Made Men

by Glenn Kenny

  I had been asked to submit a list of written questions so Scorsese could be well-prepared. In this exchange I was told that Scorsese did not want to discuss issues of producing credits, and in fact would prefer if I not bring up the name of his former producer and former wife at all. I had misgivings in this respect, of course. I decided I would not force the issue, and the fact that Irwin Winkler had already given me a response to Barbara De Fina’s account made my resignation a bit less concerning.

  Scorsese emerged from his office and Lisa led me inside as he paced around a little. A six-foot-tall poster for the 1942 classic Cat People made an immediate impression. Scorsese’s very occupied desk faced east; catty-cornered from it was an easy chair and a sofa separated by a small coffee table and I was pointed to the chair. Scorsese was dressed in a white shirt with a small blue check, jeans, and elegant brown leather loafers. All Armani, I presume; Scorsese has a longstanding professional and personal association with the design firm. He immediately struck me as a little tired and a little preoccupied. He began with the first of two apologies, telling me he would have loved to have done this sooner, but...and he shrugged, and indicated his desk and the boxes around the room. I congratulated him on The Irishman and mentioned that my wife and I were frequently chuffed when Scorsese, when thanking crew members at screenings of the film, would mention Kip Myers, who was the locations coordinator on the movie and is an old friend of ours. “No kidding? Oh, Kip’s great. Although I did yell at him a lot—‘Kip, my God, what have you done!!!’” He laughed. In Tom Shone’s coffee table book about The Irishman, he mentions that Kip put 5,000 miles on his Subaru Forester while scouting the over one hundred locations the film used; I told Scorsese I’d recently had the occasion to drive that same vehicle, and told Kip, “I’m driving a piece of film history!” Scorsese laughed again. “That’s right!”

  Lisa told Scorsese that she would interrupt the interview in the event that she got hold of “the doctor.”

  “Doctor?” I said. “My wife,” Scorsese said matter-of-factly.

  Since 1999 Scorsese has been married to Helen Morris, a book editor and producer; they have a daughter, Francesca, born in November of 1999. Francesca is now a college student at the same institution from which Scorsese came up, and where I now teach. Morris has Parkinson’s disease (she was diagnosed in 1990) and this is a cause of constant concern and monitoring these days. I think it is both out of his own general sense of discretion and a protective instinct and respect for his family that when Scorsese refers to the personal life of his past, he doesn’t mention any names.

  He sat on the couch and we got started.

  “I’m going to try to be as succinct at possible,” he said. “I appreciate you doing this. It’s very interesting and I’m sorry, because I could talk about this for days...but I don’t have the time. Sorry. Sor-ry! And you should know, Marianne [Bower, Scorsese’s print archivist] has so much in the archives...”

  “Yes, I’d love to speak with her,” I said. “I’m particularly interested in the annotated script. Joe Reidy let me look at his copy when I spoke with him.”

  “Joe really pulled it together. He knows. He and Michael Ballhaus really laid out the Copacabana shot for me in such a way...we knew where we were gonna go, and I’d go in the trailer and come back, and they’d have pieces of action plotted out, a little here a little there, and then ultimately by the end of the day we had it, but they did the legwork of staging stuff. And of course to make sure the table was flying right and to make sure that Mr. Tony the maître d’ was in the right place. When we used to go to the Copa, we were young kids, we were maybe late teenagers. We didn’t really frequent the lounge because that was for the...more mature crowd. Although the bar was run by Nicky De Faro, who was one of my best friends’ fathers. And we put him in Raging Bull, in the bar scene. In any event, we’d go, for example, celebrations, graduation, high school, I saw Bobby Darin there. Whenever we went to see Joe E. Lewis or Sammy Davis or whoever, we would get in the line and go down and we’d get tables. And the tables were always very good. Until the last minute. And all of a sudden, other tables come flying in and it’s all wiseguys. Or juiced-in people. And all of a sudden you couldn’t see anything. And we couldn’t believe we had such a great view, until the moment the performers came on, and then, gone. And so that had to be there. We did not go in through the back. We were kids.”

  “Everybody has wonderful things to say about Ballhaus,” I said, “and because of his work with Fassbinder...”

  “He could work very fast. And he wasn’t afraid of camera movement. If the camera’s freed by the use of lightweight equipment, whether it’s Shadows to Godard and Truffaut...in Italy they didn’t shoot with sound. Camera movement is less complicated with European thinking. American, in the ’70s as soon as the camera got freed up, through the inspiration of European or Asian cinema—mainly Japanese, because there was not much South Asian film available to us at that time—it got complicated very quickly. Somehow, there was more equipment involved, it was heavier to move...but in the European mindset it was just a different way of working. And in the European films there was a roughness that was part of the shot. I’m not talking about handheld, I’m not talking about obvious attempts at shaking the camera. It wasn’t supposed to be shaking. But you accepted it, and also it added to the energy of the shot, by being just a little off a bit. But in America, with a lot of the DPs, it became more arduous. And so Ballhaus had this freedom of thinking.”

  “I think of Godard’s A Woman Is a Woman, the opening scene, when the camera follows Anna Karina through the Paris streets. It’s a not too distant homage to Tashlin’s The Girl Can’t Help It, but much less slick...”

  “Yes. That was exactly it. The camera was moving and it seemed so effortless, it seemed like the camera was flying. And I liked that. I always wanted to get to that. And now you can do it with an iPhone. You finally got there.”

  Scorsese took a look at the sheet that had my written questions on it. The first one was this: “It just so happened that you had to take the opportunity to make Last Temptation when it preempted Goodfellas. Both films have a cinematic language that is your own, but each film is also distinctly different from the other. You spoke of the attempt to create timelessness in Last Temptation, but in Goodfellas time is always hurtling ahead. Did making Temptation when you did help you hone the approach you would take in Goodfellas?” (In case you are wondering, almost all my written questions were that wordy.) He took it up.

  “It was really the subject matter. Last Temptation was supposed to have been made in 1982, 1983. It was canceled, and in effect I had to start all over again. And I came back to New York. Honed my craft again to move faster on After Hours. Then, Mike Ovitz came into the picture. And that changed everything. And then what I applied to After Hours I applied to a studio picture, The Color of Money. Which is the only film I ever came in a day under and a million dollars under. Which I think betrays the mild nature of the film, which I’m not very satisfied with. It’s a good picture, I like it. But it was marking time in a way. A workout. The whole thing was that I wanted to get Last Temptation made. The script had to be changed. Reconfigured in a more economical way. Obviously. I had been trying to combine both Hollywood elements, meaning bigger films, with the Italian style. All of that had to be eliminated. I use the term Italian style to mean Olmi, Pasolini, the last films of Rossellini, Taviani, all that sort of thing. Now we were looking at a smaller crew, minimal crowds. Minimalism, really, minimalism. That had a lot to do with the ancient towns, the life. Obviously not of the Senate class, or the aristocratic class or Herod, but the people on the street. So. That opened the way for me. And the intensity within something that’s minimal. Camera movements included. And I had designed all the shots, they were all drawn. I enjoyed doing that but I was doing it to have control of the shoot. Knowing that if I was ever going to have it made, I wouldn’t have much money to make it with.r />
  “I was in Chicago, shooting Color of Money, and I was reading the New York Review of Books. And I certainly wasn’t going to do an organized crime film again. But I read this review of the book, Wiseguy, in which it was described as mob life from the point of view of the foot soldier. And I thought, This is interesting. So I got a copy of it. And I read it. I think I told Mike Ovitz. This is how it works, I think. Ovitz is above all of this stuff, and he’s behind all of it. Including Last Temptation. Including Kundun. Including Schindler’s List. Including Cape Fear. All of that. His guidance and influence is there. He was very proud to resuscitate my life. And also to get my taxes paid. By ’91 or ’92. In any event he was putting me back on track. And so... I believe Irwin Winkler, who stayed a very good friend, because we met in 1972 at the New York Film Festival, with Mean Streets, which has a major reference to Point Blank, which he produced, so we met and talked and worked together. On a number of films, including Raging Bull and New York, New York. New York, New York was a life experience. Put it that way. So was Raging Bull but New York, New York was more trouble. And we all went through that together. Raging Bull we all went through together but we had it. With New York, New York we were flailing about. I had some thoughts, I had a certain way of doing it, Irwin supported me; Bob Chartoff was his partner and we went through some very hard times and some very wonderful times making it. And I think he wanted to work with me again. Thelma and I were editing in Chicago. And it wasn’t an easy shoot, but it was easy enough, so that we could actually do some of the cutting as we were shooting. And I got a call from Irwin, who said, ‘You like this book, Wiseguy?’ and I said, ‘If I were to do another film about organized crime in New York, this would be the way to do it.’ Because that’s how I knew it, when I grew up, through the street corner. Combined with confidential information I heard from my father. Telling stories of people, sometimes I didn’t know their names. And that was only said at the kitchen table. Where nobody could hear.

  “Irwin said, ‘I’ll buy it for you.’ And that was that. Having said that, he was good friends with Nick Pileggi and Nora Ephron. And I was not. I was not in any way connected with the New York intelligentsia of the journalists, writers, for New York magazine. I knew a few people but I had horrible, horrible experiences with them. Understandably, though, under the circumstances. Still. I didn’t know Nick. I didn’t know his cousin Gay. Didn’t know Nora, any of these people. The Elaine’s group. I think I only went there twice. Once it was a little dinner to meet Isabelle Adjani, for Truffaut’s Story of Adele H. And then another time. And then one other time Nick took me. All these writers. Flexing their muscles. Elaine was very nice to me. But I don’t belong there. So I left.

  “Nick called me in Chicago and he was very nice, very complimentary. He later told me that when he told his agent that I was interested in doing it and Irwin was buying the book for me, he told Nick, ‘Don’t bother, ’cause he can’t get pictures made.’ His agent was negative on it. But that was the take on me at that time. That was the take. King of Comedy was an unmitigated disaster, except for a few good reviews. Last Temptation, the first time around, from ’82 to ’83, when it was canceled, was considered a folly. We were laughed at by everyone in Hollywood. Irwin and Bob tried but eventually they had to give up. So I was sent packing then. I had been living in Los Angeles since ’71. I couldn’t get anything done. That’s not to say that Paramount, when they canceled, because I was friendly with Jeffrey Katzenberg and Dawn Steel, that’s not to say that they didn’t offer me Witness. There was talk of Beverly Hills Cop. They tried to get me something that they had. I think even The Golden Child. But Witness was the one. And I...just couldn’t take my... I had to start all over again on my own things. I just couldn’t shift gears like that, especially after having the rug pulled out from under my feet. Because I was so into Last Temptation, it was all cast. And it wasn’t all them. There were circumstances, and [the Gulf and Western CEO—G&W was then the parent company of Paramount Pictures] Marvin Davis getting all those letters from evangelicals. It was just circumstances. A perfect storm, to use the cliché. But that’s what it was. I was talking after this for a little while with Gene Kirkwood, a friend of Irwin Winkler, nice guy, and dealing with Mark Helprin, the writer of Winter’s Tale. He at least said to my face, when we were talking about doing that book, this was around ’84 or ’85, ‘I’ve been talking to people in LA and they say you’re washed up.’ At this time I was doing After Hours, relegated to independent film, and at least David Geffen still believed in me and told me to go out and make that, for him.

  “I don’t mean anything negative about Helprin. He was concerned about his work getting on-screen. If this was the case, how are you going to get anything, especially a period movie with effects. And so that’s what I was regarded as, in a way. So understandably Nick’s agent was dubious. Even Irwin... Irwin came to visit me shooting one night on After Hours—it was all nights, forty nights—and he looked at me and said, ‘You wanna come do a real film again?’ And I said, ‘I thought I was making a real film.’ So he was very excited to do this. He got the rights and somehow Nick and I started working on it. I don’t know how.

  “You know what it was? In Chicago when I was reading it, I was taken up into the whirlwind of the last day. The way he was describing everything, I thought, This is the movie. This is the film. Everything builds to this. Forget all...the Lufthansa this...so and so being killed. None of it matters. What matters is the sauce. Sending her on the plane with her lucky hat. How much more can he take.”

  “You don’t even show the Lufthansa heist,” I said.

  “No no no! It’s not important! The money is important. They never found the money by the way!” Now, in the thick of his memories and observations, Scorsese could let go a little, and he began cackling with glee about the absurdity of the still partially unsolved case.

  “There was a prosecution just a few years ago,” I said, “a whole book is predicated on it, and they didn’t get...”

  “I can’t believe it! They can never get a conviction!” Scorsese says. We are both amused with this.

  “And the fact that none of them were made men. So they can behave badly. Especially in terms of Joe Pesci’s character. Which, I’ve gotta say, is something I’ve experienced. There was a kid I knew, he was killed at twenty-one for that. Now whether he was killing people, I don’t know, but he was the son of a major wiseguy. Then, about a year later, his father was killed. But we were with them, and that’s how it happens. So I’m aware of all of that, and I was around it. It was the last days of the wiseguy, is how I saw it. And it became a movie more about the lifestyle than any main character. Henry Hill was Virgil taking Dante around.”

  Getting back to the matter of cinematic language, he continued. “Around this time I did a commercial or two for Armani. And I discovered that, doing this commercial, which I’m not very good at, meaning selling stuff, but we made little films in a way. But it was fun to be in Milan, enjoyable, the clothes are just so wonderful...getting back to Italy, having burned certain bridges in Rome in the late ’70s, with my personal life, I was no longer welcome there...but I came back into the Italian scene through the Armani group in Milan. I made a commercial, and in Italy it can be a little longer, and then they tell you, you’ve got to have a minute version, and then they say, Oh, by the way you’ve got to do a twenty-second version, and then a ten-second. And I said, ‘Wait a minute.’ But I found a way to do it. And I found that shots could stay on...which I knew in a way...it’s about the information in the frame. Let’s say it’s a pocketbook and a hand places something in it. How long does it have to be for it to register in an audience’s mind? Knowing that, going back to Eisenstein. I know it, but I never did it. Or at least I did it in my first shorts at NYU, when I was playing with the medium. But they’re juvenilia. Murray, Nice Girl...not The Big Shave, The Big Shave is different. And I’m thinking, the world is going so fast...what if we make somethi
ng that’s very fast? And I always talk about this: the first three minutes of Jules et Jim. It’s pure cinema, and it’s beautiful. And the language. The actual words. The voice-over is also part of the image. And each frame, each camera move, each expression of the actors, has a poetic nature to it that is...poetic is an overused word. But what I mean is that so much information, and I don’t mean narrative information, is conveyed.”

  “But it’s true, it’s almost literally poetic, because ideas of line and meter are conveyed in the rhythm of the shots.”

  “Right, when the camera’s zooming in, and they’re saying, ‘We went to this island to see this statue...’”

  “And you have to pay attention, because if you don’t pay attention you lose the thread, and the point of it. You do that in Wolf of Wall Street, with the poor guy who marries the woman who fellated him in the elevator, and the gruesome cut to the tub full of blood.”

  “Oh, that’s right, that’s right, I forgot that. In Jules et Jim, the narrative is as you point out, on another level. It’s not direct exposition, I mean, he’s saying certain things, ‘I met Jules,’ and so on, that’s okay. But there’s something about the frames, and every time I see it I think of the different production elements in that frame. There’s not much to it. They’re taking stuff out of a trunk, but in my mind’s eye it’s the entire fin du siècle.”

  “And it’s the speed of thought.”

  “Yes, exactly, the speed of thought. Thank you.”

  “Nick said that both you guys went off after resolving to work together on the script and each outlined what needed cutting and you both came back with...”