Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  MS: We’re going to miss it, you know. We’re going to miss a lot. Except, following the logic of nothingness, we won’t know.

  RS: I have a friend who says, “What I hate most about it is you’re asked to leave the party, and the party’s still going on.”

  MS: It will still be going on.

  RS: They’re going to be making movies—

  MS: Pictures are going to be made, plays are going to be written, and books are going to be written. And I’ll miss it all. It’s not fair.

  Marty lines up a shot in the danker reaches of the Shutter Island insane asylum. Cinematographer Robert Richardson is at his left.

  RS: You are finished, Mr. Scorsese.

  MS: Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, I have one more thing to say.

  RS: It’s funny, but it is not.

  MS: Well, you have to laugh about it because that’s what it is. Epictetus, I think, said not to be concerned with death, because life is the presence of feeling and emotion and awareness, and death is the absence of all of that, which means you won’t have any awareness. So why worry about it?

  RS: I’ve thought about the suddenness and the apparent motivelessness of violence in your films. There’s a lack of—forgive the pomposity of this phrase—precognitive awareness on the part of your characters in those situations. It makes your movies uniquely intense.

  MS: I don’t know. I don’t mean them to be.

  RS: Of course you mean them to be! What I’m saying is that I see a lot of movies and I admire a lot of movies. Your movies all characteristically have an enormous intensity to them. I’m not just talking about movement in the frame, the way you cut them, all of that technical business. There is a relentless, in-your-face quality to your movies. It’s not present in the work of most of your contemporaries. I admire Spielberg, but he doesn’t have that intensity. It comes out when we talk about, for example, your maniacal layering of music. It’s in everything you do.

  MS: Okay, it is in everything. It has to be worth saying to go through all this, to put it on film. And there’s gotta be somebody out there it’s going to say something to, to grab. It has to be that intense to accomplish that. It’s got to be like DiCaprio’s face when Jack Nicholson tells him, “I smell a rat.” Leo has to convince him he’s not the rat. Leo thinks, What am I doing here, what choice have I made in my life to get me in this position? It’s all there in his eyes. It has to be.

  RS: Well, where does the feeling that motivates that sequence spring from in you?

  MS: You have to be selfless to be a good servant. Yet I have a giant ego. That’s the way it is.

  RS: It’s the same with me. If I ask myself, What is the purpose of what I do? I have no idea. I think that’s true of most people.

  MS: People think in different ways. But you open up doors. That’s the key, I think. Like the Walter Benjamin material we discussed. The business about the aura of the work.

  RS: It’s a fabulous piece of thinking.

  MS: It’s quite something. It’s the kind of influence that a priest had on me when I was a kid, and he said, “Look at this book. Go see this movie. Listen to this piece of music.” And suddenly people go off in directions they never would have thought of.

  RS: Well, I guess that’s the ideal. If you make a movie, or if I write something, that gets to a couple of people and—

  MS: It makes some kind of difference.

  RS: If it makes them think a little differently and behave a little differently, then I guess we’ve fulfilled our purpose. I don’t know what else we’re here for. As you say, all the rest is ego.

  MS: Yes, the rest is ego.

  Kazan’s On the Waterfront meant so much to me. People do affect other people. So many people go up to Bob Dylan and say, “Your work changed my life.” What is he going to say to them? You can’t say “I didn’t mean to,” because in some way you did mean to.

  A lot of what I do comes from, again, what I perceived as religion and morality. The nature of the male-dominated world that my father represented, and also specific to that patriarchal religion—that whole way of thinking—as opposed to what I perceived in the “church,” which represented to me a more nurturing, female side of the religion.

  In my work, I’ve been trying to develop, over the past ten years, a nurturing compassion, I suppose. Some people say it’s just Catholic guilt, that’s all. But it’s still guilt. I don’t mean guilt from being late for mass or for having sexual thoughts. No, I’m talking about guilt that comes from just being alive. That’s what brings me to these characters.

  RS: Guilt from just being alive? That’s cosmic guilt!

  MS: I mean, it’s not like I’m complaining about it. I just need to live with it and deal with it. Look again at Leo’s face in The Departed. What is he guilty of?

  RS: Really nothing.

  MS: Yes, but in his mind, everything. He puts himself in a suicide situation. He’s going to die. He’s twenty-five years old. I’ve seen this happen, you know. I’ve seen people just condemn themselves. I’ve seen people destroy themselves over the years. Why? It’s not that easy. There’s something in our nature, something I gravitate toward.

  RS: Okay.

  MS: People say, You take yourself too damn seriously. But it’s the reality. I’m stuck with myself. I’ve been taking myself seriously. I’d better listen to myself and deal with it.

  RS: Well, you do take yourself seriously.

  MS: I can’t help that.

  RS: All of us do. We can pretend otherwise. But the truth of the matter is almost everything we do is something that comes from some part of our souls.

  MS: A basic core.

  RS: A core, yes.

  MS: Who we are, our heart.

  RS: Do you have any aspiration—

  MS: To make a love story?

  RS: To put it simply.

  MS: I keep thinking, Do I have to? But then I think, Well, if I’m able to do a love story, then I should be able to do an historical epic, I should be able to do anything else. In the time that’s left, I would love to find a story like Happy-Go-Lucky [Mike Leigh’s film about an amazingly cheerful schoolteacher’s life in North London], for example, to deal with those two people—Eddie Marsan’s character and Sally Hawkins’s character, Poppy, in the car.

  RS: Oh, that’s a really interesting entanglement, isn’t it?

  MS: Yeah, it’s wonderful. It’s not a test or an exam, but it’s like a canon of work that every filmmaker or novelist should be able to do.

  RS: Alfred Hitchcock, to name another Catholic-raised artist, made the same movie a hundred times.

  MS: Yes, but there were love stories, like Notorious. And Vertigo, the most extraordinary one, because Jimmy Stewart loses Kim Novak twice. If I finally do Silence, it will have no women in it, but it’s about love. It’s about love itself. And pushing the ego away, pushing the pride away. It’s about the essential nature of Christianity itself.

  RS: Is Christianity the ultimate expression of love? I don’t know.

  MS: It is the road I was given, the road that I was put on. If I had been born in the Middle East, I might have felt differently. I don’t know. My first experiences with love, basically, were with my parents. Then the concept of love itself came through indoctrination by the church in the early 1950s.

  I’ve gone through a lot of changes since then. But looking at who we are as a species, love does seem to be the only answer. So how is that nurtured? How is that developed in us as human beings? In our actions, particularly.

  I often think of The Bridge of San Luis Rey. [There are five people on the bridge, all of whom are killed by an earthquake. The Thornton Wilder novel and subsequent film ask whether their deaths were part of some cosmic plan or merely accidents.] There doesn’t appear to be a particular reason why they’re there. The nurse at the end—a nun, I think—is taking care of all the other victims and she suddenly thinks, What if there is no God? Then she looks around and says to herself, in effect, They need your help
one way or another, and she goes right back to work. That’s the beauty of it.

  EPILOGUE

  The image of the dutiful nun attending to those wounded in the collapse of the bridge of San Luis Rey is one that often recurs to Marty. It’s not particularly a spiritual thing. It’s more a matter of the practical—and inordinate—demands that conscience and the accidents of fate place on the individual.

  Alone among the world’s major directors, Marty maintains an incredibly active life as a filmmaker in other fields. For example, he was in London from spring 2010 to the end of the year directing (in 3-D) the film version of a very fine children’s book, Hugo Cabret. The story recounts the years in which Georges Méliès, the magician who pioneered the delightful special-effects films of the cinema’s early years, was forced out of the business and eked out a living as a shopkeeper in a Paris railroad station. As the movie would have it, he meets a young boy, also living in the station, with the film retailing their fantastic adventures. The aim is pure delight, but Marty being Marty, he found himself increasingly fascinated by the “sculptural” possibilities 3-D offers him. They are something new—and exciting—to his restless eye.

  Meantime, his documentary Letter to Elia, virtually completed before he began shooting the feature film, had its first film festival screenings, at Telluride and, later, at the New York Film Festival. It is a very personal tribute to one of his most revered directorial masters, Elia Kazan, and was meant for limited theatrical and wider DVD release. It followed by just a few weeks the HBO presentation of Boardwalk Empire, an historical epic about the criminal history of Atlantic City, for which he served as executive producer as well as the director of the first episode of the series. Beyond that he was directing the epic-length documentary Living in the Material World: George Harrison, about the life, music, and spiritual questings of the onetime Beatle, as well as the more modest Public Speaking, a very funny documentary about Fran Lebowitz, the comic writer, who is a personal friend of Marty and his wife, Helen. He was at the same time looking forward to shooting Silence, his long-dreamed-of film about Jesuit priests in Japan many centuries ago. At the same time, a script for his biopic about Frank Sinatra was in preparation.

  Just recounting the range of his activities in the fall of 2010 leaves everyone except Marty a little breathless. He says that at his age (sixty-eight during this flurry of activity), he more and more feels the pressure of time and his own mortality. So much to do, possibly so little time. Moreover, he has never banked as much money as other directors of his stature have done; he’s always plowing it back into film preservation, his collections of posters and film, his film foundation. He therefore worries about leaving enough money to assure his children’s future, especially that of his youngest daughter, Francesca.

  But more than practical considerations account for his pace. All of the work of 2010 and beyond has serious meaning for him; he wasn’t and will not be bowling for dollars with any of it. Take Boardwalk Empire, for example. It may be full of menacing and bloody activity. But it is also a serious representation of the rise of organized crime in the early twentieth century. The New Jersey playground was, Marty says, “the template for Las Vegas,” which means that it holds high intrinsic interest for him. I’ve never believed that he concerns himself so often with crime, both organized and disorganized, out of an impulse for sensationalism. It’s the extremes of behavior found in the underworld that fascinate him.

  And also the ironies it presents. For example, in Boardwalk Empire there is, of all things, the question of roads to consider. The rum runners needed paved highways to move their contraband from place to place. The result was the beginnings, at least in New Jersey, of an excellent road network that ultimately benefited the general public at least as much as it did the gangsters. It is this alertness to the curious by-products of criminal activity that distinguishes Marty’s work in this field from that of his competitors. Comedy, like violence, is a form of extreme behavior, and there is a lot more of the blacker varieties of comedy in his films than most people perceive. It is an important factor in making Goodfellas, for instance, such an extraordinary experience. And Boardwalk Empire is a more than usually interesting television series.

  But it is the documentaries that provide him with satisfactions not available in feature films. For one thing, the financial stakes in these pictures are much lower, which means the pressures on Marty are also lessened—especially deadline pressures. “You can approach the material carefully,” he says. “You can let the film grow naturally. You are much more free to play with the form than you can with a feature film.” The Kazan film provides a particularly good example. He worked on it for several years, testing different approaches to his subject, making a multitude of rough cuts as he refined various versions of the piece.

  Something similar, though with a different cumulative effect, occurred with the George Harrison film. He quite quickly determined that he did not want to think chronologically about the man’s life. What fascinated him was Harrison’s post-Beatles life, his disillusionment with celebrity follies, and, above all, the man’s earnest search for some deeper, existential meaning in our passage through life. The film is very long (about three hours) and contains some interesting digressions on less-than-obvious matters. For instance, Marty suggests that Harrison’s late music functions somewhat the way chanting does in Eastern religions, as an aid to meditation, which took Marty back to some of the ideas that underlay Kundun. Not that he wishes to proselytize for that notion. It is, he insists, just something that emerged as he worked with his material in comparative leisure.

  As for the Lebowitz film, it is a much lighter exercise. “I couldn’t resist it,” he says. Interviewing her, bringing his cameras to her public appearances, he quickly realized that “you could make a different film every night,” so mercurial is the persona she has created and plays with a sort of noisy subtlety. Making the film, Marty was often reminded of Italianamerican. However complex his filmmaking, both factual and fictional, becomes, he remains wedded to the idea that the world offers no more intriguing spectacle than that of a man and/or a woman simply talking to each other or to a camera. To invoke the cliché, such figures are capable of containing multitudes.

  They are also capable of containing Marty—by which I mean that his work on nonfiction films is not just something that keeps a workaholic busy. It is, I think, central to who he is as an artist. It would be easy for someone like Marty to lose touch with reality, to succumb to the high flattery that is always dangerously available to “auteurs.” This work on limited budgets, for (relatively speaking) limited audiences, on topics that are more interesting to him than they are to anyone else, keeps him grounded. It surely keeps him in touch with his modest beginnings, when getting any film, fictional or nonfictional, into release was a major triumph for him. They must, as well, remind him that maintaining your credentials as an artist in any medium requires that you from time to time devote yourself to topics that do not have broad popular appeal, that offer you more private satisfaction than public acclaim. This is, I think, especially true of moviemakers, who require so much more in the way of equipment and manpower to pursue their goals than do poets and painters.

  So his documentaries are not sidelines or indulgences for him. They are, I believe, a crucial element in maintaining his sense of himself. Marty has lately found himself taken with the notion that there “is more democracy in our culture than there is in our society at large”—a willingness to take more risks, to experiment more radically with both form and content. His documentaries put him at the center of that sort of activity. They freshen and recharge his energies, grant him the opportunity for serious play, which is essential to any artist. It’s an accident that so much of his work came to fruition in the fall of 2010. But it is no accident that the films were undertaken. They are of the essence as far as Marty is concerned. And they are a large part of what distinguishes his career from any other that comes easily to mind.

&
nbsp; ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Rather obviously, my gratitude goes first and foremost to Martin Scorsese, who embraced this book from the outset and devoted more hours to it than either of us imagined it would require. It’s not just the time that went into our conversations that I thank him for, but for the time I know he spent thinking about and preparing for our talk when I was not present. I have interviewed many directors—Marty included—for a series of television programs I have made about them and their work. But I have never gone into quite the depth I did with Marty, whose patience, concentration, and openness were wonderful to behold—and inspiring as well.

  My thanks for their assistance on this book go to a relatively small number of people, but they are all the more heartfelt because they are so few. In Marty’s office, his co-producer, Emma Tillinger, became over the years not just an informal collaborator in my efforts, but a true (and unfailingly good-natured) friend. Lisa Frichette, Marty’s personal assistant, has been a cheerful, blindlingly efficient presence as an arranger of meetings and source of information. She has been dauntless in support of a sometimes daunting task. Marianne Bower, Marty’s archivist, has been wonderfully patient in answering my many questions and in providing most of the pictures that add so much to this book’s appearance.

  At Knopf, Jonathan Segal has been—as always—an ideal editor: incisive, demanding, and insistent that this book be as good as I could possible make it. I’ve known Jon for something like thirty years, and his friendship is one of the ornaments of my life. His tireless assistant, Joey McGarvey, has handled the multitude of details that go into making any book with unfailing good cheer and marvelous efficiency.

  All these people have conspired to make this book a pleasure to work on and to make it better than I dared hope it might be. I hope that they will enjoy the results of our joint efforts.