by Simon Schama
Disorder, horror, fear and mutiny,
Shall here inhabit, and this land be call’d
The field of Golgotha and dead men’s skulls.
Death is everywhere in the play – ‘graves, worms and epitaphs’ already on Richard’s mind when he is barely back on dry land. In fact, the drama is perhaps best thought (especially by the sixty-something Queen Elizabeth) as an Ars Moriendi: a preparatory treatise on how to die, wholly right for a history set in the world of the Black Death. Richard learns the hard way. But he does learn, and near the end asks his weeping queen also to ‘learn, good soul,/To think our former state a happy dream’. Richard’s eagerness to embrace his Christ-like sacrificial martyrdom was a logical end for the historical ruler, who did indeed suffer more than somewhat from a Messiah complex, understandable (if not forgivable) in an age desperate for saviours. It’s a pity, really, that Shakespeare opted for the predictable thug-attack to polish him off, since the more historically plausible end of the King – death by starvation – would have given Richard a chance to meditate more fully on the provisional nature of majesty, indeed of earthly life itself, and to become absorbed most completely into his transfiguration as a Plantagenet Buddha.
Henry IV, Part II
Note for the Royal Shakespeare Company production, 2008
Among the Histories this is The tragedy. It is, not least in the cool tightness of its writing, right up there with Dane, Moor and Scot. At its pitiless end, no bodies litter the stage. Something much worse has happened: the annihilation of hope; the banishment not just of plump Jack Falstaff, but of delusion. What remains? The naked machinery of power in all its grinding metallic cruelty; the tinny blare of trumpets tuning up for the new king’s murderous cross-Channel excursion, courtesy of his father’s deathbed counsel. And Shakespeare appearing as himself at the very end offering a mordant shrug, ‘My tongue is weary; when my legs are too, I will bid you good night.’
Only those half-asleep in the stalls imagine that Henry IV, Part II is somehow an ‘add-on’ to Part I. It certainly is woodwind to I’s brass, but the plaintive minor key that plays throughout is the tip-off to II’s darker profundity. II needs I to set up the vanities – history, amity, loyalty, appetite, mirth, battle – because II’s job is to rip them all to shreds. The muscular heft of history gets collapsed into rumour, false comfort, ill tidings. Unlike I, not only is there no point to the plots and rebellions, but those who enact them know there is no point, except some sort of remorseless execution of a fatal cycle. So the protagonists on both sides – the dying king, the melancholy Archbishop of York – spend time wrestling with the unquiet ghost of Richard II, whose deposition and murder have condemned them all to stumble around forever sleepless like the grimly insomniac king.
Not a hoot, then, even with Falstaff at its heart? No, but something important remains amid the cold political ashes: memory. Part II is better called a memory play than a history; it is the most lyrical Shakespeare ever wrote. And it needs the most delicate touch in its direction and acting to draw out the autumnal pathos. The most heartbreakingly vivid scenes come from the mouths of the old as they spirit themselves back beyond the ache of their brittle bones to the lusty lads and lasses they still feel themselves to be. Whatever else ails them, their memories are as bright as gems: ‘Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet sitting in my Dolphin-chamber at the round table, by a sea-coal fire, upon Wednesday in Wheeson week when the prince broke thy head for liking his father to a singing man of Windsor . . .’ prattles Mistress Quickly, never forgetting Falstaff’s promise of betrothal – and we see the moment in all its hopeless glory. ‘Then was Jack Falstaff, now Sir John, a boy and page to Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk,’ reminisces Shallow to Silence, and we suddenly see the juvenile, perhaps slender Jack. Time rustles in the lines like fallen leaves.
What makes all this bearable is a scene of intense sweetness, a love scene all the more tender for being ostensibly dressed in farce, and the purer for being set in Mistress Quickly’s brothel. After the raillery – and brutal it is, with much talk of diseases – between Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet, they become creakily amorous for old time’s sake: ‘Come I’ll be friends with thee Jack; thou art going to the wars and whether I shall ever see thee again or no there is nobody cares.’
Falstaff defends Doll against the rampaging Pistol, then verbally sets about the Prince and his friend Ned Poins, ‘a weak mind and an able body’, not knowing they are listening in disguise. The affronted then get their satisfaction by cackling at the ancient venery:
Poins: Let’s beat him before his whore.
Prince: Look, whether the withered elder hath not his poll clawed like a parrot.
Poins: Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?
To which Falstaff, oblivious, gives the retort that redeems the entire play from the cynicism that sometimes seems to chill it, a single moment of instinctive, unembarrassed humanity: ‘Kiss me, Doll.’ And she does, for unlike princes and kings, the whore is true: ‘By my troth, I kiss thee with a most constant heart.’
Martin Scorsese: Good-Fella
Financial Times, 30 October 2009
It’s just as well that the couch I’m sitting on is plump and hospitable or I might have fallen off it when Martin Scorsese tells me that the real inspiration for the tone and voice of Goodfellas was not Scarface or Public Enemy, but Kind Hearts and Coronets. Oh, right, Alec Guinness in drag, Joe Pesci in murderous hysterics, I see. But then, when you think about it for a minute, the revelation makes perfect sense. The note of black glee in Ray Liotta’s interior monologues (‘As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster’) is not that far away from Dennis Price’s cool plan to murder his way into the landed class that presumes to despise him. They share the smirk of superior knowledge, the contempt for the chumps who do things the regular way. Mayhem and chuckling are never far apart in either the British post-war comedies or Scorsese’s opera of mischief. Stick a fedora on Dennis Price or Alastair Sim, unclip the accent and they could breeze downtown. The wiseguys in Goodfellas spend even more time laughing than killing. Sometimes the uproar is so unhinged that it looks like de Niro, Liotta and Pesci will dislocate their jaws, like pythons guffawing as they digest a goat.
In his sixties, Scorsese is at the height of his powers, which is saying something. After a long day in the cutting room working on a pilot for a television drama series about Prohibition-era Atlantic City, his conversation is still high-octane, the enthusiasms sparks, that catch the weighty pack of his idea-loaded imagination. Lately, he’s got a lot to be happy about. His new movie, Shutter Island, based on a thriller by Dennis Lehane, scheduled for release early in 2010, is set in an institution for the criminally insane off the Massachusetts coast, a pile that makes the hotel in The Shining or Motel Bates look like day-trips to Disneyland. Scorsese built the set around the shell of the old hospital. The gurneys were still there, the stainless steel of the cafeteria giving off a bad glint. ‘You walked in and you could feel it, the disturbance,’ he says. Ben Kingsley and Leonardo di Caprio (doing most of his own stunts) stalk and scuttle through it like cat and rat, and the storm-blasted island turns in a performance of thunderously Calvinist gloom. If there were an Oscar for best acting role by a landscape, Shutter Island would be a shoo-in. For the first time Scorsese had to work with those pesky extras, trees. ‘Never worked in a forest before. Hard to get the shots, no room for dollies and tracks.’ In many ways the movie, a crazy quilt of dreams and terrors, was a tall order. A week into filming the director realised what he was up against, the fiendishly complicated layering of Lehane’s story asking him to ‘make three films at the same time’. Maybe Scorsese works best when most stretched, for the result of all the perfectionist head-scratching and pitch-in ensemble acting is a triumph of what you might call heavy entertainment, but only in the sense that bits of King Lear are too.
And like everything Martin Scorsese does, Shutter Island is e
nriched by its director’s encylopaedic memory of the cinema. Nothing so laborious as ‘homage’ gets inserted; there are no billboarded visual quotations, but it’s as though Scorsese has internalised the entire history of the medium, turning himself into a one-man archive on which he can draw for inspiration in whichever genre he happens to be working. Sometimes even the admirers forget his astounding range. The same director who made the agonised Raging Bull and the manic, temple-pounding Bringing Out the Dead also made the exquisitely patient Kundun, the camera letting a small boy come at his own pace to the realisation of what it meant to be the Dalai Lama. The guiding light of Satyajit Ray seemed to be at Scorsese’s shoulder when he dissolved the camera into the chosen boy’s point of view. So which movies guided him this time? ‘Oh, for the atmospherics, the way of setting mood: Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and Out of the Past,’ he says, as if I was bound to know all about the work of Jacques Tourneur. Caught out like an undergraduate claiming to have ‘looked’ at the assignment rather than actually to have done it, I make a quick hit on YouTube after our meeting and there are the Tourneur films, moodily off-kilter, tautly scripted, nagging little shards in the psyche.
This total immersion works curatorially. Scorsese doesn’t just make individual movies, chasing box-office and the annual-award madness, though he’d be inhuman not to want both. But he has always felt lucky to be able to work in the art to which he’s been addicted since, as a bronchial altar boy, he sat bewitched in the Saturday-morning movie theatre darkness, or watching on black-and-white television (as I did an ocean away in London) Alexander Korda costume movies like The Private Life of Henry VIII or David Lean’s Great Expectations, in which John Mills was scared pipless by Magwitch and Jean Simmons as Estella stomped on our balls even before we had any.
Never taking this good fortune for granted (it was an outrageously long time before The Movies finally returned the favour with Oscars), Scorsese has done everything he could to look after the memory bank. He has been a major force in the conservation and restoration of decaying and damaged film; devoting special care to films which meant a lot to his own education as student and practitioner. Olivier’s Richard III he first saw in a black-and-white television broadcast, but it was shot in a process called VistaVision, and he is currently restoring a surviving print to its original splendour. The winter of discontent will never look so sunny. Meanwhile, the ‘crawl’ that opens the film, ‘England, 1485 . . .’ etc., sits in his personal treasure trove in New York along with the Red Shoes from Michael Powell’s masterpiece. In between feature films he and his long-time friend and editor-collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker, who was married to Powell and whose perfect touch is all over Shutter Island, are putting together a documentary chronicle of the British cinema from the late 1940s to the gritty neo-realist films of the early ’60s: Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Tony Richardson’s Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life. Like his Italian documentary, the work will be unapologetically personal and when I hear him summon up the shade of Ian Carmichael (I’m Alright Jack is a favourite), the improbability of the young Scorsese, spending time in the world of the Lawrentian slagheaps and the two-ups, two-downs, strikes me all over again. But for Scorsese, the fried eggs and rolled-down nylons, footy in the smoke and puke in the pubs, brought a scuffed-up truth of documentary realism to Ealing, Pinewood and Elstree, much as Rossellini, de Sica and Visconti did for the fantasy world of Italian films. He may be the only director who can invoke Rocco and His Brothers and This Sporting Life in the same sentence, as if it were obvious they were rivers flowing into the same deep sea of social drama. Talking about them, I have a presumptuous hunch and wonder out loud if the bone-crunching sound track of the rugby-league movie, with Richard Harris’s skull smashing against other mangled faces, had any influence on the way Scorsese recorded and shot the boxing devastation of de Niro’s Jake la Motta in Raging Bull? A pause. Ever the tactful gent, he replies, ‘Maybe, yes, maybe!’
Sure. But generosity comes naturally to Scorsese. So it shouldn’t be surprising that he agreed to participate in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative – one of a group (other distinguished mentors work in theatre, literature, dance, music and the visual arts) – that gives younger artists the opportunity to learn something about their vocation by directly experiencing a work-in-progress. (Stephen Frears was a Rolex Mentor in 2008.) The lucky young director who got to spend precious time, months of it, with Scorsese at work on Shutter Island is Celina Murgan, an Argentinian with two films already on her résumé. Scorsese chose her from a shortlist of three, impressed by a film she had made about teenagers doing their thing in a gated community after the parents had gone. ‘I sat there, and around twenty-five minutes into it, I realised this was something; that, almost casually, she had created a world that already seemed to have been there, no starting, no stopping.’ A benevolent chuckle and ‘Of course that’s a different sensibility, not the way I work, but . . .’ And it was exactly because he does things differently, generates the worlds he creates out of the plot, that Scorsese, so open to other ways, picked his lucky protégé. Murgan got to go to the shoot of Shutter Island as often as she wanted and must have seen the toughest of movie-making challenges bloom into something extraordinary; the actors reaching hard; the director revising and revising again as things went along. Could she talk about particular shots? ‘Sure, sometimes, to the assistant director.’ She was welcomed to the cutting room, to the sound mix and, exceptionally, even to rushes – ‘not always . . . I like to speak freely to Thelma’.
There’s a back story to this great gift. Murgan – and many others, it turns out – are getting the chance that the young Scorsese was himself denied. In the 1960s, a young film student in NYU School of the Arts, Scorsese badly wanted to get experience first-hand from a master. Elia Kazan – whose On the Waterfront and East of Eden were just the kind of epics of social pain he revered – was visiting the school. Scorsese, script in hand, made an appointment. He arrived ten minutes late at the great man’s office. Kazan had his coat on, listened to the young enthusiast, riffled cursorily through the script and wished him luck. Indies hardly existed in New York, other than John Cassavetes’s company that produced Shadows. There was nowhere to go and no one to help a novice through an apprenticeship. Scorsese, without any ill will, thought at that moment, ‘If ever I was in Kazan’s position, I’d do something to help.’ So starting with Taxi Driver, he brought novices onto the set, sometimes youngsters with absolutely no experience of film-making beforehand, and into the crew as apprentices, ‘So long as they didn’t get in the way of the actors and knew when not to speak up.’ Some of them decided film wasn’t for them, but others began their career this way and went on to make good features and stay in touch. I’d never heard of such a thing, directors normally being ruthless about keeping ‘outsiders’ away from the set. But Scorsese was, and is, different. He makes outsiders insiders and all he asks for is rapt attentiveness. So, I ask him, which films after Taxi Driver did he open to this kind of apprenticeship. ‘All of them,’ he says. ‘Anyone else do this kind of thing that you know of?’ Scorsese smiles, shrugs.
Which only reminds me that to spend any time with him is to be in the presence of someone for whom his hard craft is an exacting labour of love. He burns with the anxiety and pleasure of that knowledge like a perpetually glowing coal. And some lucky people get to draw close to the warmth. His ten-year-old daughter Francesca, for example, to whom he’s showing the British comedies of the 1950s that still fill him with delight. ‘Does she get it, the wickedness?’ I ask. ‘Oh, The Ladykillers, she and her friends they all love it. There’s this moment when there’s a fight going on and the little old lady comes in and they stop fighting! They stop!’ Scorsese laughs like the connoisseur of mischief that he is – and like the ten-year-old he once was, watching that malarkey unfold for the first time. One thing is for certain; he’s the perpetuum mobile; he doesn’t do
stop.
Charlotte Rampling
Harper’s Bazaar, January 2010
There’s a crunchy moment in The Night Porter when Charlotte Rampling lays a trap for her ex-concentration-camp guard, played by Dirk Bogarde, which involves him walking over broken glass. He does so and smiles. Ten minutes into the interview with her and I know how he felt. The lacerations are minor, the attractions powerful. But there are moments when it feels bloody. It’s not that Rampling is openly hostile; just giving off waves of someone enduring a minor indignity, like a dental check-up. To be fair, she had been perfectly frank about her distaste for interviews, telling me that one reason she doesn’t do many films is that she finds ‘the exposure’ tawdry. ‘There are so many things I hate,’ she says, offering a steely smile. I grin back weakly, hoping I’m not the most recent addition to what’s obviously a long list.