Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  RS: Absolutely.

  MS: Or at least, Part One. In my mind it was sort of like Part One. In a way, whether it’s good, bad, or indifferent. There are some interesting scenes.

  RS: There’s a lot of good acting in the movie.

  MS: The acting is wonderful.

  RS: Particularly by Daniel Day-Lewis.

  MS: He’s great. I loved him in There Will Be Blood. He was amazing. At first, I didn’t even know it was him.

  RS: Those last minutes in the bowling alley are beyond the beyond. [It’s a scene in which Daniel Day-Lewis—playing perhaps the most misanthropic character in film history—bloodily beats to death the preacher-son of his longtime business rival.] I’ve never seen anything quite like it in a movie. You’re following this interesting story and then suddenly this outburst of insanity happens.

  MS: I went with it, you know. It’s pretty wild.

  RS: It’s astonishing. I said to Day-Lewis when I met him, “I’ve just never seen anything like it. I couldn’t imagine where that came from.” And he said, “It’s funny, my mother said the same thing to me.”

  MS: They asked me to do the Q and A for an event in New York with Paul Thomas Anderson. There was only one other movie from my generation about oil discovery—Giant. And I said, I guess for your generation it’s more Chinatown. He goes, “No, no, it was Giant.” He had seen Giant a number of times and loved it. And I said what I love about the picture is that it eschews the epic conflagration at the end which seems like it always has to happen.

  RS: Right.

  MS: In Giant there is this great scene where Jett Rink [James Dean] is fighting with Rock Hudson in the basement of the hotel, where he gets drunk and all the shelves collapse. And then, of course, the fight in Sarge’s restaurant.

  RS: That’s a great scene. It’s corny as hell.

  MS: It’s corny as hell and he loses the fight. Anyway, what was interesting here is that instead of exploding, the scene implodes. In this ridiculous bowling alley!

  RS: A mansion having a bowling alley—it’s almost the ultimate in conspicuous consumption.

  MS: Oh, boy.

  RS: I imagine you’re drawn to There Will Be Blood in part because it’s another father-son drama.

  MS: In part, I suppose. But I have to emphasize again that by the last thirty years of my father’s life, we became friends. I’m dealing with it still in the Kazan documentary Kent Jones and I are finishing, which is really more of a memoir, almost a eulogy. And it has, again, to do with Kazan’s film East of Eden, which is a great exploration of the love and hatred of a son and his father.

  RS: But your father wasn’t anything like Raymond Massey’s father in Eden.

  MS: Not at all. But in the child’s mind, I may have conjured up images of God the Father in the Old Testament.

  RS: Well, if you see him in the documentary you made [Italianamerican], your dad is very silent, though kind of amiable.

  MS: At first very secretive. And then he opens up, you know. It seems to be a well that I keep drawing from. There seem to be some primal feelings that I kind of feel comfortable with, and enjoy. Maybe not enjoy, but that seduce me into certain projects.

  RS: Talking about Daniel Day-Lewis: There is the character in Age of Innocence, and then there’s his character in Gangs of New York. It seems as if he is some sort of go-to guy for you when it comes to father figures.

  MS: There’s an element of my father in Gangs. Because of a kind of strict way of thinking, and, as I told you, my neighborhood was like a little medieval village.

  RS: Daniel Day-Lewis is a fastidious man who’s an absolutely great father, in a certain sense, in Age of Innocence. I find it fascinating that you would even think of the same actor for Bill the Butcher.

  MS: Look at My Left Foot—the way he controls his body; the energy it takes to play that character, the energy it took for him to do a painting with his feet. He actually did one then.

  RS: Did he?

  MS: It’s hanging in Jim Sheridan’s house, the director’s house, in Dublin. There’s a kind of determination in that work. More than that, there’s an anger that you certainly could tap into—a good, healthy kind of anger, not a self-destructive, King Lear–like anger, as there is in There Will Be Blood. He’s shouting at the elements by the end of the movie. There’s definitely that in him. I saw it in My Left Foot and I saw it in Last of the Mohicans. And the great sense of humor in Room with a View. So I said to myself, Well, the guy can do anything.

  RS: From some things you’ve said, I gather that even as late as your parents’ young years, some of the Gangs architecture and atmosphere still lingered in your neighborhood.

  MS: When my mother was a girl, the horrible tenements still existed. You looked out at nothing. The first man who did a film there was Raoul Walsh. He shot some of Regeneration there.

  RS: I’ve never seen that movie.

  MS: It’s magnificent, incredible. It’s unrelenting, a tough movie, because he knew the people at Five Points, what was left of the Five Points. He put some of them in that film.

  RS: Raoul was born in New York.

  MS: His The Bowery is like my Goodfellas in a way. You know what I’m saying?

  RS: Not exactly.

  MS: Because he knew those people, knew their folklore. He knew how they went in a bar and how they ordered a beer, how they moved, the kind of clothes they wore. He understood Chuck Connors, the famous racketeer, who coined the phrase “rackets.” He threw big dances the police would come to. There’s something about all that that was second nature to Raoul—similar to the way I grew up around that area of Italian Americans. He was Irish. He really had the line on post–Civil War to turn-of-the-century New York—of the New York Tenderloin (up in the Chelsea area), the New York underworld. I think he had it down cold.

  There’s something about the way my parents described their lives—I have that script that Nick Pileggi and I are working on, “Neighborhood” it’s called now, and it’s about them and that period of time. It’s partly the way they described their lives and the way they lived and the way they dealt with just the basics of living—how everybody would take care of each other in the tenements, where the toilets were, where they had to wash, a sink, one faucet, if they had any at all. The way people lived, and the way they had grocery stores, the kind of food you would get, that really had ties to the way people lived in early New York. It’s the same as Orchard Street, the same with the Jewish area. I felt—

  RS: Some living connection there—

  MS: Yes, absolutely. You could feel it in the walls of the tenements. There were ghosts. It had a history and it had character. We knew so much of what had happened in that area.

  RS: It’s as if that history didn’t exist when the official history of those times was written.

  MS: Well, I guess it’s like picking up The New York Times, the Metro section, where you see small articles that are front-page news in the tabloids. I remember back at NYU, people used to say, Read the tabloids, because they talk about real life. Because poor people don’t have educations, that doesn’t mean they don’t struggle and suffer.

  One guy I knew made page one in the Daily News. He was a nice kid across the way, maybe sixteen or seventeen. He was the son of the lady who ran a soda fountain at 240 or 238 Elizabeth. She was really nice, let us hang out there. And he was always very quiet. In 1950, ’51 maybe, he took part in a robbery, had guns, and got shot. It was on the front page of the Daily News. And, you know, his mother was in that luncheonette for another thirty, forty years—next to the butcher. It’s just you get into situations.

  RS: Why?

  MS: No education. That kid probably needed money. Probably there was peer pressure. He was very quiet. He wasn’t an aggressive kid. The next thing you know, they were going in with guns. They come out, the cops are there. They see a kid with a gun, they start shooting.

  Leonardo DiCaprio and Marty on the Gangs set.

  RS: It’s obvious that that kid—or
the modern mobsters in your other films—are in some way the inheritors of the world you portray in Gangs.

  MS: I was always drawn to a world that seems so strange, almost like the ancient world, yet still filled with the same kind of people. We haven’t changed.

  The Bowery was the last dregs of the Five Points. You lived with people dying in the streets. It was what the Five Points must have been like.

  RS: But how different was the Gangs underworld from the underworld you saw glimpses of?

  MS: Very different. There was anarchy, more tribalism in the past. My grandparents were tribal, but not like what we showed in Gangs, where somebody would turn on you and betray you.

  RS: You’ve said you feel Gangs of New York isn’t as violent as some of your other movies.

  MS: Nowhere near the violence of my other pictures. It does go on and on, a continual cycle of violence, though. It’s as Daniel Day-Lewis’s character says: A man robs me, I cut off his hand. He talks against me, I cut his tongue out. He tries to harm me, I cut his head off and put it on a pike so everybody can see it.

  Maybe if I’d made the film earlier, it would have been horrendous in terms of graphic violence, but I don’t really want to do it anymore—after doing the killing of Joe Pesci and his brother in Casino, in the cornfield. If you look at it, it isn’t shot in any special way. It doesn’t have any choreography to it. It doesn’t have any style to it, it’s just flat. It’s not pretty. There was nothing more to do than to show what that way of life leads to. Not only what it leads to, but that it leads to this being done to you by your closest friends. It’s brutal, it’s nasty, it’s humiliating, to say the least.

  It speaks to some people. Joe Pesci was playing golf, and a couple of older men were on the same course. Afterwards, they were all in the locker room, and when they changed into their street clothes, it turns out that the two gentlemen are monsignors. They went over to Joe and said, We admire your work. Joe figures they are going to compliment him on Home Alone. But they said they really liked him in Casino. They said they really felt bad about how he died in the film. They really felt for him in that sequence.

  And Joe said to me later, That’s exactly what you wanted to do, right? I said, Yes—as mean and nasty as he gets throughout the whole picture, he deserves his fate.

  RS: It’s pathetic.

  MS: It really is pathetic and sick and terrible. I remember I showed a rough cut to John Kennedy Jr., and it upset him very much. When he got out of the screening room, he was walking in the hall. I said, What’s the problem? He said, I just got a little nauseous.

  But Gangs of New York is stylized, like choreography, I think, so the violence seems held back to a certain extent.

  RS: It was more mass violence. The violence in Casino was pretty much one-on-one.

  MS: It’s happening right now as we speak, all around the world. In Iraq, in Afghanistan—the breakdown of society, the breakdown of civilization. We’ll be reduced to chaos again.

  We bombed Afghanistan into rubble, where, you know, warlords have taken over. Kids today don’t know what happened in China in the 1920s. Just look at the beginning of Lost Horizon. The Chinese warlords. They cut off heads just for the equivalent of speeding. Read Edgar Snow’s books.

  RS: What you’re saying is that we’re witnessing a kind of fraudulent nationalism that’s masking sheer chaos.

  MS: You give a seventeen-year-old kid a gun and put him in a firefight, it’s going to be rough. Kids often don’t think they can die. Kids can easily become like animals, you know.

  RS: By which I guess you mean a reversion to primitive tribalism?

  MS: Yes. Definitely. The old genie is out of the bottle. We’re in for hundreds of years of it.

  I read ancient history to learn how the empires fell. The barbarians at the gates. Take Gangs of New York—their gods are Celtic war gods. It’s not Jesus suffering on the cross. They’re tough bastards. They’re going to kill and maim. The reality is that the war gods are the ancient gods. The history of God, the development of monotheism, is warlike.

  THE AVIATOR

  RICHARD SCHICKEL: How did The Aviator get off the ground, so to speak?

  MARTIN SCORSESE: At the time, I really wanted to do Silence [his script about Jesuit missionaries in Japan]. I tried writing the script with Jay Cocks in 1991 and it didn’t turn out right. There were also problems with the rights. The other picture I really wanted to do was Gangs of New York, which eventually, obviously, got made. Meantime, I had to work, I had to find something.

  When this script came to me, they didn’t tell me what it was about. It just said “The Aviator.” I don’t really like flying very much. I’m fascinated by it, but I just don’t like it. But there’s also a kind of beauty to films about flying—like Hell’s Angels, which is still the best work with planes in a picture [it was released in 1930, though begun some years earlier], Howard Hughes directing. Even William Cameron Menzies’s design of the plane in Foreign Correspondent was terrific. So I’ve always had some fascination.

  But I’d always stayed away from a work on Hughes because I knew there were many people, a number of excellent filmmakers, who had been trying to make pictures about him over the years: it was sort of their territory. Warren Beatty wanted to make a Hughes picture for years. He talked to me about it—he talked to everybody about it. Spielberg also wanted to make it. The legend of the strange-looking old man who lived in one room.

  The only thing I knew of Howard Hughes was his involvement in Hell’s Angels, and what a lot of people know of him today: that he was a very famous, very, very rich man who died holed up in a room somewhere, and looking kind of strange toward the end.

  By the way, I didn’t think the dramatic scenes in Hell’s Angels were all that good.

  RS: They were awful. But the flying was great.

  MS: William K. Everson showed it in 16 millimeter at NYU, and I sneaked into his class to see it for the first time. Then I saw the restoration of it. It was amazing—especially the flying sequence. The Outlaw I didn’t like. But I liked some of Hughes’s other films, like Scarface, which he produced. I loved that film. Not as much as Public Enemy, though.

  RS: You couldn’t see Scarface for a long time. Hughes had it held back.

  MS: You couldn’t see it, right.

  RS: It’s a movie Howard Hawks directed, but never much liked. He said to me it was not in his style. He said, “You know, I’m hanging cameras from the ceiling and all around. My style is eye-level camera, real simple cutting.”

  MS: But he has the long tracking shot in the beginning which is very, very good.

  RS: But, really, he wasn’t a big tracker.

  MS: No, but that really worked with the shadow. And then, of course, Lucia’s whistle, which we use in The Departed—a reference to that. And we put the Xs all over the bar, one for everybody who gets killed.

  RS: What do you mean, Xs?

  MS: There are Xs in practically every frame in The Departed to reference Scarface.

  RS: Honestly, I didn’t notice.

  MS: We literally put Xs on the walls with the shadows, and the light, even when they salute at the end, the two hands sort of cross.

  RS: And why did you do that?

  MS: So that if people ever go back, they would have fun noticing the Xs. I mean, it was too much, we put too much in. But you didn’t notice. That’s a good thing.

  RS: Let’s go back to your initial response to “The Aviator.”

  MS: It took me twenty pages to realize that at the beginning it’s about Howard Hughes directing Hell’s Angels. By the time I finished reading it, I saw that it goes from 1927 to 1947, which means it covers just twenty years of his life. It doesn’t deal with his end, just elements of it. There are nervous breakdowns in the film that lead eventually to the big one at the end. And also four plane crashes—two of them in the film. And one car crash, which did a lot to his head. Then, too, it had a sense of the obsessive, which was important to me—the obsessive natur
e of his cleanliness, and how he got wrapped up in it.

  But the main thing was this was a very vibrant, alive young man—aging over twenty years, going through hell, with more hell to go through when the film is over.

  What I hadn’t understood, but which John Logan’s script made clear, was how important he was in aviation. I didn’t understand what the XF-11 flight was like, or the H-1, or particularly, the nature of the Hercules, the giant plane he built and how he’s affected a lot that we do in our lives.

  The script had an upbeat feeling about him, before the illness set in. I think what John was trying for was something that had the spirit of adventure—a hope of what this country could be. It’s about this spirit of the explorer—the spirit of someone who kept testing the limits and pushing and pushing, because this was the country to do it in. You know, when they got to California, there was no place else to go. That’s it. Everybody who wants to make it big goes to California, because it’s the last place, it’s the furthest west you could be. You’ve got to make it there, or not make it at all. So you have everybody going out to be stars in California. That’s part of America. And then the disease sets in.

  Meet the press: Howard Hughes, on the edge of madness, after getting the Spruce Goose into the air at the end of The Aviator.

  RS: But these are also businesses that oddballs could go into. They were for outsiders, people who couldn’t go to Wall Street and be in investment banking.

  MS: They were going to do it on their own, they were going to make movies.

  RS: Or build airplanes. Something visionary.

  MS: “Visionary” is the word. And the thing about it, too, was the idea of the sky being the last frontier. When you couldn’t go any further west, you go up in the sky. But then the sense of rapaciousness sets in. It’s something we’re dealing with in this century.

  I thought the story was fascinating, and a good introduction to Hughes. There are other people who may want to do other aspects of his life, but this film deals with the young Hughes, who is not only flying, but making a picture about flying. It’s crazy—you know there were four men killed making that film? He was shooting from the cockpits of those little planes, almost scooters. I was in one of them, though of course I didn’t go up in it.