Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

RS: Well, as we discussed earlier, it’s a particular homage, it seems to me, to Vincente Minnelli.

  MS: Particularly The Band Wagon.

  RS: Because his use of color was different from other people’s use of color.

  MS: Amazing, amazing. And we used many of the stills from Band Wagon as research, with Boris Leven designing. But really it was that element of Technicolor promising one thing and yet having a darkness. I wanted to combine the two. [Laughs.]

  RS: I understand that. But I’m also not sure there’s a really good chemistry between Bob De Niro and Liza Minnelli in that film.

  MS: I thought there was. But I couldn’t tell.

  RS: There’s something that doesn’t quite jell, that doesn’t quite say that whatever else is between these people, there is a passion.

  MS: Maybe.

  RS: They’re acting it. They’re trying. Yet—

  MS: That could be because of what we did to the material. The thing we got interested in more was the competitiveness, and how that ate away at the relationship.

  RS: But one of the things that’s striking in the movie is that De Niro’s character is much more consciously passionate about his work, his music, than she is. She’s kind of a natural.

  MS: That’s the thing. I think, ultimately, she is a natural. And he has to work at it and work at it. And there’s a resentment. And it’s very unpleasant.

  RS: The ambition of the movie really does come through, though. It’s manifest in the way the movie is shot and staged. It just doesn’t quite get translated into the dramatic action.

  MS: Well, that’s in the writing—in the rewriting, I should say. That’s what we were trying to do with improvisation, working with Earl Mac Rauch, the writer. Other people worked on it, too—Mardik Martin, Irwin helped, Jay Cocks, a number of people. People who were experimenting to see where we could go. It was a dangerous thing because, of course, there was a lot of money involved. But beyond that, I’d come off three movies that were well received: Mean Streets, although it wasn’t a financial hit; Alice was pretty well received; and Taxi Driver was certainly well received. So there was a lot to lose. It was a big gamble.

  “The best-laid plans …”: Marty attempts to solve his overwhelming problems on the New York, New York set.

  RS: What is Marty up to? I remember that feeling being in the air at the time. Doing a film of a type you had done nothing like before.

  MS: Maybe it was wrangling something like six to eight horses in the chariot before they just run wild. And they ran wild. And then the film was reviled for it.

  I didn’t go through that very well. And, interestingly enough, by the time I was pulled back together and we were doing Raging Bull, articles were coming out asking, Will this be his comeuppance?

  RS: And you thought, I’ve already had my comeuppance.

  MS: And if I hadn’t, why would I have to have a comeuppance anyway?

  RS: Well, that’s an interesting point: If you do pretty well, whatever you do, directing movies, writing books, whatever, there are a lot of people out there—

  MS: Waiting.

  RS: —who really want you to have a comeuppance.

  MS: They’re waiting for you.

  RS: Some don’t even want to say it.

  MS: No.

  RS: But they do.

  MS: Yes.

  RS: I mean they say, in effect, Oh, screw him. He thinks he’s hot stuff.

  MS: And often the stuff that is reviled or soundly trounced is years later revealed to be something more interesting. It’s fashion, I suppose.

  RS: No, I think it’s more than fashion. I think there’s active resentment out there.

  MS: I don’t know. For me this goes back to the family, my expecting the world to be like my family. But that is not the case. For instance, your collaborators are there, and you collaborate very well, but there’s a limit.

  RS: That’s true.

  MS: Loyalty only goes up to a certain level in this kind of work. And the sooner you get to know that, the better it is. People very often have to take stands that might be against you or hurt you. And other times they may take stands at the wrong time.

  THE LAST WALTZ

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: The Last Waltz, your first full-length music documentary, was kind of squeezed in between New York, New York and Raging Bull. And it’s very different in tone from your other music docs.

  MARTIN SCORSESE: It reflects a totally different mindset.

  RS: Sure. But how so?

  MS: Because The Last Waltz was really a last waltz. [The Band was breaking up and the film is, among other things, a record of their last concert.] They stopped playing. The group broke up. It also gave us a chance, although I didn’t realize it at the time, to look back on something that was definitively ending by 1980, ’81, maybe even earlier. I was kind of seduced into it by Jonathan Taplin, the producer of Mean Streets, who called me when I was doing New York, New York and said a lot of the rock people were watching the film, and a lot of younger actors. He said he wanted to have a screening for a few friends, including Robbie Robertson.

  We loved the sound of The Band. No one has ever equaled that sound. It incorporates so many different facets of American music—the South, Canada, the Southwest. And influences from all over the world, too. There’s a character they created with their voices, like in “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” which was a song that went against the grain at the time, don’t forget.

  These guys were coming out against the hippie movement. It was a special sound, different from Dylan, different from everyone else. And it was almost as if they didn’t give a damn, either. They had placed themselves in a special place. So to go back to Woodstock for a moment, it was a big event. I was delighted, though The Band were really angry to be at Woodstock.

  RS: How come?

  MS: Because Woodstock was the place where they worked and lived. What were all those people doing there? It had become hippie heaven suddenly. It was a revolution. And they wondered, What is this shit?

  They didn’t allow the film onstage. The lenses had to be on the lip of the stage, rather than close to them. They gave a look to the audience which said, Do not come near us, especially you guys down front. Don’t come up on the stage. We said, “Okay.” We loved them so much that even if we couldn’t shoot, we were happy just to listen. They wouldn’t let us say anything. They weren’t ruffians, but they had a determination about them: We don’t want to play, but we’re going to play. It was too bad they didn’t get into the final cut of Woodstock.

  Anyway, I met Robbie the night of the screening of Mean Streets at Warner Bros. and said hello, and he said he liked the film. So when Jonathan called me, saying there was going to be this farewell to The Band, and they wanted to get special guest stars, and would I want to shoot it, I was open to the idea, especially when I heard the people who were going to be there—Muddy Waters, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young. So over a series of dinners—Robbie had a way of seducing you into it—I decided to shoot it just for archival, in 16 millimeter. And then one thing led to another and I said, “You know what? Why don’t we do a film like this in 35 millimeter? Nobody’s done it before in 35 millimeter.”

  I didn’t think it was going to be a film until I saw the first day’s rushes on the editing machine. And I said, “There’s something special about the look of it, the way they are on the stage.” I had designed it very carefully, because they didn’t move very much—as opposed to the Rolling Stones, where there’s a lot of movement. It became, over a period of two years, a film we were doing on the side, because I was trying to finish New York, New York. But it developed into an exploration of American music, ultimately culminating with them and Bob Dylan onstage. We didn’t know we were doing that, but that’s what happened.

  And later on, interviews were put in the picture. Robbie just said, Let’s do some interviews, because people wanted to know a The Band members. So it became more of a view, a vision of an era.

  We wa
nted to record it, get it down. These people were important historically. But the film became something lyrical, I thought, and quite beautiful the way it was edited. It became elegiac in a way, and it took on more import than we thought it might at the outset. The form of it was important to me—the camera movement to music, the editing, capturing the live performances.

  Marty directing The Last Waltz, his documentary about The Band’s final concert. It is widely recognized as one of the great concert films.

  RS: You feel you broke some new ground with that film?

  MS: I kind of thought we did. After 16 millimeter cinema verité in the sixties, culminating in Woodstock, this was rather different. This was staged, more studied in a way, much more planned out. And when the footage came on the screen, it revealed something else that was much more powerful than I thought it would be.

  RS: Which is what?

  MS: The presence of the performers, of the way they handled their instruments, the nature of so many of them singing those lyrics for the last time together. And Muddy Waters up on screen—he was not part of the band, of course, but it is great when he comes on: suddenly there was a special glow to the film. We felt it onstage.

  RS: But you feel it was more intense on the film than being there?

  MS: On film, absolutely. When we saw the rushes, we knew it was a movie.

  RS: Isn’t that interesting.

  MS: Something happened. It just clicked.

  RS: It’s a gigantic version of that notion that the camera loves some people and some people it doesn’t.

  MS: Whether you like that kind of music or not, you cannot deny that there’s a relationship of the performer to the audience. You don’t even see the audience, but you can feel it.

  RS: That’s what’s interesting in that film. Usually you pull back and you see audience.

  MS: Like in Woodstock. Michael Wadleigh and Thelma, they edited that picture so there was a lot of audience. The audience, the event itself, was as important as the music.

  RS: They made the right decision.

  MS: They were absolutely right. But with The Last Waltz I thought to myself, We’ve seen the ultimate audience movies in Monterey Pop, and certainly Woodstock. What do we care? We’re the audience. The Last Waltz is for everybody, and let’s just go with it.

  RS: You’ve mentioned you were busy with New York, New York at this time.

  MS: I was editing it and simultaneously supervising The Last Waltz.

  RS: Kind of a high-pressure moment for you there?

  MS: Very. A year later we shot the interviews, after they had broken up. What you feel in those interview scenes, I think, is real tension—maybe among themselves, or the situation made them nervous.

  RS: I think it’s what makes the film unique.

  MS: They were being very nice to each other because I was there.

  RS: But you get that feeling of edginess, unease. It makes the movie more interesting.

  MS: It’s constant. There also was an interesting edginess and unease during the actual show. When Dylan got onstage it was very tense.

  RS: Really?

  MS: Very tense. I didn’t know this until years later, but apparently backstage something happened and he said he wasn’t going on. All I know is he finally came on and we were told not to shoot certain songs, which we didn’t. And I was told by Bill Graham, “Shoot it, don’t worry about it. Shoot it. He comes from the same streets you do.” That’s what Graham told me [though, of course, Dylan came from Minnesota].

  Bob Dylan joins The Band in The Last Waltz.

  RS: I don’t think so.

  MS: I don’t think so, either. So I didn’t shoot it; everything had gone so well, I didn’t want him to walk off.

  RS: That does happen in documentary shooting. You push it that one extra step. That’s the edge the filmmaker has: it’s his choice in the end.

  But let’s talk for a minute about documentaries in general. Unlike most directors of your stature, you have what amounts to a full career in that genre.

  MS: The American cinema documentary I did with Michael Wilson and Thelma and Kent Jones and Raffaele Donato: it was an example of something that kept me alive creatively. Because I kept experimenting with it—with the form, especially the first hour and a half—trying to find the thread.

  RS: What’s wonderful is I’ve never seen anybody play clips so long. I mean, those were real scenes.

  MS: That’s something that Thelma and I tried to do. If I was experimenting in the feature films, I’m not in a position to say if they worked or not. Obviously, at the time I felt they worked. But everything has been done, so I’m not sure it’s really important if it works or not. But the documentaries gave us more freedom. I think it started with Italianamerican. It burst through. Sometimes all the plans are wiped away, and a truth, or an emotional power, comes across that you never planned.

  RS: It’s a very strange thing, but I think I’m a better interviewer when I have a camera over my shoulder.

  MS: Over your shoulder?

  RS: Behind me as I’m interviewing. It’s because it feels like there’s something really at stake there.

  MS: Yes. You’ve got to get it on film.

  RS: You don’t know if when you get to someone’s house, he will have just had a fight with his wife, and everything is chaotic, and you’re just standing there. And it’s your only opportunity to film him. Whereas in a fiction film you can make your own reality. I don’t care how simple a documentary seems to be, it’s always difficult.

  MS: Agreed.

  RAGING BULL

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: You spoke earlier about the limits of friendship and loyalty. Yet around this time a friend did come through for you. I’m talking about Robert De Niro and his determination that you make Raging Bull. This was coming at a time when you were very ill and were, if we’re to believe Peter Biskind’s book, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, part of a fairly heavy drug scene.

  MARTIN SCORSESE: The only good thing about the drug use is that it was very obvious in my case. And I just had to go to that brick wall. Nobody was going to tell me otherwise, whether it was a rock ’n’ roller, or a studio executive, or an actor. People can try to guide me, but I always have to go my own way.

  RS: The only reason I bring it up is because it’s part of the public record of your life.

  MS: Right. After New York, New York I was exhausted to the point where a number of people were worried about my health. I said, “Don’t worry, I’m fine.” And then after the Labor Day weekend in Telluride, at the film festival, I got back to New York and suffered a total collapse.

  That’s when I finally went to the hospital, and that’s when De Niro came to visit and asked if I wanted to do the film. Really, we had been working on it since Taxi Driver. I realized I had nothing else to do. I had exhausted all the possibilities. Even my friends were all going off on their own. I was alone. And it was time to go back to work. And what I discovered—it’s in Raging Bull and it’s in the other pictures later on—is that I had to come to terms with something.

  A still from Raging Bull (1980), a film that strived for new levels of realism in its brutally stylized manner.

  RS: What did you come to terms with?

  MS: The fighting with myself. You get to the point where you just get used to yourself: that’s who you are, just get on with it.

  RS: Stop there. What were you fighting in yourself? I mean, you were a talented kid. You had done pretty well for a young guy.

  MS: I have no idea. Really.

  RS: Were you fighting the past in some sense?

  MS: Probably the past, I guess. I didn’t trust myself. I’m not talking about art; I’m talking about myself as a person. I’ve surprised myself too many times in the wrong way.

  It’s how you treat people around you, how you treat yourself. And then you say, If you make a little bit of peace with yourself, you might be better with the people around you, too. That’s all it is. Maybe it’s maturing to a certain exte
nt, but I don’t think I did. You just get older; you’re a little more tired.

  RS: Was this tied in to people firing you, or saying you were too damned ambitious? Was it pushing yourself to succeed when people thought you already had, given your age, your experience? Or was it that you were pressing against their low expectations for you while you had high expectations?

  MS: I don’t really know. I mean, I just wasn’t comfortable with myself, who I was, what I was trying to be. Was I trying to be a movie director, or a filmmaker? A director in the style of Hollywood, or a filmmaker in the style of Europe? I mean, I didn’t fit either place. I still don’t. It’s about how you’re trying to express yourself. You’ve got this need to do something, and sometimes it’s crazy. People say, Oh, you’re taking yourself too seriously. But I can’t help it. Out of the seriousness comes the humor, too.

  RS: It’s perhaps not so apparent to the people around you as it is to you.

  MS: Maybe, but it is absolutely hilarious at times to me. The gambles I make— I seem to have this need. I try to do other things. I wish I could do many things—like write music. But making movies is the only thing that there seems to be a need for on my part.

  RS: Raging Bull seems to be your common-consent masterpiece.

  MS: I don’t know.

  RS: You don’t think so?

  MS: I don’t know. I really have no idea.

  RS: Set aside its masterly qualities for a minute. There’s no doubt you were coming back with it, so to speak, even though most of us didn’t know you’d been away.

  MS: I was coming back. But I collapsed on that movie, too, during postproduction. And that wasn’t from drugs. That was just from exhaustion—walking pneumonia, apparently. Later, on King of Comedy, Jerry Lewis would make me laugh, which made me cough, and then the bronchial asthma would start. Then he would say, “Would somebody get a goddamn ambulance over here,” and make me laugh more.