The editors working in the system didn’t want me in the editing room. Well, I am sorry, that’s how I work. Thelma knows who I am, knows the best and the worst of it. Her loyalty to the film we’re trying to make is the key.
RS: I don’t remember your ever saying it quite that way.
MS: A loyalty to the film, to what my initial instinct was, what some people would call an idea, a vision, whatever. We are constantly being buffeted by all kinds of turbulence while making a movie. And you have to hold that plane straight as best you can. Thelma is very good at refocusing me. We’ll think about someone else’s idea, try it out sometimes, maybe even show it to the person whose idea it was. But, in the final analysis, it’s my call. She’s very loyal to that concept.
I’ve had editors try to make changes without my noticing. And I’ll say, “No, something happened there.” And the editor says, “I didn’t think you were going to notice that.” I don’t need to play games. It’s hard enough as it is. I have to work together with an editor I trust.
Thelma and I usually have a good time when we get into the editing room. The hardest time and the best time.
RS: Thelma asked me the other day, “How do you and Marty work?” I said, “Oh, we kind of go on until midnight or so.” And she says, “Oh, we sometimes used to edit all night.”
MS: We enjoyed that so much. We used to edit only at night. Raging Bull was edited only at night, so nobody would call us. King of Comedy was edited at night, and we got into a rhythm. That’s when making a film is really the most fun.
MUSIC
RICHARD SCHICKEL: Music is almost as important to you as film has been over the course of your career. Did your father ever take you to the Metropolitan Opera or to a concert, anything like that?
MARTIN SCORSESE: No. But eventually my friends and I would see operas. We’d have seats way up at the top of the old Met.
A lot of classical music I learned from Hollywood films. The first LP I bought was Tchaikovsky—the 1812 Overture. Some of my uncles had twelve-inch records of Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien, Debussy’s “Claire de Lune,” and I would listen to those, along with “M’Appari,” the aria from Martha that Enrico Caruso sang. I listened to a twelve-inch record of “Sing, Sing, Sing” by Benny Goodman. There was a great deal of music around me. In the sixties, I brought into the apartment Stravinsky, Le Sacre du printemps and L’Histoire du soldat, things like that. They began to get on my parents’ nerves a bit.
I took several music courses at NYU. I had a choice between the history of painting and the history of music, and I took music. I don’t regret it. Music was more useful in filmmaking.
RS: So where does pop music come in?
MS: Well, my interest in pop music, I guess, was born of the swing music I grew up listening to—records of Django Reinhardt and the Hot Club of France, and Al Jolson: Jolson’s records were rereleased for The Jolson Story at the time. His theatrical persona was amazing, extraordinary. Have you seen the restored version of Hallelujah, I’m a Bum?
In New York, New York, Liza Minnelli played the naturally gifted band singer who marries Robert De Niro’s driven bandleader, to their ultimate sorrow.
RS: No, I haven’t.
MS: I saw it on television as a young kid. It was a bad black-and-white, scratched, edited-down version. But they restored it about two years ago. It’s a masterpiece.
RS: Really?
MS: Lewis Milestone was the director. The editing was almost like Russian editing. Sometimes, too, the effect is almost Brechtian. It was a major revelation. It’s edgy and tough; it deals with the New Deal, and Marxism. It’s just extraordinary.
RS: Even in Milestone’s later films, which were sometimes banal thematically, there’s some beautiful filmmaking.
MS: His films were part of a United Artists television package—all the Alexander Korda films, plus things like The Shanghai Gesture, which was repeated all the time. I became obsessed with it.
Of Mice and Men was repeatedly shown, and that too affected me a lot. Lenny and George were like brothers.
RS: It resonated with you because you have a brother?
MS: Yes. But Aaron Copland’s music was also important to me. That was when my ear began to be attuned to scoring. We actually wound up using a section of that on the television in the background of the scene in Raging Bull when De Niro is fixing the TV, and he’s questioning his brother, which builds to the moment when he asks, Did you fuck my wife? That’s literally synced up to the end, when Bob’s walking up the stairs to confront his wife—the ending music of Of Mice and Men. All the dialogue is there, too. My ear became attuned to that kind of music. I saw The Red Pony on its release in 1949, and that was Copland’s music. My father liked guitars, and he bought some records. One record I still have is considered the first rock ’n’ roll record, one of the first “boogie-woogie” records. It was made in the forties by a guy named Arthur “Guitar” Smith and was called Guitar Boogie. The flip side was something by the Tennessee Ramblers, which you can’t get a copy of anymore. It was basically bluegrass. We had maybe twenty-five records and I played them over and over again. My father used to play ukulele, apparently; I never saw him do it live, but in my Italian documentary we have film of him that his brother-in-law shot. My father always talked about appreciating how people played guitar, banjo, bluegrass fiddling. My brother then started playing guitar, and sometimes my mother was washing dishes or something, and he’d be playing something, and she’d be singing along—songs like “When Day Is Done,” standards that we all knew.
When I was growing up, my mother used to like listening to country western. I heard it in the morning in the late forties, early fifties—Hank Williams and others.
RS: How does an Italian lady get to like country western?
MS: She just liked country western because of the guitars. I remember that we liked “Clear, Cool Water,” by the Sons of the Pioneers. Do you remember that?
RS: Do I remember it? Are you kidding?
MS: The thing about that was, for me as a kid, it was a very interesting story.
RS: [Sings.] “… don’t you listen to him, Dan, he’s a devil not a man …”
MS: A devil, not a man, yeah. Then the guy dies in the song. It’s a dramatic song. I guess the epitome of that kind of song is the “ride away” chorus in The Searchers. [Sings.] “Ride away.” It clicks in there with the opening shot and the last shot.
RS: Given all that, did the rock revolution really hit you hard? I mean, did it just blast into your consciousness?
MS: It did—because it was 1953. The songs up to that point were, you know—
RS: “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window.”
MS: Right. And Frankie Laine—“Jezebel”—or Perry Como singing “Round Round Round” and “Papaya Mama.” These are the bad ones; Como did good ones, too. And Frankie Laine sang “That’s My Desire,” which was not bad. But you had that extraordinary singer named Johnny …
RS: Johnny Ray?
MS: Yeah. “The Little White Cloud That Cried.” You’d hear this echoing in the streets, the 78s. I was thirteen years old, the right age, when I first heard Fats Domino, singing “I’m in Love Again,” and “When My Dreamboat Comes Home.” And then Presley’s “Hound Dog,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” “All Shook Up”—that was a key one. The other important singer for me was Little Richard—“Tutti Frutti,” that was major, right at that same time. My uncles loved music so much, and when I would play that, one of them would say, “He’s not singing. Listen. He’s out of breath.” They didn’t like it.
The other key voice for me was Ray Charles—“Hallelujah, I Love Her So.” That I have on 78, and on the flip side is a song called “What Would I Do Without You?,” which was a seminal song for many listeners of that period. It was seminal for The Band, I know; they would refer to it. It’s extraordinary. Only two, two and a half minutes, a blues number, but Ray does something with his voice at the end where it cracks, where it’s just overwhelmi
ng. Everything in the early fifties was changing. And at the same time you had pictures that were dealing with subject matter that was previously taboo. By 1954 there was On the Waterfront. The year after Blackboard Jungle appeared. To me it’s not a great picture, but once you hear—
RS: “Rock Around the Clock.”
MS: Exactly.
RS: Richard Brooks had a wild story about that. He could have bought the rights to that song.
MS: He would have never had to work.
RS: You know for how much? A thousand dollars.
MS: Then there were the other films that came out of Hollywood about rock ’n’ roll that were absolutely terrible.
RS: That one wasn’t so great, either.
MS: No, no, it wasn’t.
RS: But the opening is great.
MS: The only truly great rock ’n’ roll film is The Girl Can’t Help It [a 1956 comedy by comedy master Frank Tashlin, in which a gangster tries to make his talent-free girlfriend (Jayne Mansfield) into a singing star]. They actually took the care and the time. Not every performance in it is on the level of a Little Richard or Fats Domino or Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps. But that’s an extraordinary movie in terms of musical treatment.
RS: There is the big scene in Blackboard Jungle when the delinquents break all of Richard Kiley’s records.
MS: That was terrifying, very disturbing.
RS: It was, wasn’t it?
MS: Because I had those records at home.
RS: Of course you did. So did I.
MS: We had those records from the older generation. Those are the records we grew up on.
RS: It was symbolic—“Rock Around the Clock” is our music, the records we’re trashing are your music. And your music is moldy fig music.
MS: But you know, it wasn’t. I had it all. I mean, I appreciated the old and the new.
RS: Of course. But they were trying to say something about that generation of kids.
MS: It was a very tough transition. Some of the rock music wasn’t very good, but some was classic. The sound of a Fats Domino, for example, the New Orleans sound; it’s very special. It comes from many different sources: Cajun, the Acadians from Canada, Creoles. It’s a very special sound. Remember Professor Longhair playing jazz piano in Clint Eastwood’s documentary, doing “Tipitina”? It’s a great moment.
RS: Yes, it is.
MS: Some of it sustains itself better than others. For example, for me, the early Presley songs were fine. After that, once “Love Me Tender” came out, we rejected him. Some of my friends didn’t like any of the films he made except maybe King Creole, and Flaming Star, Don Siegel’s picture.
RS: I liked Flaming Star. It was a pretty good western.
MS: Flaming Star is pretty good.
RS: But he doesn’t sing in it, except the title song. The one with Barbara Stanwyck wasn’t so bad.
MS: What was that?
RS: Roustabout, I think.
MS: I hated those titles, Roustabout and Viva Las Vegas. By that time we wanted to see him transform as a performer. Those were the years of James Dean, and Montgomery Clift, and Brando, people coming out of the Hollywood cinema who spoke for the young.
RS: He should have adapted, he could have. If he hadn’t been managed by that terrible man—
MS: Colonel Parker, yes.
RS: I think he might have instinctively found his way to it. But, you know, Colonel Parker wasn’t having that.
MS: Oh, I know. They had to make their money with him. I helped edit the Elvis on Tour film. It was enjoyable. He certainly performed, there’s no doubt about it. But he didn’t develop or evolve. They just created something, and they kept him where he was.
RS: He just got fatter and crazier.
MS: I stopped listening to Presley, I think, after, oh, maybe 1958. I didn’t take him seriously anymore.
RS: What were you taking seriously at that point?
MS: There was still Chuck Berry, as a sort of a chronicler of the time if you listen to his lyrics. He was an originator. And being a New Yorker, doo-wop was very important to me. I hate that term, but those were the songs that were sung in the hallways. We would imitate those songs. Buddy Holly was very important to us—really key. There was something about the country and western influence. Did you know that Buddy Holly’s song “That’ll Be the Day” comes from The Searchers?
RS: Sure, of course. That line of Wayne’s.
MS: Because they saw that movie, and John Wayne does get those laughs when he says, “That’ll be the day.” The timing is perfect. I saw Buddy Holly at the Brooklyn Paramount in one big rock ’n’ roll show that ended with Jerry Lee Lewis, whom I also took seriously at the time. Buddy Holly up there on that stage—the thin suits, the narrow, narrow lapels, thin ties, big glasses. He had amplifiers that went to the ceiling.
We were stunned. Buddy Holly only played three songs, but they were extraordinary. Then Jerry Lee Lewis came out and just destroyed the place, I mean, took it down. That whole thing of attacking the piano. If you go back, Jimmy Durante did the same thing. And Franz Liszt—Lisztomania.
Leader of The Band: Robbie Robertson, who starred in The Last Waltz, became Scorsese’s good friend and, often, a musical collaborator on the director’s later films.
RS: Yes, right.
MS: Liszt would do what James Brown did.
RS: Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar. I mean, there’s a whole tradition of it.
MS: My father’s favorite performer was Cab Calloway. He loved Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald. You can’t touch them.
RS: Oh, absolutely.
MS: I appreciated all that. But my father kind of stopped listening after swing music. He didn’t really get into jazz. I bought some jazz in the fifties that was pretty interesting.
RS: But cool jazz is not emotional.
MS: You’re right. That’s the problem I had. But a lot of emotion did come in through the scores of movies—Sweet Smell of Success, Man with the Golden Arm, Elmer Bernstein. Odds Against Tomorrow, and Duke Ellington’s Anatomy of a Murder.
RS: That’s a very good score.
MS: In the early sixties, Quincy Jones did a good one for The Pawnbroker. I was trying to learn more about cool jazz. But I went another way. I’m too hotheaded for cool jazz.
RS: That’s a contrast between you and Clint. The big, WASPy West Coast guy went for the cool.
MS: And I went for the grand opera or rock ’n’ roll.
RS: Highly emotive music.
MS: Still, in the late fifties and early sixties, jazz was part of your everyday life. We had Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five.” We had Ahmad Jamal’s “At the Penthouse.” We had John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things.” We were playing those albums. Rock ’n’ roll was more powerful, but still, that music coexisted.
I may not have been delving into it as deeply as rock ’n’ roll, but country and western, country rock, the Dylan stuff, George Shearing, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Jimmy Giuffre—I knew all of it.
RS: It was a sort of obligatory eclecticism.
MS: Very much so. The best concert film for me is Jazz on a Summer’s Day—Bert Stern made it in the late fifties. I screened it again two or three times before doing the Stones picture. I said to myself, What are we going to do with the Rolling Stones since everybody’s done them? Jean-Luc Godard had even done the Stones. So I decided the only thing to do was just to do the performance, just stay with the music and stay with the performance.
He had great tension in the frame. He was a still photographer, you know—he may have needed only two cameras, really. I never knew him. But I went to see the film and I loved it! And it really holds up. For me, it’s the key music film.
Watch the opening credits, the way it intercuts the reflections in the water, the boats, the mist, the sails. Jimmy Giuffre is playing his saxophone. There is a medium close-up of him. As Giuffre plays, he keeps moving his head toward the bottom of the frame, because he keeps squeezing
out those notes. You think he’s going to go out of frame, but he doesn’t. The tension is wonderful. And the camera doesn’t move. It’s all interior, in a way.
It really holds up. In fact, Jagger and I were talking about making a Jazz on a Summer’s Day, about the Stones visiting New York. We came up with all these different scenarios. We went through a long writing process on that before we abandoned it.
RS: Did it ever occur to you that your burgeoning interest in film and your burgeoning interest in music would ever come together in any way?
MS: I think so. Music moved me. It literally makes us move a certain way. It makes certain things happen. It’s equivalent to dancing, I guess. You know, you behaved a certain way. Some of the boys were able to swagger. Others pulled back. But the music scored our lives. I was taking it all in, pulling it together.
I mean, the music was scoring what was happening—in the summer the windows were open and you heard music coming from other people’s apartments. The people were eating, or looking out the windows, and the music would be playing. There’d be a family fighting, and the music would be the background to that, too. Music was playing as you saw the derelicts on the Bowery.
It was a cacophony of all kinds of sounds, but I started to put it together. The piano music of Fats Domino, it felt like it was rolling, and the camera would move and move and move. That started something working in my mind. The Beach Boys were the furthest thing from my experience—California and surfing—but I appreciated them musically, it suggested certain movement and action to me.
Robert Pupkin in full cry.
RS: I went to see Tom Stoppard’s play Rock ’n’ Roll the other night. It has got a lot of great rock music in it, including a couple of Beach Boys numbers—Stoppard heard their music in Prague. Think about it.
MS: One of their key songs for me was “I Get Around.” I designed a whole sequence to it in Who’s That Knocking, though I didn’t use it in the end. I used “El Watusi” by Ray Barreto in a scene where the fellows are playing with guns.
Conversations with Scorsese Page 37
