Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  I attacked it on an emotional level. Even those who disagreed with me, especially in Hollywood, saw that there was a genuine reason for what I was saying. It was not to advance myself, or the film I was making at the moment. I was fighting for the films of the past. Don’t forget, I said, you’re also making money. You want people to see these films.

  RS: The artifacts of history in film are terribly important. I mean, the worst movie in the world will contain clues to how we lived, how we dressed, how we talked.

  MS: That is what I was pointing out in 1979. There was a film called The Creeping Terror, a silly sci-fi film shot in the Midwest. They got everybody in some town to act in it. So you actually saw the way people dressed. And you saw how they behaved in everyday life. They were “acting,” but they really weren’t. The plot was not the point. What was important to me was what it said about America, and about our culture. It was very moving.

  RS: It became a valuable record.

  MS: It really is.

  RS: Yet sometimes I feel that’s not enough for you. However much you contribute through your work with the Film Foundation, you keep saying you don’t feel you give as much as you should, or in the right way.

  MS: It’s the conflict of the selflessness with the selfishness. You can write a check to a charity and you feel better. But writing a check is doing nothing. You should be out there, if you really care about it.

  RS: You’re very stern.

  MS: It’s true. And it is coming from a person who feels he’s been a failure in giving over the years.

  RS: Wait a minute: For you to put what you put into the Film Foundation, the amount of work you do for it … You shouldn’t feel bad if you support film preservation. It’s a valid thing to do.

  MS: I do think it’s valid. I think it feeds the soul in a way.

  RS: Well, it certainly feeds your soul.

  MS: A good friend of mine recently said, to make a point about the necessity of art, “Let’s sell the Sistine Chapel to a developer so the poor can eat for one day with the profits.” But then what? They would eat for one day, but we would have lost the Sistine Chapel. And the Sistine Chapel may be of more value for people for the next ten centuries. It’s food for the soul. It’s spiritual nourishment.

  RS: Saving a glorious film that’s in danger of being lost or destroyed might also possibly sustain souls.

  MS: I know it will.

  RS: So you should feel fine.

  MS: I do feel okay about that. Maybe it’s just that we take ourselves too seriously in this business. How do you develop as a person? Am I in touch with what moves me at this age? Am I able to convey it through the films I make?

  Lenses, nature, actors. This has to be enough to drive you at a certain age, to keep you believing in what you’re doing. If you don’t believe in it, then you can’t do it.

  Marty particularly admired the gaudy color palette director John Stahl employed on this 1945 melodrama. Gene Tierney’s lipstick alone was enough to blow you out of the theater.

  RS: I’m entirely with you on that. I don’t really have to work anymore, but I like to work. I know you like to work. What the hell else would you do?

  MS: I tried thinking of it, and I don’t think I belong anywhere else, really. Maybe I should make more documentaries, especially the music ones. I need to find new forms of expression, narrative expression. And music is enriching. Whether it’s Dylan, George Harrison, or the blues musicians we featured on the PBS series.

  RS: The other aspect of your collecting is the posters. They’re fabulous. When did all that begin for you?

  MS: While I was doing the storyboards as a kid, I also did posters and movie ads.

  RS: I didn’t realize that. It makes me think of Walter Benjamin, the brilliant, tragic Jewish intellectual who died early in World War II.

  MS: I know the name, but I’ve never read him.

  RS: He wrote a very famous article called “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” His notion was that a great painting has an aura about it, and that the further you get from the original, through mechanical reproduction—newspaper lithographs and so forth—the more the aura diminishes, my point being that a movie is not a static object. It’s not in any particular place. It’s in thousands of places simultaneously. Almost intrinsically it can’t have an aura the way a Rembrandt painting can. Whereas a poster of that movie can have an aura of some sort.

  MS: That’s right, exactly.

  RS: It’s possible that a poster in some ways can have a poignancy and a power that the actual movie may not have. It’s showing you maybe the three or four images that are the best parts of the movie. Maybe that’s why posters have a kind of a particular pull for you.

  MS: By the early seventies I started to become obsessive about collecting them. It was part of this urge or impulse to possess the cinema experience. The posters promise something. They really do. A special dream.

  RS: If a poster is a good poster, it encompasses the movie instantly for you. Especially if you’ve seen the movie.

  MS: True.

  RS: But you’ve also spoken to me about the promise of the poster outside of the theater.

  MS: Yes, exactly.

  RS: But now that you’re collecting them, it’s not the promise anymore, it’s the memory.

  MS: Yes. The poster of Leave Her to Heaven evokes the entire movie for me. It’s not the greatest film, but it’s one of my favorites; I like watching it.

  RS: Gene Tierney’s lipstick blows your mind.

  MS: It just knocks you down. We studied it for Aviator.

  RS: All the lipsticks in that film are terribly vivid.

  MS: For years I lived with a part of a six-sheet of East of Eden. A six-sheet is a giant poster, basically. But the greater part of it was missing. I just had the one image from the middle of it. I framed it. It was over the couch in L.A. for a while. It’s in the vault now, I guess. It was just James Dean and Lois Smith in a dark hall; he’s getting ready to go down the hall to his mother’s room. Kazan came to dinner one night and was so taken by that. It conveyed all the fear of finding out what was at the end of the hall, what was in the room. There was no calligraphy, nothing, just that image. The East of Eden one-sheet doesn’t evoke the film for me in the same way.

  RS: What got you started collecting posters?

  MS: Well, it’s absurd, in a way—you can’t possess the film because you didn’t make the film, and you can’t possess the moment that the film was projected. It’s like chasing a phantom. The only way you can try to possess films is to make your own films. But they don’t come anywhere near the films that influenced you or impressed you when you were in your formative years. So you try to capture something of them.

  RS: I guess you could say a poster makes an object of a film.

  MS: It does.

  RS: I think it was Claude Chabrol who did a documentary showing clips of films made by the Nazis during the French occupation in World War II. There is this sequence when the narrator says, in a very chipper way, “Your favorite films are being used and recycled. And, in fact, very often you may find that certain films are being recycled as shoe polish.” For example, they show someone shining his shoes, and there’s his favorite actress smiling back at him from his shoe tip, and the man smiles back. The true essence of a movie doesn’t exist in the real, physical world, as opposed, maybe, to a poster, which is a stand-alone physical object. Can you remember the first movie poster you ever bought?

  MS: Phantom of the Opera. It’s a Belgian poster. My brother and I happened to see that movie on a rerelease on Halloween night at the Jefferson Theater in the 1950s.

  RS: I liked that movie.

  MS: Me, too. And I never saw color like that before. And the way it’s cut to the operetta Martha—it’s as well cut to the music and as well designed to the music as some of the scenes in Colonel Blimp, or Tales of Hoffmann. It’s a little silly at times, but it made such an impression on me.

  RS: It’s
the only version of The Phantom that gives the Phantom a motive.

  MS: I’ll never forget the scene when acid is thrown into Claude Rains’s face— turning his mild-mannered musician into the film’s eponymous monster.

  RS: It’s one of the great scenes.

  MS: And the poor guy goes into the sewer—

  RS: I saw it when I was twelve years old and I’ve never forgotten it.

  MS: By the way, the original one, tinted and slow, eighteen frames a second, is excellent. It’s with Lon Chaney.

  RS: Oh, it’s a very good silent film.

  MS: His movements are excellent.

  RS: So how many posters do you have now?

  MS: Three thousand maybe. They’re mainly at the Museum of Modern Art, which uses them for different shows. If there’s a film that’s restored, or there’s a special show for a filmmaker, I’m asked for certain posters. We just make sure they’re presented in a certain way, and that we can get them back. Recently, for the Roberto Rossellini show, we loaned them a few.

  RS: But your original motive was just that you wanted that first poster?

  MS: Well, yes. I looked at the use of color on it, and I was so obsessed with that three-strip Technicolor.

  RS: Where did you see it?

  MS: The poster was somewhere in Greenwich Village. It cost me maybe $25. Some years ago I found another copy, and that’s in the editing room. I always look at it.

  RS: Those Belgian posters, originally, all that same odd size.

  MS: And they are in both French and Flemish.

  RS: And what’s the first movie you collected?

  MS: I think it was Citizen Kane. And then I got 8½. 8½ is still very watchable for me.

  RS: It’s a wonderful film. Somebody said to me the other day that I had given it a bad review. I said, “I couldn’t have. I love that film.” But maybe I did, being young and stupid. I don’t even remember actually reviewing it.

  MS: I remember reviews people wrote in the sixties, even the fifties. I remember the Daily News review for The Night of the Hunter, two and a half stars. I went to see it anyway. I remember the review for Forbidden Planet in the Daily News—two stars, “a waste of electricity.”

  RS: Well, to be honest with you, I wouldn’t have given more than two and a half stars to The Night of the Hunter, either—at the time.

  MS: There are people who don’t like it, there’s no doubt about it.

  RS: At the end of the day, if you liked it, and I didn’t like it, it doesn’t make any difference. That’s just opinion.

  MS: It has to do with different generations as well.

  RS: Absolutely.

  MS: As I mentioned, some people say Fight Club is The Clockwork Orange of its generation. Whatever you may think of the film is neither here nor there. It’s the way it has affected many young people under the age of thirty right now.

  One of the ornaments of Marty’s poster collection. The Red Shoes (1948) was co-directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger; the former became Scorsese’s friend and mentor later in life, as well as Thelma Schoonmaker’s husband.

  RS: How many films have you collected, do you think?

  MS: About four thousand.

  RS: No wonder you’re broke all the time!

  MS: I’ve stopped. I was living comfortably, I’d say, until we did Gangs of New York. And then Gangs put me way in debt.

  RS: You put your own money in it?

  MS: I threw most of it in. I only got very little of my salary. I put the rest back into the movie. I was obsessed. I kept pouring it in.

  I mean, they weren’t even delivering The New York Times to the house. It took me until The Aviator to balance out the financial damage that I did to myself. That’s why I did a lot of publicity. I had to; I had to follow it through. I didn’t necessarily think it was going to win awards, but I had to follow it through in terms of box office.

  I felt I might not be able to make another film again, in the sense of getting Hollywood backing. If you agree to do a film for a certain amount of money, and if you as director go way over budget, you have to pay overages. I don’t know if I can afford it anymore. But somehow I have to do the films. I’ll find something, I’ll find a script, or a commercial, just to tide me over sometimes.

  RS: I cannot tell you how much garbage I have written in my life for exactly that reason. I have done it all my life. It’s only in the last five years that I don’t have to do it. It’s so hard to do something you’re not really passionate about.

  Yet sometimes when people give you an assignment, it turns out great.

  MS: Look at De Niro forcing me to do Raging Bull. Very often some people know what’s better for me than I know myself.

  ASPERGER’S SYNDROME

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: I read an article in The New Yorker once that made me think of you, and not you alone—other movie directors I’ve known as well. It was by Tim Page, a music critic, who suffers from Asperger’s syndrome. He quotes David Mamet from a new book he wrote about cinema in which he says if there weren’t Asperger’s syndrome, there would be no serious movies in America.

  MARTIN SCORSESE: [Laughs.] Why is that?

  RS: Because the syndrome is a form of autism. Page says the symptoms that he suffers from include an insane amount of knowledge about a subject—in his case, music. He has an infinite capacity for detailed work. People who know him say he is out of his mind to do it. It would be like you mixing a scene for the twentieth time.

  MS: That’s the best part [laughs].

  RS: As I read the piece, I was thinking, It’s kind of like Marty [laughs]. You should read it—it explains what I think those priests recognized when you were a little kid. You’re helpless, you understand.

  MS: Yes, I think I know what you’re saying.

  THE ONRUSH OF TIME

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: You’re in your sixties now. You’ve had great success lately. But I wonder—are you beginning to feel age creeping up on you?

  MARTIN SCORSESE: Of course, there’s less time. And there are certain responsibilities. It’s not a matter of luxury, but of keeping your nose above water and making sure my little girl’s taken care of. The amount of work you want to do, the kind of work you want to do—your choices are different at this age.

  RS: Looking at those choices, do you feel sometimes, I’ve done that, I want to move on, or is it, I’ve done it, but I can still do it better?

  MS: That’s the constant struggle, to decide.

  RS: How do you look at it?

  MS: When I talk about exercises in style, I don’t know if there’s any more time for that, because of the nature of the way I make a picture. Given the amount of time and effort I put into a picture, there’s no sense in revisiting a similar one unless I can find another facet to the gem, if it is a gem at all—and maybe unless I can learn something from making the film. Sometimes you think you’re learning from a film, and then sometimes you’re just happy to get through a film.

  RS: Every director has always said that.

  MS: So the choice is, (A) Should I do again types of pictures I’ve done before? I have to ask myself what about it will be different, stylistically different. What is different about the themes? And (B) Should I enter wholly new territory—to try to do a spectacle of the ancient world, for instance? Should I try to do maybe a children’s film?

  But because of the way I make films, as I said, those would take longer. I don’t know if I have that time to experiment. In the past ten years, I’ve kind of put them aside. I’m dealing with stories that are similar to what I’ve dealt with before. I think I’m finding new ways of telling them, finding new things in them to say, but maybe I’m kidding myself. I feel comfortable with what I’m doing—to a certain extent—and I feel impatient with it at the same time, because I want to move on in another direction.

  Marty, at his Video Village, consults with Dante Ferretti. This is his vantage point on some of his sets when the cameras are turning.

  RS: Some cr
itics say, Marty is always doing criminals, he’s always doing murderers. Then you go and do Kundun and they’re not exactly happy with that, either. Does that get in your head? Do you ever say, Maybe they’re right?

  MS: Oh, yes, sure, when I’m in a weakened state. But I’m constantly testing myself. If the material is similar to what you’ve done before but you still get excited about it, that’s the key: if you still want to deal with all the problems that you have to deal with to make any picture.

  There are a number of scripts I’ve read, a number of books I’ve read, where I’ve said it’d be wonderful to do a film with this. But in the end I don’t know if I could do them, something like John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra, for example.

  RS: That’s the one nobody’s ever licked. That would be a hard one for you, because it’s dealing with a very small-town society.

  MS: Exactly. I don’t know if I have the time to put into exploring that.

  RS: In effect, what you’re saying is, If you weren’t in your sixties—

  MS: Maybe I would try.

  RS: You could, perhaps, spend the extra time to absorb a different environment. Now you can’t.

  MS: I feel the onrush of time, but still, I have certain projects ahead of me, like Silence, which takes place in seventeenth-century Japan. I feel I can take the time on that, try to find the center of the picture. The shots are different because it’s not set in a modern world. It’s dealing with nature, and the evanescence of life, as opposed to it merely being about these two priests who are trying to sustain Christianity in Japan after the religion has been outlawed. They claim that God is demanding their—the priests’—martyrdom. And the Japanese are asking, What kind of a god is that? It’s pretty interesting.