Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  RS: How different?

  MS: It was more guarded.

  RS: Less black-and-white, maybe?

  MS: Yeah, less black-and-white. First of all, the family owes loyalty to itself, to each other. It all stems from how you treat each other in this room.

  RS: So, if that room is small enough, it’s going to increase the intensity?

  MS: It’s the table scene in East of Eden. I don’t mean he was pompous or in any way like the character played by Raymond Massey. But for an eight-year-old or a seven-year-old kid, you hear things that are just pretty scary.

  RS: And your parents are thinking, I don’t know what to do with him?

  MS: Exactly. My father was very concerned: The boy says he wants to be a priest. What if he’s not a real boy? Maybe there’s something different about him, you know.

  I wasn’t tough. In a way, you have to not believe in the soul. Certain people in those “mobs” had almost no choice. Some basically good people ended up doing bad things, because they had no choice. Then you have the monsters like the one that Jack becomes.

  But there are others who are doomed. My friend Raffaele Donato used to talk about good people forced into doing bad things because they’re uneducated, because they’re stuck, because they have problems with their families. And on the feast days or the festivals of the saints or whatever, they’d be the ones carrying the saint, and putting the weight on their shoulders to take the suffering. So that’s where a lot of my work comes from. It doesn’t come from a desire to always show the Italian Americans in this dark way.

  De Niro one time had a good answer for that. He went on for about five minutes in a meeting that I don’t see it as solely an Italian-American problem. I see it as what is in us, in every one of us. And I have to face what I think is not good about myself. And it’s realized more truthfully when I deal with it in those particular stories of the Italian-American world.

  All this comes together and it feels almost universal to me, and ultimately it seems that I found it more comfortable, more accessible to me to do in the stories that happened to involve Italian Americans. There is one more film about it called Neighborhood, a Nick Pileggi film, that one day I might make. Elia Kazan always told me to make it. It’s sort of a story about my mother and father.

  RS: Art has to be specific. Generalizations are the enemy of art.

  MS: I was thinking about it the other day, this idea of becoming a priest. Maybe it wasn’t really a serious vocation after all. Maybe I just wanted to be like that neighborhood priest, Father Principe. But, as I said, my parents were not religious.

  RS: Christmas and Lent Catholics?

  MS: Kind of. The last time my mother went to confession she said, “That priest asked me some questions. It’s none of his business.” She never went back.

  RS: That’s funny.

  MS: But, you know, what were they going to do with me? For about two years I was an altar boy. It was something to do and the priest was nice to me. But I got thrown out because I couldn’t make it to the seven o’clock mass. I’m not very good in the mornings.

  RS: I’m guessing that even that early you had some sort of half-formed doubts about the priestly vocation. Maybe it was too focused on you, your own needs.

  MS: Yeah, and it should be the other way.

  RS: And you felt that if you had a priestly vocation, it should be to help others.

  MS: Well, no. I understood that you have to help others, you do things for people, you work in schools, you work in the streets. But I was only thinking what was in it for me, not for what really mattered. And that’s what interests me about the Dalai Lama, about any truly spiritual or religious figure.

  RS: Talk a little more about that.

  MS: I don’t say I believe it now, but at that time I wondered, What’s the sense of hanging around here? If you die, you can go to heaven. So why be here? I mean, I put it in childlike terms—ultimately, maybe it’s just a matter of marking time until you’re dead.

  RS: The thought occurs to me all the time. Or I’ll say to people, “Well, you’ve got to do something between the cradle and the grave.”

  MS: We have to do it. I mean, I look back, I think about it a lot. But, anyway, I went to Cardinal Hayes, and in two and a half years at Cardinal Hayes I sort of straightened out—at least got focused. For what, I wasn’t quite sure.

  I wasn’t focused on movies. There was no such thing as that. I was focused—how should I say?—on not living the way the others were living, the ones who hadn’t gone to high school, the ones who hadn’t gone to college. I wanted to go, after Cardinal Hayes, to Fordham, but I was in the lower quarter of my graduating class, I hadn’t applied myself, or whatever.

  CUTS AND ANGLES

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: Was there any film, when you were a kid, where you would say, Well, that’s a knockout cut. Maybe you wouldn’t even have known to call it a cut. But a juxtaposition, maybe?

  MARTIN SCORSESE: I think I was aware of it. There was no doubt when I was very young and I saw Duel in the Sun [the epic, heavily sexualized western of 1946], there were some edited sequences, spectacle sequences, not the melodramatic stuff.

  RS: When they gather from all over the ranch—it’s beautiful.

  MS: I’ll never forget that.

  RS: It’s one of the best sequences ever.

  MS: Ever.

  RS: I mean, it’s a wacko King Vidor movie, from what Andrew Sarris once called his delirious phase, but boy, that’s a great sequence.

  MS: Yeah, yeah. And I’m trying to think. I’m trying to project myself back now: Is that something I noticed, the editing? Or didn’t I? I think I did in some way, because, you know, there’s the one cowboy and then there’s the two cowboys.

  Marty’s merry Christmas.

  RS: And then there’s twelve cowboys.

  MS: And how about, finally, hundreds of them coming over the hill to stop the railroad.

  RS: It’s just classic filmmaking.

  MS: Another one I remember liking when I was a kid was I Shot Jesse James, Sam Fuller’s first film. My father took me to see that when I was about six or seven years old. That ending. And those close-ups are amazing. I remember those close-ups very strongly. But the thing is, I knew it wasn’t your traditional western—a High Noon kind of thing. Something else was going on there. It was more intense. But I think the big one for me was Shane.

  RS: Really?

  MS: Because I was the same age as the boy. And there was something about the way the director [George Stevens] used the medium. For example, the fight scenes, the way the action erupts. And the way Shane goes for his gun—the use of sound effects and editing. And it cuts to Brandon De Wilde and his eyes open. And, of course, the fight in the bar.

  It’s beautifully constructed. You watch how it builds, and builds, and builds. Now, these days, I notice the music helps it to a certain extent. But, still, it’s got the traditional scene, which I did in Gangs of New York—you know, the intimidation at the bar. And again in The Departed with the cranberry juice, which is [Ben] Johnson in the bar with Alan Ladd, and Alan Ladd ordering sarsaparilla.

  I watched it while I was doing The Departed. And I liked the way it’s constructed. I don’t know if it holds together completely. I think there are elements of it that kind of get bogged down.

  RS: Well, I have observed this a great deal in interviewing directors, where directors do not look at movies the way movie critics do, or the way the audience does. Director conversations about movies will always come down to a cut, an angle, something to do with technique. Which the audience mostly skips. They’re really there for the story. And the story of Shane works for them.

  MS: Yeah, especially at the end—I was a little boy, and Shane’s the kind of father I wanted. It’s the kind of father any boy who saw it wanted. In the meantime, the kid’s real father, Van Heflin, is a good man.

  RS: Well, Van Heflin was kind of like your dad. I mean, a dutiful man.

  MS: Dutiful. And it�
�s also about taking responsibility for yourself, I hear that again. It’s hammered into my head.

  I disagree with you about the audience, though. The audience is affected by, for instance, the way the level of the sound effects were raised in that movie. And the editing of the scene—technical things, even if they’re not aware of them as technical. But a filmmaker may well be more aware of them.

  RS: And a filmmaker will be able to talk about it later, may even be able to trace influences on his work. It’s just an entirely different way of looking at movies.

  MS: Well, it is. Another example: Bonnie and Clyde, which was, I thought, an extraordinary film. I remembered a scene where they all get shot up in a motel that they’re in one night. And they get in the car, and they start to drive away. And they’re firing at this other car. And I swore there was a close-up of a gun coming toward the window and shooting into the car and hitting Gene Hackman in the eyes. I could have sworn there was a separate cut. But if you look at the film, it’s a medium-wide shot.

  So then I’d go back to see why I felt that way at that moment in the film. And often it isn’t just that moment—it’s scenes that build up to that moment. And acting for me was very important. When Brando came on the screen in On the Waterfront, my whole idea of acting changed. That doesn’t mean I didn’t still like James Mason or didn’t like William Holden. But for me, until Brando, cinema was the rhythm and the timing of the performers, like Judy Holliday and Broderick Crawford and William Holden in Born Yesterday: George Cukor directed that, and these films were plays, but yet they don’t feel like plays. You know, they don’t feel stagebound.

  RS: George was really good at that.

  MS: Yeah. I think it’s the actors and the timing. Also it came from watching some of David Lean’s films. I saw Breaking the Sound Barrier on its first release, and I think it holds up better than Brief Encounter.

  RS: I’ve always loved that film. [David Lean’s 1952 film about the development of supersonic flight is also a tense family drama involving a tyrannical airplane designer, his daughter, and the test pilot she marries.]

  MS: If you watch it now, it is really mystical, the whole relationship between the father and the son and Ann Todd at the end. It is really a beauty.

  RS: Yes.

  MS: And I learned a lot about sound editing from it.

  RS: Oh, really?

  MS: About the plane, and the way it was landing, the way the director cuts to the plane. They hear nothing, nothing, and then suddenly the buzzing gets louder and louder, and comes right at the camera. I used that a lot in The Aviator.

  RS: I wasn’t aware of the Lean connection.

  MS: But the Powell-Pressburger films are much more influential for me, of course. There was something about watching The Red Shoes that was all-encompassing, the excessive performances—Anton Walbrook, Moira Shearer—the makeup on their faces, it was extraordinary, the beauty of the production design. Then this very strange ballet sequence, which visually had more to do with silent cinema than anything else.

  RS: I don’t know if you felt it when The Red Shoes came out, but all the girls wanted to see it, and us hearty guys were saying, “Aw, don’t wanna see that!”

  MS: The guys were not going to go see the ballet. But for some reason my father took me to see it.

  RS: I remember going to it and, kind of against my will, being sort of strangely enchanted by it.

  MS: [Laughs.] But, you know, I guess what I’m getting to is that I became aware of those angles—even in something like Sam Fuller’s Park Row. It was again on Million Dollar Movie, and that obsessed me. I began to really notice long takes with a crane that he used. Granted, it was a very volatile picture, and maybe it was the energy of it that grabbed me. And maybe the way he moved the crane in the scene of rioting in the streets. And it ends with him fighting with somebody at the base of the statue of Horace Greeley. There’s something that was so explosive about the way the camera relentlessly kept moving.

  RS: But it seems to me important to point out that you’re probably the only person you knew at that age who was paying attention to that.

  MS: I know.

  RS: Everybody else was going, Oh, that was a neat flick.

  MS: Yes. But I did have my friend whom I had tortured by showing him all these drawings I had pretended were movies. And there was my other friend, Joe—we were altar boys together, and we hung out a lot together, and we just kept seeing all these movies. And we loved Ford, we loved John Wayne in these films, and I admit we didn’t really talk about technique. We talked about story and character, mainly character.

  In the American cinema—George Cukor, Billy Wilder—the angles are precise, they’re intelligent angles. They serve the story, the narrative. It’s very, very clear. And it’s a very gifted thing. I don’t even know how to do that, quite honestly.

  RS: So in this period, are you saying at all to yourself, I don’t know how you do it, I don’t know where I would go learn it, but that’s something I want to do?

  MS: Yes, absolutely. And you really couldn’t say it aloud. That’s why I hid the drawings, because you couldn’t say it. Your parents would think you’re mad. And then everything came together at the end of the fifties, the beginning of the sixties. The New Wave France and Italy and the 16 millimeter Eclair camera—the break away from the studios—because that camera gave you freedom. The French were using it, the Italians, the new American cinema in New York.

  Yet, at the same time, we were made to feel ashamed of American films—it was snobbery. They were not very intelligent, maybe not completely worthless, but still the more important films were, of course, Bergman’s, and the New Italian Wave. By the time Fellini did La Dolce Vita, by the time he did 8½, you had Bertolucci, Bellocchio, Olmi, Rosi. They seemed light-years ahead. So even though I loved the westerns, and musicals, there was something happening to me, something was seeping in from the Rossellini and the De Sica pictures.

  But, a little later, right around the mid-to late sixties, the much maligned, or misunderstood, auteur theory was being expressed. And Andrew Sarris came out with the American Cinema book [1968]. And I just looked at that list: John Ford, Nicholas Ray, Sam Fuller. I didn’t know anybody else knew about these films. There were in those days very few books on film. There was Arthur Knight’s The Liveliest Art, or Paul Rotha’s Film Till Now, the introduction to which already had an inferiority complex about English cinema. And I said, wait a second, I love The Fallen Idol—

  RS: Just to go back a minute, when you were a kid, maybe you weren’t consciously thinking about it, but some instinctive thing was pushing you toward film—the drawings, the whole obsessive interest in just seeing movies and absorbing them.

  MS: But it was a dream. Or maybe not completely a dream, because I drew them out on paper. And then with a couple of friends I did a little 8 millimeter thing that wasn’t very good, a short film with my friends, two or three of us, which I shot on the roofs of Mott Street with white sheets, in black-and-white. I didn’t understand lighting. I understood some camera movement, I think. And I tried to make this little film.

  RS: At NYU?

  MS: No, no, before NYU. A friend of mine whose father had a little extra money had a little camera, 8 millimeter. We were sixteen years old, seventeen. But I learned some things about camera angles and fooled around. And, what I did was, in my mother and father’s apartment—it was a Saturday night, they went out—I invited all my friends and our girlfriends, and we wound up trying to sync music to the film with a tape recorder. The music was eclectic. It was Django Reinhardt, Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky, Lonnie Donegan. It actually worked.

  RS: It was really an insane kid thing to do.

  MS: [Laughs.] But we did it!

  I had, by that point, seen Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory. It gave me the sense of camera positions. And I’d also seen Citizen Kane many times. I was crazed about Citizen Kane. It was on Million Dollar Movie, so I saw it twice a night for a week, even though
the March of Time sequence was edited out.

  RS: My God.

  MS: I saw The Third Man that way. The Third Man and Citizen Kane were the ones that actually made me try to direct—coupled with John Cassavetes doing Shadows, which has an improvisatory style. His people seemed like people I kind of knew. It had a freedom to it.

  RS: The Third Man is—I mean, talk about angles—

  MS: If Carol Reed never made another movie—The Third Man is a beautiful film, and it still holds up. The Departed just reeks of The Third Man.

  RS: Really?

  MS: Yeah. I mean, particularly the last sequence in the cemetery. I shot every angle of Vera [Farmiga, playing the estranged lover] leaving, going past Matt Damon. We went crazy shooting every possible angle. But I knew that the only angle was the one that was similar to the one at the end of The Third Man—not exact, but similar. And I shot that, too. And in the editing—well, I said, That’s it, there it is, just do it. It was so obviously my reference, anyway.

  RS: Well, in retrospect, I suppose.

  MS: But there was something about the excitement of the camera positions that I saw with Welles, even though I hadn’t seen The Magnificent Ambersons and I hadn’t seen Touch of Evil yet. The other thing was that when I would go to the Thalia, I saw everything—Alexander Nevsky, a lot of Russian films. Also Jacob Ben-Ami and Edgar G. Ulmer’s Green Fields and The Dybbuk, Yiddish cinema. I saw whatever seemed interesting. Some of the Mosfilm screen versions of obscure Chekhov plays were staggeringly dull, you had no idea what was happening, as opposed to Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Dovzhenko, who was the best. And even now, Dovzhenko is the one who holds up for me.

  RS: Same here.

  MS: Earth—