Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  Maybe it has a lot to do with me. It’s about guilt; even if it’s something that I reason out, I still feel bad. So the only thing is to deal with it and just move on. You can’t run away from it.

  I think there was a lot that wasn’t said in the film about that. All the camera moves are reflections of the character’s own dread and guilt. I keep getting drawn back to Hitchcock movies like The Wrong Man, which I used as an example for [cameraman] Michael Chapman and everybody else on Taxi Driver. The way Henry Fonda is in the line at the insurance office, the way the camera moves as a woman sees him and he reaches into his coat. She thinks it’s a gun, but we know it’s an insurance policy. It’s the way the camera moves and it’s the way he edits.

  I had the cast and crew look at it again for Aviator, for the scenes that have to deal with Howard Hughes’s obsessive behavior. It’s when Henry Fonda sits in the cell the first night. You see the corner. You see the ceiling. You see the lock. It’s the nature of the framing and the pace of the cutting.

  Marty directs Griffin Dunne in After Hours (1985), an underrated black comedy which turns lower Manhattan into the Lower Depths, as a mild-mannered clerk looking for a little sexual action is almost killed by the forces of anarchical modernism.

  RS: Which gives it such a powerful sense of entrapment. I recently did a DVD commentary on The Wrong Man and I had forgotten how much religious iconography it contains—but almost casually referenced. It has to be Hitchcock’s most overtly Catholic film.

  MS: It probably is. I was just going to say that I’m probably attracted to his work a lot because of the Catholicism. It’s not overt to me, but it’s there.

  Actually, I like some of the minor films, like Dial M for Murder. It’s theater. The actors are sitting in a room talking, but yet at a certain point in the dialogue the camera angle changes very slightly. I always tell film students to study that, to look at where the camera changes. How does it change? What’s the image size? What does that mean psychologically and emotionally? What does that make the audience feel? The audience doesn’t seem to notice it—but it makes itself felt.

  Again, one of my favorite scenes in Psycho is when Martin Balsam is interviewing Anthony Perkins. There’s one shot that’s sort of strange, where Balsam tells him to lean over and look at the name in the book, and the camera is sort of suddenly looking up at Anthony Perkins’s throat as he leans over. Watch the angle, watch the way he cuts, on which line of dialogue, and where Balsam begins to figure out there’s something funny in the story, and where Perkins starts to realize the guy knows there’s something funny.

  Even the business about turning on the switch of the Bates Motel lights. Balsam says, But your lights aren’t on. Perkins says, Oh!—then click—you see the lights come on. The insert is less than a second, I bet you, but when the lights come on, it’s like a slap. The repressed violence there is in that turning on of that light switch. I find that kind of thing both interesting and entertaining.

  RS: I saw After Hours first, I think, in a screening room. There was a fair-sized crowd. It was a very jolly experience. But I found that when I watched it alone at home I wasn’t laughing so much. It seems like a comedy, because a lot of truly unexpected stuff happens that makes you laugh—but it’s not really funny because what’s happening to the main character is really pretty damned dire. I think when we talked earlier, you called it a descent into hell.

  MS: Yeah, yeah. [Laughs.]

  RS: I guess he is someone who’s kind of on the edge—I mean, he’s got this dull little job and he’d like to be something that he isn’t. He goes into this place where he thinks maybe he could be transformed. But he isn’t.

  MS: Transformed into what, though? That’s the thing. There’s an emptiness there in that world that he’s discovering, and there’s a desperation. In my mind, it’s reflective of what’s all around us, the menace we don’t usually notice. Looking at it as a black comedy, I was thinking, This could happen to me. Maybe it has.

  I did a commercial for American Express, where I’m complaining about snapshots I took at a kid’s birthday party. My associate director saw it and he said, I loved the commercial. He said, It’s like being back at the monitor with you when we’re shooting. And I thought, You take yourself so seriously.

  But you know the damned thing is, you’ve got to be serious about making a picture. Yet you’ve still got to have that sense of humor.

  RS: What’s going on in After Hours is really “Oh, my God, this is the worst evening.” Yet it starts out really—

  MS: Promising. But there’s also a technical thing about the film. I always liked those two farces by Allan Dwan—Up in Mabel’s Room and Getting Gertie’s Garter. I liked the way their multiple stories enfolded upon each other, and how these people found themselves in these ridiculous situations, with everybody speaking so fast and moving around. To me, if you put any kind of reality into it—I mean, who cares about Gertie’s garter?—you’re not going with the game. You’ve got to go with the game.

  RS: I think that’s true. In this film there is a logical step-by-step descent, no? It starts with an innocent encounter in a lunchroom. And by the end—

  MS: —he winds up encased inside some statue. It’s just wild. I’m always interested in the ancient world, what it was like to be living in the Roman Empire or among the Greeks before Christianity—their relationship to their gods, and, in a sense, their relationship to life; their sense of the chaos in the world and their acceptance of it. I read a lot about the ancient world, for pleasure. I get into that mindset, and understand that the world is chaos, and understand that there may or may not be gods. And if there are gods, they’re not really interested in us very much. I understand the cruelty and understand that death can happen any second.

  That’s the key thing to me—that idea of being a pawn, that the gods really don’t care and we’ve got to make a life in spite of that. It comes down to accepting the reality. Rather than complain about it, we deal with it. We try to live a morally good life on this basis.

  RS: So that’s what After Hours is about.

  MS: In a sense. It should just be a good black comedy, and you shouldn’t have to think about this. But that’s the impulse behind a lot of the things I do: I just find it fascinating to imagine what it would be like meeting an ancient now. I’d like to see what their similarities to us are as human beings, what they cared about, what they felt was right and wrong.

  THE COLOR OF MONEY

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: The Color of Money seems to me your most conventional picture to date: a sequel starring a major older star and a younger one very much on the rise. How did that happen?

  MARTIN SCORSESE: My agent, Harry Ufland, helped put the movie together with Mike Ovitz, then, of course, the famous superagent. Paul Newman liked Raging Bull and wrote me a letter. So it was basically worked around Newman, that’s how we got it made. By the time the film was being edited, Tom Cruise had come out in Top Gun and he was suddenly a big star. The film came in a day under schedule and a million dollars under budget and it did very well.

  RS: How did Tom Cruise get involved?

  MS: Michael Ovitz at that time was representing Cruise. He called me and said, “Why don’t you use Tom Cruise?” Cruise had been in [cinematographer] Michael Chapman’s film All the Right Moves [as a high school football player fighting with his coach]. And I thought he was very good. I said, “Sure, let’s put him in as the young pool player.”

  Still, there were issues. You know, The Hustler [by Robert Rossen, which starred Newman as the young pool shark, Eddie Felson] is a masterpiece, so I couldn’t emulate that. But I always loved Newman, and he was giving us a great chance.

  At that point my main goal was to try to get The Last Temptation of Christ made. I knew I had to make it Italian style, in the style of Ermanno Olmi, Pasolini—

  RS: Especially Pasolini. It put me in mind of his Christ movie—

  MS: Especially Pasolini. Exactly. And the Trilogy of Life films. Anyway
, I was out in L.A. and Ovitz had me come to his house. He told me he wanted to represent me. He explained to me that I could get paid for what I do [laughs]. He literally said that: “You know, you can get paid for this.” Because at that point I never got a salary, I didn’t care. Sometimes I just took scale. In Raging Bull, De Niro and I split our salaries, out of a bond of trust.

  In The Color of Money (1986), Paul Newman returned as an older version of Fast Eddie Felson, whom he played in Robert Rossen’s memorable The Hustler of 1961. This time he was rewarded with a long-delayed, long-deserved Academy Award.

  RS: Really?

  MS: We just did it. We didn’t care that much about our salaries; we wanted to make the movie. But in any event, Mike said, “What do you want done most?” And I said, “The Last Temptation of Christ.” And he smiled. Mike was a genius at what he did, and a person who likes challenges. He said, “I’ll get it made for you.” I didn’t think he would. I didn’t think he could.

  Within a few months, right before I signed with Ovitz’s agency, he said, “You know, Tom Pollock has just become the head of Universal. And he signed a deal with Garth Drabinsky, of Cineplex Odeon Theaters from Canada. And they want to make the movie, for a price. What’s the price?” The producer was with me, and she said about six or seven million dollars, whatever it was. Ovitz said, “They want to do it.” I remember, we were on our way to Tahiti to visit with Marlon Brando. He’d invited me to his island; he wanted to make a movie. So we stopped over in L.A. and had lunch with Pollock and then we flew off to Tahiti. We came back, had another lunch with Pollock. And by that time, the picture was almost a reality. I couldn’t quite believe it. I mean, I was a little nervous the night before I met Pollock. I remember Ovitz called me and said, “How are you feeling? Get in there tomorrow and do your lunch meeting, and give them your idea.” Usually I was burning to tell the story, and I would talk for hours about it. But, sometimes, you know, you’re just down. You just know how long the odds are. I said to Ovitz, “I don’t know. I really don’t know if I can …” He said, “What do you mean, you don’t know? You’re going to go in and you’re going to tell them you’re going to make the best picture ever made. That’s how you do it.” It wasn’t a pep talk, really, but he helped realign my thinking.

  RS: I often find that with something you really want, just before you pitch it, you feel like hell. You doubt yourself.

  MS: Oh! [Laughs.] You’ll never do it!

  RS: I don’t want to be here. I don’t even know why I wanted to write this, or to make this.

  MS: Maybe it’s a mistake.

  RS: I mean, it does happen.

  MS: Michael, though, was very unique. He can grab your attention, convince you of practically anything.

  RS: Yes.

  MS: In any event, Pollock was an interesting man. He wanted to make special kinds of films. In two years he made Temptation of Christ, Do the Right Thing, and Born on the Fourth of July. Three pretty strong statements.

  RS: Yes. Tom is a very interesting man.

  MS: And Garth Drabinsky was a very unique character. Do you know him?

  RS: I never met him, but I heard a lot about him. Didn’t he go to jail?

  MS: I think he might have. I don’t know. But that was his moment. He had the biggest theater chain in Canada and America. And the only thing I had to do was go to Vancouver to have a press conference for the film, which is what I did. And go to Toronto for the opening. Garth was really great with us.

  RS: He liked you and respected you.

  MS: A very interesting man. But that’s how Temptation got made.

  RS: The Color of Money made some money, right?

  MS: It made a lot of money.

  RS: And finally it got Paul Newman his Oscar.

  MS: It did. Richard Price was nominated, Paul, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and Boris Leven. I wrote the Goodfellas script with Nick Pileggi after that and was ready to shoot it, but then I got the money to do Last Temptation. We did that and then came back and finished Goodfellas.

  Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio gets up close and personal with the director.

  RS: What was Newman like to work with?

  MS: It was a great experience. We shaped the story around him, to emphasize those qualities that he had in him, at that point in his life.

  RS: Which were?

  MS: He was a man who was getting older, he understood the nature of it. Fast Eddie Felson was at a point in his life where he had to accept a challenge, go back to what he had done.

  He had to stop gambling. He had become a different kind of hustler in a way, selling liquor. But he couldn’t resist the joy of the game. I mean, not just pool, but livening up the game of life, which is the real gamble. But he had also to deal with his limitations as an older person. I wanted it to be a story of an older person who corrupts a young person, like a serpent in the garden of innocence.

  RS: I see.

  MS: The corruption of the younger person is really what I was interested in. Richard Price, the writer, and Paul formed a companionship working on scenes together, rewriting in rehearsals. The whole film was rehearsed. Paul wanted to rehearse like a play. I had never done a play, so he took me to a rehearsal hall. Basically I blocked the scenes there and the movie was shot very quickly because of that. All the pool games were designed in about two or three days in September and we were way ahead. The rehearsals with the actors were word-for-word from the script. It was a different way of working for me, very different.

  RS: Did you find any constraint in that way of working?

  MS: Not really. Don’t forget, it’s a sequel to a very strong picture. So you can only go so far.

  RS: What was Tom Cruise like in those days?

  MS: Wonderful. Enthusiastic and, I thought, a damned good actor.

  RS: I think he’s a wonderful actor.

  MS: My mother and father were there—we were shooting in Chicago—and he became good friends with them. Very often, years later, he would go to their apartment on Third Avenue and 19th Street and have dinner in their apartment. He would just go and hang out with them. They loved him.

  RS: I met him two or three times and found him very agreeable.

  MS: I’m telling you, the kid was great. And in The Color of Money he was wonderful. And we had a great time. With Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, the three of us together working. I used to tell him about Stanley Kubrick all the time, about Barry Lyndon and other movies. Then, of course, he got to work with him in Eyes Wide Shut.

  RS: I recently was reading a review of some star bio about him in The New York Times.

  MS: Oh, I stopped reading it.

  RS: It said that maybe Tom Cruise is looking for a father figure, because he had a very bad relationship with his dad.

  MS: It’s interesting he played that part in Magnolia then.

  RS: Right. I forgot that.

  MS: You know, about the father. He did a great job in that.

  RS: Yes. Maybe the way he surrendered himself to Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut had something to do with a father figure, too.

  MS: Maybe. But I found him very warm, with a great sense of family.

  THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: Frankly, I had a lot of trouble with The Last Temptation of Christ when I first saw it.

  MARTIN SCORSESE: Well, it’s a long picture.

  RS: I’m a born atheist, I mean.

  MS: Yeah, okay.

  RS: I liked the movie better when I saw it again. I haven’t seen it for some time, though.

  MS: I haven’t, either. I’m going to wait.

  RS: You said that as a kid you loved all those sword-and-sandal epics, like The Silver Chalice.

  MS: Yes. But they’re bad.

  RS: Perhaps, but I’ve always remembered The Silver Chalice because of the way it’s designed.

  MS: Exactly. It’s not a good film, but I love the look of it. We were working class, we didn’t go to theater. We went to movies. That was the first time I s
aw real theatrical design in a movie. It was fantastic.

  RS: What I was getting at was that somehow you were at least thinking about all those big, corny American biblical epics, very much a part of the 1950s moviegoing experience, when you made Last Temptation, even though it was a totally different kind of film.

  MS: Always, yes.

  RS: It’s interesting to me how you got from The Robe and The Silver Chalice to Last Temptation.

  MS: Well, by seeing them many times, and by accepting their conventions. And then realizing that the time was right, in the early eighties, for another approach—just to deal with the idea of what Jesus really represented and said and wanted, which was compassion and love. To deal with this head-on. To do it in such a way that I would provoke and engage the audience.

  The only way you can do that is to not make your films look and sound like the old biblical films. In those films, the characters were speaking with British accents. The dialogue was beautiful, in some cases, and the films look beautiful. They were pageants. But they had nothing really to do with our lives, where you “make up for your sins at home and in the streets, and not in church.” The transgressions you have to undo are with people. It’s not about going to church on Sunday. Very often people think, I’ll go to church on Sunday and I’ll be okay. They know Jesus suffered, but they don’t really ask what the suffering was for. I was upset when Last Temptation came out and people were claiming it was harming their faith. I never want to injure anybody’s faith. If you have faith, that’s a good thing. Whether I have my faith or not, personally, is a constant struggle. But there’s a difference between faith and evolving in a spiritual way, a big difference.