Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  You know, I’ve got lights around me, I’ve got the producers yelling at me because they want me to finish. All these problems. As you get a little older, you have to be in great shape and you have to be focused. And I found that Leo’s very similar. His instinctive feeling about the world around him is a lot like mine. The major difference is I’m thirty-five years older, a totally different generation, and he grew up in California. But we think similarly.

  I always tell a story about what happened on The Departed, that scene where Marty Sheen gets thrown off the roof, and he’s lying in a pool of blood. We had to go back to that location a thousand times—it was just one of those pain-in-the-neck shoots. It was very difficult for other reasons, too, including the actors’ schedules and finishing on time.

  So I needed to go very quickly that day. And I needed a medium close-up of DiCaprio’s reaction. He comes running and the body falls right in front of him. In the original Chinese film, apparently, the guy falls on a car. In Collateral, Michael Mann, whose work I admire greatly, has a character fall right on a cab.

  RS: I remember that vividly.

  MS: So I said we couldn’t have that in this script. So how was I going to do it? I decided we would stay on Leo and never see Captain Queenan being pushed out a window; we just see him falling through the air. And suddenly, he would fall in front of the kid. So we got that shot, which was a problem because we had a dummy, and blood being sprayed—too much blood, not enough blood. Then I needed a medium-close shot with Leo as he went around the body. In the meantime, these other guys, these animals, are coming down the building. If he’s late, he could be exposed as the rat. And, of course, he was just talking to Queenan on the roof, who was going to get him out of the whole thing.

  On take one I should have been in front of the camera and watching the actor. But I was a little tired, so I was watching it on the monitor. And Leo did something in his reaction that suddenly moved me to tears. Son of a bitch, I said to myself. That’s why I make these movies. That’s why! [Laughs.] And I told him, “That was beautiful.” And he said, “I think I can do it better.” “Okay, let’s do another,” I said. We did three more takes, I think. But I decided [laughs] that first take was beautiful, and I used it.

  One of the several mad scenes in The Aviator.

  RS: We’re talking pure actor’s instinct here, aren’t we?

  MS: The instinct was extraordinary. And it was instinct under a lot of pressure. But the kid locked in, he had a certain kind of truth—he gave a whimper, like the whimper of a poor little animal that was stuck in this world, knowing it would get killed.

  And that wasn’t the end of it. Marty Sheen wanted to be off camera for him, in the blood, lying on the ground, you know. And Leo didn’t want Marty to do that. But Marty was a pro, he was going to do it. And, bless him, he did it. Then, in editing, we struggled, Thelma and I, to work it out so that we stayed on Leo the right amount of time and didn’t cut away too soon. We tried different cuts. I said, “Keep it the way I felt it that day.” I said, “Let’s keep it long.” And then I had to struggle to keep all the sound out. They’d keep putting sound in, background noises. I said, “What’s that? It’s interfering with the sound in his throat.”

  RS: But there’s even more to that sequence, isn’t there? I recall that Marty Sheen’s death is followed with shots of Matt Damon, back at headquarters, trying to figure out what’s happening.

  MS: Yes, Matt is in his office after Marty falls off the roof, and you cut back to Matt at the desk. He has the walkie-talkie on the desk, and he’s listening, and he’s saying, Who fell off the roof? What are you talking about? Every time you cut, it’s a different angle and slightly different lighting, and the camera’s moving a different way. Until finally you’re in very close. All that was designed. And it was shot very quickly.

  RS: And what is the editing saying?

  MS: There’s an implied tension in the frame if the sequence is working.

  RS: So it’s related, in some measure, to the dialogue he’s speaking?

  MS: And the intensity of how things are going out of control on the other end of the walkie-talkie. The more things go out of control, the more the camera is moving in closer to him, but off on an angle. The more he’s worming out of it, the more he’s taking the coward’s way out, the more I felt that, instead of tracking in faster, zooming in, I wanted it to be slower—to convey the feeling that he’s set in motion a series of events that are going to go out of control and everybody’s going to die.

  But the editing is very controlled, because the frame has to have that tension. It’s almost as if you want to hit him with the camera. But you can’t. The camera’s holding back. The tension arises out of the contrast of its pace, enhanced by the editing, with the hugeness of the events going on in the sequence.

  Normally, a picture like that develops into a big, climactic shootout—you know, a bravura set piece in terms of camera movement, lighting, explosions, this sort of thing. But we had that to a certain extent earlier when Jack gets killed in the car. So it’s almost perfunctory, that scene. The only thing we could do was be as objective as possible about it. It didn’t need any embellishment. There are a few cuts, and then basically it’s a wide shot. It’s the opposite of what Hitchcock does with suspense. Maybe the Hitchcockian way would have been to show Barrigan [one of Nicholson’s hit men] coming up the stairs with the gun, Leo in the elevator with Matt, Barrigan getting closer with the gun, Leo in the elevator, the door opening, and Leo getting shot.

  RS: Well, as you know, Hitchcock liked to give the audience information the characters don’t have, to enhance the suspense.

  MS: It was about suspense. But when I was growing up, I was in situations where everything was fine—and then, suddenly, violence broke out. You didn’t get a sense of where it was coming from, what was going to happen. You just knew that the atmosphere was charged, and, bang, it happened.

  In this particular story, I wondered what would happen if you just took out Jack’s character. Immediately, Colin [Matt Damon] then has to think about where his allegiances lie. The audience has to think about who they have to care about.

  RS: I was with both those boys. I didn’t choose.

  MS: No. But I saw an audience reaction in Chicago, a preview, where they were stunned. They didn’t know who to care about. All bets were off. All plot points were thrown out the window. It was [snaps fingers] like a moment in time: You exist, then you don’t exist. That is the nature of who we are and what we are as human beings. It happens that fast in life, whether it’s a violent death or a natural death.

  RS: Oh, God, yes.

  MS: I think of that all the time.

  RS: Me, too. But, you know, we’ve drifted kind of far from Leo. Any more thoughts on his work habits?

  MS: Well, I really respect what he did in Aviator as Howard Hughes, how he worked with the Hughes accent, how he went through all the meetings with John Logan. The thoroughness of Leo’s approach—I just know I can count on him.

  RS: Is he an actor who does more research on his parts than other actors?

  MS: He does very thorough research. We shoot a lot more than we use with him. Very often with him I’ll shoot the psychological subtext. I did it with Bob, too. And with Daniel. You never know, the subtext may need to be seen. If we can squeeze it in, it’s there. I found with him, in acting out the subtext, he goes through a process until he knows it’s been fully absorbed. For instance, on Aviator, we all had discussions about whether we should or should not show the old Howard Hughes—Howard Hughes in Vegas at the end of his life. I had felt when I read the script originally that it was good that we never saw the old Hughes.

  RS: That’s one of the things I liked about the finished film. That crazy old coot in Las Vegas is about the only thing most people know about Hughes. What we didn’t know was much more interesting, as the movie proves.

  MS: Right, but the discussions went on about it. I wanted to at least entertain the idea of usin
g a scene of the old Hughes. What scene might we do of him? What would be consistent with the rest of the picture? John Logan, who wrote the film, worked on so many different things—Leo, me, him, together. We came up with a couple of scenes. I wasn’t totally convinced, but I would have shot them.

  But about halfway through the picture we had to do the scene where Hughes loses his mind in the screening room, sitting nude in the white leather chair. The attendant comes in the door with his gloves on. Hughes says, “Bring in the milk. Bring in the milk.”

  RS: A great scene.

  MS: But we spent, I think, nine days and nights in the screening room on that. It was hell, absolute hell. His body makeup took seven hours. With that much makeup, you cut into your shooting time. You can only shoot maybe five hours, as opposed to twelve hours a day, or ten hours. It was the hardest thing Leo had to do.

  RS: Well, that happens a fair amount of time with you, doesn’t it?

  MS: What?

  RS: That the scenes take a lot of time. I’m just thinking of what some of your actors have gone through to make your pictures.

  MS: Yeah, they do a lot. They’re very committed.

  RS: It’s grueling.

  MS: Absolutely grueling. But Leo’s got the youth and the energy. And the curiosity for it.

  Anyway, I saw the rushes of him in the screening room scene and I felt strongly that we didn’t need to include the last Las Vegas scene. I looked at the scene we had and I said, Forget it. The next day I saw him on the set. I took him to my trailer and I said, “We did the old Howard.” [Laughs.] “You have to see this stuff,” I said, “it’s beautiful—especially the blue behind his head.” And when Leo saw it, he said, “Great. Okay.”

  So we didn’t shoot the older Howard scene. But he had to go through a process, get the real knowledge of shooting that scene. Some people tell an actor they will do something, and don’t do it. I was going to shoot it. Even if I shot it and didn’t use it, I was still going to shoot it. But when he looked at the rushes, he agreed that there was no need to.

  The cinematically complex murder sequence in Shutter Island.

  RS: Do you feel a little more mentorly toward Leo, as opposed to actors who are your contemporaries, like De Niro and Harvey?

  MS: Maybe. But that would be presumptuous of me, I think. Besides he comes from another time and culture. I can guide a little bit, that’s about all. There might be some specific things I’d tell him from time to time, to watch out for, or think about clearly. But that doesn’t mean he’ll do it. It’s like any kid.

  But no matter what you do, the difference in generations is there.

  RS: Sure.

  MS: It’s just there. I mean, there are certain things that happened on the Howard Hughes picture which were interesting, and stemmed from the difference between a young man and an older man. For example, it’s how the whole relationship ended with Katharine Hepburn by the screening room door. We went through a whole process there. It became more attuned to her. That took maybe eighteen or twenty takes. That’s something we discovered together—for Leo to put the focus on her and not think about himself. Not to bring her into his goddamned world. Get her out of there. Say, Yeah, yeah, I’ll go flying with you Tuesday. Don’t worry about it. Rather than being, in that particular moment, a character who would be asking for her sympathy. That’s a key thing. That’s something he discovered while we were shooting that scene. I didn’t know how to say it. But we kept working until I finally realized what it was.

  RS: So that he wasn’t asking for sympathy?

  MS: Right, exactly. And then finally he did something, and I said, That’s it. We’ve got to go that way. But it took me all those takes to get to it with him. It’s the process. But he found it rewarding and so did I.

  RS: Would you say, from what you hear, that you do more takes than other directors?

  MS: No. That was a special scene. He’s talking to her through a door and he’s out of his mind. You just can’t do it in two takes.

  RS: I’m sure.

  MS: You would be missing something. We had to touch upon every possibility, you know: all those spasms, which were related to his obsessive-compulsive disorder. We did different takes with different kinds of moves. Maybe he touched his legs too much in one take, so we did another one with less touching of the leg. That kind of thing.

  RS: That’s a lot to hold in your head. I’m talking about you, Marty, not him. Let’s leave Leo out of the equation for the moment. How do you know when you’ve got it? What’s the moment?

  MS: In this case, I could hear it in his voice. Like that scene in The Departed, I knew immediately when we had it. I just felt we were going to cut to him and he was going to give the required emotion. I didn’t know how he was going to give it, though, or that it was going to be that moving.

  I heard something similar in the door scene between Hughes and Hepburn in The Aviator. It was in his voice when he turned to me and said, “Don’t make it about me, make it about her,” and I said, “Exactly.”

  I didn’t know that from the beginning, though. Because, you see, there was so much that was going on in his body movements in every one of those shots. And maybe a third of that scene was cut out of the picture. It was almost mathematical. We had to measure how many times we used that tic in the earlier part of the shot; we didn’t want it to be too much. And the tone of voice—a little too much of the twang: we had to take that down. We could loop that later, just in case we got in trouble, but I’d rather do it on the set.

  All those choices meant really hard work, especially if you have a special relationship with the actor. But you just go through it.

  We had a good time with it afterwards, particularly when he talked to Alec Baldwin [playing Juan Trippe] through the same door. Where he had the meeting, and he’s screaming at one point, I wish you were there, so you could have seen how that plane flew. [He’s talking about the moment when the Spruce Goose takes flight.] It was beautiful, you would’ve loved it. Because he knew that Juan Trippe also loved flying.

  And he tells him, “Fly safe, fly safe,” at the end of the scene. It’s very moving.

  Liza Minnelli commands Marty’s attention in New York, New York.

  RS: It’s amazing to me, how you can stay on top of so many things at the same time.

  MS: I stretched that screening room set like I did the ring in Raging Bull. We made the room much, much longer. We added wall space, added more walls, so that it always seemed bigger or smaller, or whatever. It’s never quite one size. That took time. But it was something we had to try.

  Making Gangs of New York, I felt there was a real bond created between Leo and me. So I thought that if there was a project that came to him, or one that I came across that he would be perfect for, or that was written with him in mind the way Ellen Burstyn was perfect for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, or Raging Bull was for Bob, or Paul Newman was in The Color of Money—I felt it would be great to go further with him. When I saw the title on the script of The Aviator, I thought, That word hasn’t been used in years. I was very dubious about it. Then I read the first scene with the mother bathing him and I thought that was interesting, about quarantine, and the strangeness in the mother. The next thing I know, I realized it’s Howard Hughes shooting this movie, and I thought immediately, I can’t do this. But when I continued reading the script, I came to see it as an epic about an American pioneer.

  RS: Right.

  MS: And it was bold enough. John Logan had that fine perception of Hughes’s creative energy and how that creative energy fueled the great American pioneers of the nineteenth century.

  RS: I really feel Gangs and Aviator are related in some way. The American dream, if you dream it intensely enough, will make you nuts.

  MS: That’s the beauty of Aviator. The land wasn’t enough for Hughes. He had to have the sky, too. But the real point is the end of the picture where he gets locked in his mind again and can’t get out and he keeps repeating, “The way of the
future, the way of the future.” For me, ending it on Leo’s face in the mirror saying that line was the reason to make the movie. We worked on that for the whole nine months we were shooting. To accept the future, knowing full well that for him it will only mean those men with the white gloves. For me, I must say, the way of the future is all about unrestrained greed.

  RS: It’s a very beautiful and ironic ending because, you know, you’re also hearing a radio reporter saying, “Well, Howard Hughes has flown.”

  MS: He flew the Hercules for two minutes.

  RS: It’s a very interesting climax, isn’t it? I mean, in some curious way. It’s a triumph—an ironic one, of course.

  MS: I thought it was great. That’s really what made me do the film. The shaking of the plane and everything, that sound is on that audiotape. We used the actual audiotape. Hughes said, I think we’re aloft, or something like that.

  The reporters on board all started applauding and whooping. All that’s from the actual tape. And they were terrified, those reporters, because he was supposed to be taxiing it, not taking off. They didn’t realize what Hughes, the maniac, was going to do. After that, I thought that line about “the future” was a perfect way to end, because no matter what you could say about Hughes’s descent, that scene intimates all the rest of the story for me.

  But I also loved the idea in the script that the real battles in America, the real conflicts, are in the boardroom. Juan Trippe and Hughes at a table in the Coconut Grove talking about buttons or zippers—when I read that, I said to myself, That’s the scene for me.

  RS: It’s a great scene.

  MS: I felt that was also something for Leo. Remembering the way he placed himself into Gangs of New York for me, and the way he worked on that character. We had formed our friendship. And I wanted to do a film with him next that would showcase him as a character. As I said, I felt okay about the project because all the other ones about Hughes had to do with the older Hughes.