes Wide Shut and other films with actors around him, looking at videotape playback, and he’s improvising with them. He improvised with Peter Sellers in Lolita. Imagine if they had video playback at that time. I think he would have done that with Sellers, or in Dr. Strangelove. It really depends on the person making the film.

  RS: Can you contrast that with your way of working with actors?

  MS: By the time I did New York, New York, I expected more from actors like Bob De Niro, because they brought so much to their work to begin with. But I expected a lot from everyone. I kept pushing and pushing everyone, sometimes into very bad states. In a funny way, I didn’t understand the nature of what they bring to their work. They go through a great deal before they get on that stage that you don’t even know about.

  Yet I’m aware of and ultrasensitive to everything a performer goes through as he is doing it. In fact, my set is, very often, attuned only to the actor. It’s always very quiet. If the actor wants to do ten takes, usually, if I have the time, we do it. If he doesn’t want to do any more takes, that’s it. Early on, everything was about what I wanted, and I thought everybody would just snap to and do it.

  DIRECTING ACTORS: AN EXAMPLE

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: Through the years you’ve been closely associated with four leading actors in several films apiece—Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro,
Daniel Day-Lewis, and, lately, Leo DiCaprio. These are very disparate actors. But do all of them give you a comfort zone, an ease of communication? What?

  MARTIN SCORSESE: The explanation is in part that making films with your friends, spending time with them, gives you the opportunity to share feelings with them about many different things.

  RS: What about Leo, for example? Did you see him and say to yourself, I love this kid?

  MS: Bob De Niro told me about working with him on This Boy’s Life. A couple of other people told me about him, too. Then I saw the movie, in which I thought he was excellent. But then I saw him in Lasse Hallström’s film What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. I thought he and Johnny Depp together were fantastic.

  RS: They’re both very good.

  MS: But really, it was just that Bob said, This is a young boy who has that something special. You’ve got to work with him.

  RS: There’s something different about him, though, in one respect: Unlike your other leads, when he first came on the scene, he was a big teenage rage.

  MS: Not for me. I was going on what I saw in Gilbert Grape, and This Boy’s Life. Titanic sealed his popularity. But I still saw him as the young actor who was so extraordinary in those other movies. Mike Ovitz put us together. It turned out that Leo liked the pictures I made over the years, he wanted to work with me. Hopefully, we can do a few more.

  RS: How would you characterize him, compared to Keitel, De Niro, and Daniel Day-Lewis, as an actor?

  MS: I see a great similarity.

  RS: In what way?

  MS: In the way he works. He’s very specific, and if you need some powerful emotion from him, it’s going to be there. I don’t think he necessarily needs to spend three hours on preparation for certain kinds of things. He’s a real pro. He gets in there and he gets it done. When I least expect it, he finds an emotional level I didn’t think was there. He surprises me, moves me. Which is very hard to do when I’m on a set.