Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  MS: You can’t get in the way of that. Yet you can get in the way—with wide shots, medium-wide shots. It’s very hard today because everything’s wide screen. You can’t get that close. It’s tricky too, when you can’t do the American shot. You know, from below the knees and up.

  But what was happening was I’d see the Hawks name showing up and I started to put it together. I didn’t care what it was—if it was the crazy Monkey Business or if it was Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, I’d watch it. Even Land of the Pharaohs. As a kid I just became obsessed with ancient Egypt. [The film, co-written by William Faulkner no less, is about a pharaoh obsessed with building an impregnable tomb so he can take his wealth with him to the next world.] It was really silly—and a lot of fun.

  RS: I have to admit, I sort of loved Land of the Pharaohs.

  MS: I just loved it. I went to it from theater to theater. It was my favorite film as a kid. And then On the Waterfront wiped all that away. It didn’t wipe away the love for it, but I didn’t have to go see it again. But there was something about the ancient world and the way they shot it in modern Egypt that was interesting to me, using wide screen. And the sound, the music, was interesting, with Yma Sumac on the track, and it made me think of other cultures. Maybe it was all ersatz, but still I liked it a lot.

  RS: I did, too. But in that period I think you enjoyed movies like Helen of Troy.

  MS: Yes, I did. I was talking about Quo Vadis two nights ago. And then me making my own Roman epics from that. Discovering Shakespeare through Julius Caesar. And then, yes, about the same time, Helen of Troy, and reading The Iliad because of it.

  RS: And, of course, The Silver Chalice.

  MS: Yes, of course; it is wonderful. I saw that uptown at the Warners Theater. To see that in 2.55 Scope with stereo sound was great. It was astounding to see those sets—the audacity of it. Too bad about the script, but you know—geez. Don’t forget that Boris Leven worked on that. He did the art direction.

  So the ancient world pictures were the ones I just was obsessed with. But the ones that really gave me the impetus to make a film were the other pictures. Because I could never do anything like the Roman ones.

  RS: From all you’ve said so far, I gather that the other genres—westerns, historical spectacles, even musicals—loomed larger in your formative years than gangster pictures.

  MS: I was thinking this morning, could we mention my films that aren’t gangster films? Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. To a certain extent Taxi Driver. New York, New York.

  RS: Of course, naturally.

  MS: The Last Waltz. The King of Comedy. After Hours, and so on. I mean, really, the majority of my films are not about gangsters. Most of them aren’t even that violent—Kundun, The Aviator, The Age of Innocence.

  RS: Right.

  MS: The gangster films make more of an impression, I guess.

  RS: Well, back when you were doing Mean Streets, were you saying, Look, this is what I know. This is my world. I can bring a certain amount of authenticity to it that I couldn’t if I was doing a Roman epic, not that anyone would let me.

  MS: No, not really. No, I didn’t think it was my right. That’s why I tried Alice. And Taxi Driver is very different, New York, New York. And that’s why I embraced Raging Bull.

  RS: Of course, sure.

  MS: After Mean Streets, I kind of pretended that that was all past. But by the time I embraced that world again I wasn’t trying to hide anything about where I came from. It was still very vivid. And at a certain point, my father said, “One day you should do a really good gangster film.” He kind of liked those—they were part of his folklore.

  But Taxi Driver was easier to finance because of the success of The Godfather, the first one. That’s how Bob De Niro was hired. I took the answer print up to show it to Francis [Ford Coppola], and he looked at it, and the next day he called De Niro to play in Godfather II.

  RS: Really?

  MS: Yes. So Francis was very important at that time for me. But I never thought I would make another gangster film until Goodfellas came up. Mean Streets to Goodfellas, that’s 1973 to 1990.

  RS: We’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. Let’s go back to your teen years, when you were going to movies on your own recognizance.

  MS: In my last two years at Cardinal Hayes High School, I kind of realized I didn’t know what I was going to do. I mean, I took some elective courses, more to do with business, which is the antithesis of who I am and what I do. So I was miserable. But, primarily, I think, at that point, the idea was to try English literature. And I was going to go to St. Francis College in Brooklyn. I was accepted there. I remember taking the exam and going in and discussing literature. Again, as I said, I didn’t think I read much, but I must have, because I was talking about Thomas Hardy and James Joyce, Graham Greene, James Baldwin, and Dostoyevsky. It wasn’t easy for me to read. You know, it wasn’t part of our cultural makeup, but I was ready to delve further into that.

  Instead I saw this catalogue from the New York University Washington Square College, and they had this department called TMR—Television, Motion Pictures, Radio. And I saw that for the first year you were allowed to take a history of motion pictures course. Everything else was what they call liberal arts curriculum. And so I thought, Well, I’m going to see what that class is like. NYU was in the Village; it was America, and I was becoming more American. It was not Elizabeth Street, you know.

  And the day I went for orientation, a member of each department got up, the English department, the French or whatever, and gave a speech. And the gentleman who got up to speak about the Television, Motion Pictures, Radio department was Haig Manoogian, and he had such energy, such passion. I said to myself, That’s where I want to be, with this person. At NYU at the time, if you could pay you were in, so my father got some student loans and I just joined up there. And, eventually, by my third year, I was making a film.

  WASHINGTON SQUARE

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: At that point you had definitely decided not to be a priest?

  MARTIN SCORSESE: I thought I might go into a seminary, but then I began to think this vocation I had was for the wrong reasons—it shouldn’t be about you, it should be about others, as we discussed before. But for me, it was going to be about cutting myself off from the world, not being a participant in it.

  I think I made the decision not to go when I went to my first class at Washington Square College, which had to do with movies.

  RS: Really? With that on-the-spot immediacy? Though by that time it must have occurred to you that all the stuff you’d been doing, all the drawing and movie-going, had somehow brought you to this place.

  MS: Well, yeah, it really was something like that. And it could have been television. I mean, they had one little television studio with two TV cameras. I did a few television plays. So it could’ve been television. It was still using a moving image, you know.

  And radio, I did a little bit of radio. Whenever we could we did radio plays. All on that one floor, by the way, the eighth floor of the East Building on Greene Street. And by 1960, all these other films were being made: by Cassavetes, Shirley Clarke, the French films, the Italian films. I knew something was happening with film, and I thought maybe I could get something to do in television or maybe documentaries. Because that’s what Haig emphasized: documentaries, never feature films.

  Marty interviewing his parents for his documentary Italianamerican (1974).

  RS: In your recent DGA Quarterly interview you talk a good deal about documentaries in that period.

  MS: I love them.

  RS: Did you think, Well, I wouldn’t dare to aspire to do a fictional film, but there are things I see around in life that I could make documentaries out of?

  MS: No, I didn’t feel that. I did feel, though, a power from a documentary that no fictional film could generate—a different kind of power.

  RS: Were there documentaries at that time that you particularly admired?

  MS: Oh, there was work by th
e Maysles brothers, and there were Leacock and Pennebaker. There were films coming out of France by Chris Marker. There were the older ones from the USIA [United States Information Agency] and other government agencies.

  RS: Very formal.

  MS: Very formal. There were pictures like George Stoney’s All My Babies. Then there were pictures that kind of crossed between documentaries and fiction. And I responded to them—a lot of it is because it felt like it was of the street. I don’t want to say “real,” but it had a kind of authenticity to it.

  RS: Right.

  MS: Kazan’s films from On the Waterfront on—look at the extras in the background, look at the people—Face in the Crowd, Baby Doll, and ultimately even Wild River and America, America. Somehow, Kazan brought it all together in a way. He was really the one who made me see the combination, I think, of the real and the fictional.

  RS: Doesn’t that reflect back, too, on the Rossellini films?

  MS: You’re absolutely right. It goes back to Paisan. But, you see, that was from another world, related to my grandparents and my parents; I wasn’t there in Naples with the little boy with the black soldier. But it is the same impulse.

  RS: I remember Kazan talking to me about Boomerang, the picture with Dana Andrews up in Connecticut, and saying how it was the first time he used real people in a fictional film. And that he really loved it. And then he went down to New Orleans and did Panic in the Streets, where he did the same thing.

  MS: When I saw that on television, after On the Waterfront, I realized that you could even do a thriller, or a conventional genre film, a studio film, within the trappings of a real location.

  RS: He also said to me, “I don’t think I could have made Waterfront if I hadn’t made Panic in the Streets.”

  MS: That’s right. But you’re also right about my direct line with Italian neorealism—Paisan and The Bicycle Thief, and Shoeshine; real people, non-actors, in real urban settings. There’s no doubt about it. They were more than movies to me. They especially hit me at that age of five or six years old, because it was so personal because of watching them with my family.

  But remember, there was no school of the arts at NYU at the time. There was liberal arts. You did your first film, if you could, in your junior year. There was a course where you learned a little bit of technology—the basics of 16 millimeter. But mostly it was English courses and philosophy and French.

  And, frankly, I was still involved, in real life, with the group that was in Mean Streets. The problem was that I could never survive in that group. I was a semi-outsider there, because you had to be somebody who could handle yourself in situations …

  RS: You mean muscular situations.

  MS: Muscular. Also, you need a kind of bravado that you also should back up. If you’re going to use your mouth a certain way, look at somebody a certain way, you have to be strong enough to back it up.

  RS: Otherwise they’ll kill you.

  MS: They’ll kill you. And it was constant. At that time, you know, there were a number of kids who were killed. They were—taken out, I should say. It was shocking. And this priest, Father Principe, made some sense. He made some sense about people and about living—about what it is to be a human being. And what it is to transcend. I don’t mean, you know, becoming beatific and experiencing stigmata. I’m talking about just basically living a decent life.

  RS: Well, the question I have is this: In Kundun it’s not just that the little boy is absorbed in his religion. I always see him as this kid up in the equivalent of—

  MS: The window overlooking the third floor front. [Laughs.]

  RS: —the window over the street. And he’s looking through his telescope. Or he’s grinding his little movie camera that will show him images of a world he’s never seen personally. And it’s one of the more touching qualities of that little boy that he wants to know more.

  MS: And learn about the world.

  RS: And so I, of course, immediately said there’s some analogy here between him and you.

  MS: I don’t know if I took that in consciously in any way. I mean, that’s from Melissa Mathison’s script, from the story of the Dalai Lama.

  RS: But it’s there.

  MS: It might very well be. But I was more interested in the young boy who was devoted to his spiritual life, as in Europa ’51, when the woman becomes a person who tries to help people.

  RS: I’ve never seen that film.

  MS: It’s a fascinating film. [Roberto Rossellini’s 1951 film, starring Ingrid Bergman, traces a careless, conventional woman’s conversion to sainthood.] I mean, I’m going to sound like a public service announcement. But there is the danger that if you give to somebody, you might get a gun back, get shot at. But there is something about changing that basic dynamic between people. It depends on whether you’re able to give. I found it fascinating.

  RS: But getting back to NYU and that first, I guess you could call it, life-changing experience of formal film studies.

  MS: The first year at Washington Square College, if you were thinking about majoring in communications or motion pictures, you had to take a history of motion pictures, radio, and television. And Haig Manoogian was the one who taught that—once a week, two and a half hours—everything from the Lumière brothers to The Great Train Robbery to Variety, Greed, then finally, maybe Nights of Cabiria or something else from Fellini. He was a very dynamic speaker, with a magnetic personality.

  He’d just get up on that little stage on Waverley Place near the main building of Washington Square College and start talking, and he didn’t care if anybody was listening. He just kept going on and on and on and on. And younger people were coming in and he’d say, Okay, you don’t come back, you don’t come back, “because some of you kids think because we’re showing movies, it’s fun. Get out.”

  RS: That appealed to you?

  MS: Well, he was very serious about it. I’ll never forget, the second week, one of the young people remarked that there was no music with the silent films. Haig said, “What do you think this is, a show?”

  RS: What did Haig think it was?

  MS: He was teaching about film. He was showing different developments, he had so much to tell us, and it was only two and a half hours a week. And an hour and a half is a film. You only have at most an hour to set it in context—he showed one German expressionist film, and then had to talk about the whole movement in less than an hour.

  You could see that he cared about this very much. And I felt the same way. So the passion that I had put into the church wound up being placed here, in film.

  In Haig Manoogian’s classes in 1960—I always point this out—you only had maybe a little over forty years of cinema to catch up with. Which was very doable. Besides which, only a few countries had a lengthy film tradition: England, France, and Italy, that’s it. We didn’t see anything from Asia until Kurosawa came on in the 1950s.

  RS: It’s a point I’ve often made, too. I believe it was theoretically possible, in the period you’re talking about, for an individual to have an all-encompassing knowledge of world cinema. It’s impossible now.

  MS: Impossible. Especially silent cinema—it’s a whole other language.

  RS: It’s not just that they’re movies that don’t talk. It’s an entirely different medium. It communicates in a different way. It has nothing to do with movies as we understand them today. But when, say, you show a little kid a Chaplin movie, she won’t care about how it’s different from what she’s used to. She just sees the funny man and the funny gags and it’s fine with her.

  MS: Right.

  RS: She hasn’t gotten so sophisticated that she realizes, Wait a minute, this is not a movie as I understand it.

  MS: She asks, “Will they be talking?” My daughter asks that now, and I say, “The Tramp, the Little Tramp, never spoke. But there will be talking by other people from time to time.” Especially in Modern Times.

  RS: A little in City Lights.

  MS: And she was fine with that.<
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  RS: Getting back to NYU, was it a big surprise to you that there were movements—or moments—like German expressionism in film history?

  MS: Yes, but not a complete one. I suspected it because of all the movies I’d seen as a kid, especially when I saw foreign films on television, particularly the Italian films. And then I saw Children of Paradise in French with subtitles. And other films: Beauty and the Beast, for example, was on a great deal in the afternoons.

  RS: Forgive me for saying this, but Haig Manoogian sounds kind of like a Jesuitical figure.

  MS: Maybe. But I think I may have put that on him. You know, he was Armenian and very, very passionate. He reminded me of the Greeks or, of course, the Italians. I met a lot of Greeks at Washington Square College—Greeks, Jewish kids, and Armenians. It was a great time. It opened my mind completely, and separated me from where I had come from.

  I felt really, really comfortable with it. And Haig was tough. He was a very stubborn man. He was really an amazing man. But that’s when it all clicked. And don’t forget, by that point I had seen Cassavetes’s film Shadows. I realized that films were being made around New York that didn’t depend on the Hollywood studios.

  RS: Right.

  MS: I would’ve liked to have made a film for a Hollywood studio, but it was all changing. We had Shadows, and, as I said, Shirley Clarke making her films, and Jonas Mekas. And the avant-garde cinema in general. That opened up a whole lot to me.

  Marty at the NYU film school, circa 1963.

  RS: Did you go to Cinema 16 [the leading film society devoted to independent cinema at this time]?

  MS: I didn’t go to Cinema 16, because right at that time Cinema 16 changed in a way. But every little storefront was showing film. There was Stan van der Beek or Hilary Harris, or Ed Emshwiller’s films [all avant-gardists, making non-narrative films]. Amos Vogel [a leading theoretician and exponent of avant-garde cinema, and the founder of Cinema 16] would be there, and I became friendly with him, and we would just go see everything. It was an amazing time with cinema, the actual celluloid carrying the image—directly drawing on it or scratching on it, whatever. Stan Brakhage’s pictures, too.