Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  RS: The easy, moralistic part of his story. No one had dealt with the visionary part. They just wanted to deal with the crazy bastard in Las Vegas.

  MS: I thought the visionary part was fascinating. It doesn’t mean there aren’t negative things about him, obviously. But still, to have flown in those planes …

  OBSESSIONS

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: I admire the different ways you match your obsessions with those of your actors. Otherwise, what they do is not going to be serious, it’s not going to be worthwhile. It’s going to disappoint you, ultimately. There are certainly directors, Eastwood would be a good example, who appear to be very casual—

  MARTIN SCORSESE: Yes, but you can see he has a lot going on in him. You can see it in his films, his body of work. He is an extraordinary man, in part because he’s very cool about it. Maybe Hawks was that way.

  RS: Well, we’re talking about a couple of real WASPy directors, you know.

  MS: Maybe that’s what it is.

  RS: WASPs have got to stay cool. We cannot let people see us sweat.

  MS: I’m really the opposite [laughs]. It’s part of the enjoyment. I had a meeting here with Joe Reidy, my AD and the writer of this short film we’re doing now. We’re going over every shot. I’m telling him, “No, it’s a medium shot. This is his face. You’re on him. The camera tracks around a door that opens, he doesn’t know, and a figure comes into frame.” Joe gets up and he says, “So he’s here.” “No, no, no,” I say. He asks, “Are they moving?” I said, “No way.” Confusion, completely. And Joe said about me, “You see, he just takes all the joy out of the process.” And we started laughing. You know, niggling about every little detail, because ultimately, that’s what it’s about.

  RS: Yes, I think it is.

  MS: I mean, if the protagonist is aware of the light, would he turn around? But then, again, if it’s in the style of the films of the period—early fifties Technicolor—he may not turn around. Will I have a cameraman who knows how to do that light effect? Will the color be lush enough? All this sort of thing.

  RS: Don’t you feel, though, that there’s a danger that self-consciousness is possibly going to creep in there?

  MS: That’s a point. Yet I don’t ever like people hanging out behind me. I have a mirror, usually, over the monitor to see who’s behind me.

  RS: In case some actor—?

  MS: No. I can’t speak freely. I can’t speak freely if somebody’s behind me. Visitors to the set for me are not a good thing.

  RS: I agree.

  MS: If people have to come and say hello, or there’s some political issue involving the studio, we usually do it at a time when it doesn’t disrupt shooting.

  But I haven’t gotten the right mirror yet where I can see all that I want. I have one in the editing room. I sit with my back to the door, and the door opens, and I can see who’s coming in the door. Otherwise I’d turn around all the time, and I’d be distracted. My eye can just glance now, and I can get back to work.

  In the mixing room there’s a door that squeaks. It’s been that way for ten years now. Every time somebody goes in or out of the booth, I hear the squeak and it invariably makes me turn to my left. We make jokes about it now. The guys in the mixing room say they can’t do anything about it. I say, You’re mixing some of the biggest movies in the world in this room, and you can’t fix the squeak on the door?

  RS: What about the exhaustion factor, especially when you’re shooting? I haven’t done anything like what you’ve done but I find if I’m shooting a documentary, and it’s going pretty well and I’m really focusing, I come home just drained.

  MS: My problem is not only am I drained, I’m up.

  RS: Yes. Me, too.

  MS: I wind up in such a high level of energy that it’s very difficult for me to get to sleep and get enough sleep to shoot the next day. Of course, there are days when it’s a wonderful tired, a wonderful fatigue, because you feel you did such interesting work. Or maybe the work was not so interesting, but at least you did it, you worked it out, you went through the process. As you get older, naturally, it’s a physically taxing job. I have to make sure I get eight hours’ sleep. It wasn’t true in the past, but now it is. So I’ve got to pace myself. But yes, the fatigue factor is enormous.

  And your mind keeps buzzing. I may just be playing around with shots. I may have listed and drawn ideas for twelve to sixteen angles, when in reality we’re maybe going to wind up with four, or in some cases, just one. You think about the scenes where the camera should creep in—creep in, not move in. Or I can focus on a line of dialogue, when there is something unsettling about it. And that unsettles the rest of the scene. That’s the way I think.

  Marty directs Ben Kingsley in Shutter Island.

  RS: Are we just talking there about the accumulated wisdom of the ages, a trained instinct?

  MS: I think it’s accumulated. If it’s trained, it’s trained from my own films. You can imagine the tension in a scene, or the warmth, or the humor. I think I know the size of the frame, and I think I know when to cut—and when not to. Somehow that comes out of the story, and the actors who are playing the parts. They determine, sometimes, whether you should move the camera or not, whether you should be in close-up, whether it should be a medium close-up. I try to translate all of that into visual terms—the feeling I’d like to get from a scene.

  RS: But there’s something that, to me, is mind-bending. A film is, after all, thousands of feet of celluloid long. A famous scene, something like the one in The Letter, where Bette Davis is screaming—

  MS: “I still love the man I killed.”

  RS: That seems like kind of an obvious shot. But a lot of scenes in those thousands of feet of celluloid are not obvious at all. They might be as effective as a wide shot, a medium one, whatever.

  MS: Absolutely. In fact, coming in on a close-up of her there may be wrong.

  RS: These are big choices you are making. And a movie is composed of hundreds of those choices.

  MS: That’s the problem of visualizing it beforehand. Sometimes I’ll be in a room for hours before coming up with an idea for one scene. Sometimes it flows for two to three hours. And all of this, in most cases, changes when you get on the set.

  RS: So, theoretically, might it be as effective to start work on a film with maybe the first ten or fifteen pages outlined with your drawings, and then as the film develops its momentum, at night you would make the shot list and your drawings for the next day?

  MS: A shot list you can make up anytime. That just tells you you need certain angles to cover the action, to communicate with the audience. But I never found that easy to do the night before a scene. Still, quite honestly, half The Departed was done that way.

  RS: Which way?

  MS: When I got there, I was saying things like “Change the locations. Forget it. We’re not using this location.” Or “It’s okay, we’re going to move over here. Put the camera here, come in this way, all you need is a close-up of him.” Basically, the big choice there was to go with buildings that were being restored in the old seaport of Boston.

  The choice to cut to Martin Sheen falling through the frame without seeing him being pushed out the window was not in the script. I decided on that in a hotel room. That was the editing point. When the audience sees his body falling through the frame—I had drawn a little picture of it—it gasps, because he’s in free fall. They want to know what happened. I liked that, but I had the scene shot other ways, too—a little tighter, a little wider—to make sure. I had an idea to shoot it from above, to follow him down. So we shot a stuntman, in a kind of really dynamic angle. But there was no way to use it.

  So the way it worked out, we used the shot I had designed. I’m not saying I’m on the money all the time in what I think of originally. And, yes, you have to be prepared to throw it out the window. I’ve been talking about this for years and other directors say, Oh, kids do that, you know. Well, maybe I’m still a kid making the drawings in a room. But the
whole production works around getting that series of shots.

  RS: That reminds me of something Howard Hawks used to say, that there are only six scenes in a movie that are worth a damn.

  MS: Really?

  RS: It was a conversation he used to have with John Wayne. The other scenes are just to get you from one of those scenes to the next of those scenes.

  MS: True. But, still—

  RS: So Wayne would say to him, “Howard, is this one of those scenes?” And Howard would say, “No, Duke, it’s okay. Just walk in and pull your gun, it’s okay.”

  MS: And yet John Wayne walking in and pulling his gun in a Howard Hawks–directed picture seems to have better energy, better framing, and be somehow better constructed. It seems to hold together better than other John Wayne films.

  RS: I agree with you. Go figure.

  MS: I don’t know. I can’t figure it out. But for me, there’s no such thing as an unimportant shot. Hawks had a different way of telling stories. I think one of the few films that I’ve had with a plot was The Departed. And I did my best to destroy that plot.

  RS: Wait a minute. What do you mean by that? There’s a plot in Goodfellas.

  MS: No, it was a story.

  RS: Maybe we’re just talking semantics.

  MS: There was a kind of a plot point at the end in that Joe Pesci gets killed because he killed a guy. Basically, though, it’s Public Enemy, the rise and fall of a whole system.

  RS: Well, I see your point, without fully conceding it. But wouldn’t you say that Age of Innocence has an enormous, quite intricate plot?

  MS: I guess it does. I mean, that’s Edith Wharton. I shouldn’t say I don’t do plot. But I do tend to be attracted to stories that are more character-driven. That’s really it.

  EDITING

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: You did a lot of your own editing when you were starting out, but I wasn’t aware of how much of it you did until we started talking. Did you just pick it up, learning to do by doing?

  MARTIN SCORSESE: No, I watched it in the movies. I watched Eisenstein—

  RS: No, I was thinking more about picking up technique—in those days it was Moviolas, right?

  MS: Oh, yeah, Moviolas, and hot splices. And the thing was, the falling in love with the actual image in the frame itself, and the sprocket holes, and the flare between the sprockets, and the edge fog. I just fell in love with it.

  RS: What do you mean you fell in love with it?

  MS: Just that. I loved the way film looked. I still do. I look at Thelma sometimes—we’ll stop on a freeze frame or on a section of the shot where the camera stops running—and you get half an image. You see white, red, yellow, and you see an eye. I say, “Look, that’s a beautiful frame.” I used a shot like that at the end of The Last Temptation of Christ. That was the take I needed. It’s just the nature of celluloid itself and what light does to the image. I just love it.

  RS: Thelma has been with you many, many years. What makes her your ideal editor? What qualities does she have?

  MS: She comes from the late sixties. She was not a film student—she just did that six-week course at NYU, and then she went back to Columbia. I think she studied political science. There was something about the nature of what we all did in Woodstock—it was serious, particularly on my collaborators’ part. I was still probably too conservative to fully embrace that freedom. I think Thelma still retains that view of the world, from the sixties, an open-mindedness. And she wants to protect—good, bad, or indifferent—the art.

  Something we do may be a good film, or a bad film: it may not last, or maybe a hundred years from now somebody will still be looking at it. But whatever we’re doing she will defend to the death. She’s a very good ally. Sometimes you get tired, you start to waver, during the battering process, when you’re first screening a film. It behooves you to listen to others, but often as you get near completion of a picture, you get bad advice, or pressure. Thelma’s very good at steadying the course. A couple of times she’s actually told me, Stay strong, we’re going to get through this one. She respects the purity of the picture.

  Thelma knows the way I choose takes, in rushes. The hardest work is done usually while I’m watching rushes. I will not watch them with anybody else but her, though when I was working with De Niro in the seventies, he would watch rushes, too, particularly on New York, New York and Raging Bull. He’d be in the room and sometimes he’d say, “I like that take,” or whatever. I didn’t mind that, because I had a very good relationship with Bob and that’s what part of that collaboration was. We seemed to hit it off so well with choosing the same material. Not that we could articulate it. We kind of started to trust each other very strongly.

  RS: Right. I know that.

  MS: He just needed to know that I went through the process, tried things, worked things out. But the bottom line is, I never would have gone so far with Bob if it had been a situation where he said, “I want that scene cut,” or “I think you should use another take,” and demand another shot. There’s no way I could do that. Watching the rushes only with Thelma, I can be open.

  Thelma hardly comes on the set, you know. She reads the script only once. She just gets footage. Every day she gets to see what happens next.

  RS: That’s interesting.

  MS: She doesn’t get involved in set politics that way. She doesn’t know that during a particular take somebody got sick, or somebody was angry. She simply writes down all the takes, in great detail, then types it all up. It’s a long process. She knows my preferred takes, second preferred, third preferred, the possibility of a whole other way to go. Come back to the fifth take and she’ll remember it. Then she edits it all together so that you just punch up the takes, they’re all there. That takes a little longer, but when we’re looking for something, she can always find it easily. And her comments are so helpful. She might say, Look at his eyes here. Look at her eyes there. We need some more emotional impact, we need some more warmth. There was another take where he seemed a little more that way. Things like that. And I’ll look at what she is referring to and maybe say, I don’t know if that’s any different. She might look doubtful. And then I’ll say, “Well, put it in. Let’s see.” She’s very good with keeping the heart of the picture foremost, in terms of emotion.

  Thelma usually doesn’t cut anything until I see all the rushes. I go through the process with Thelma, and we don’t like anybody with us if I can help it. I have to be able to say, for instance, “I don’t like what he’s doing there.” Maybe later I’ll say, “Oh, that’s better. I see where he was going, okay.” She writes all of it down, and we record it.

  She types up all my notes and organizes them in her computer. So that if I say, “Scene 42, in the third shot,” she’ll punch it up and she’ll say something like, Okay, your preferred is here, take 11. Your second preferred was take 8.

  Beginnings: Editor Thelma Schoonmaker works with Marty in the Woodstock editing room.

  RS: It becomes like that American Express commercial you made, where you say, “Too dark, too light.” And you’re just looking at snapshots of your imaginary nephew’s birthday party.

  MS: Very funny, I think. I just took it to an absurd level. Which isn’t that far.

  RS: That’s what I was about to say.

  MS: Sometimes Thelma and I are laughing, sometimes we get depressed. I might say, We lost the entire dramatic thread of this. They should shoot the director. That’s why I don’t want people to be there. It’s for me. I want to be able to say what I feel about the actors, what they’re doing in the frames, uninhibited by anybody. Thelma is the woman I trust.

  RS: So Thelma knows all the secrets.

  MS: Yes. Everything. Volumes. Anyway, almost inevitably we use the preferred takes; in many cases, even the third preferred.

  RS: Is there any particular reason for that?

  MS: Because the tone of the picture changes somewhat in the cutting. The look on this person’s face makes it feel angrier here, or happier there, f
or instance. One take that I didn’t particularly like at first may flow from the preceding scene better; we can only see that as the film is shaping up.

  Thelma memorizes it all, and I memorize it, too, in the rushes with her.

  Endings: Schoonmaker and Marty went their separate ways after working together on Woodstock (1970), reunited on Raging Bull, and have been editorially inseparable ever since.

  RS: You’ve mentioned that you did a lot of your own editing when you were starting out, but I wasn’t aware of how much of it you did.

  MS: I edited Mean Streets myself. I don’t have credit on it because I’m not in the union. Sid Levin put his name on the film for me, the editor of Marty Ritt’s films.

  Then I started working with Marcia Lucas, George Lucas’s first wife. That was Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Taxi Driver, and New York, New York. Tom Rolf did some of Taxi Driver, a couple of scenes, including the famous “Are you talking to me?” scene. He’s a master editor. It’s the one sequence where I didn’t say to the editor I needed something changed. Yeu-Bun Yee worked on Woodstock with me, and he and Jan Roblee worked on The Last Waltz. That took place over a period of two years. After that I asked Thelma to do Raging Bull, because at that point Marcia had left the business pretty much. I hadn’t really stayed in touch with Thelma—she was working in Pittsburgh. There was almost a ten-year gap. I think she came to look at The Last Waltz once or twice and gave some opinions on that. I wanted her to work with me on Raging Bull. I told Irwin Winkler that, but she was not then in the union. We were almost finished with the film—mixing it—by the time we got her into the union. She’s been with me ever since.