That was broken up into four different sections, sections that I would do with Leo in real time and a real place—against the sky in a parking lot in a mock-up of the plane. Then shots with a double. Then shots that were going to be done by Rob Legato that were digital. So maybe a couple of hundred shots were shot over a period of four or five months as we were shooting the rest of the film, and then we ended with him on a green screen. It was all based on the previz, which were based on my notes and drawings.
RS: So on all your films you’ll draw notes on your script?
MS: Yes. On Goodfellas, for example, I pretty much designed the film on the script as Nick Pileggi and I wrote it, even designed the freeze frames in those sequences in the beginning. It was all there. I always say that the film was like an afterthought. But the actors contributed so much. And the paragraph about the Copacabana was just the way Nick had written it. I said, “It’s going to be one shot.” I just wanted to leave it the way it was in the script. There was nothing to draw. We had to go to the place and actually lay out the shot. Which is what Joe Reidy and Michael Ballhaus and I did at the Copa. We got that shot in three-quarters of a day. We got another shot that day, too.
They worked it out. They designed with me. I said, Now we’re here, now over here this happens, that happens. And they would suggest something happening, and I would say, Right, let’s put that in moving this way. All culminating with the camera ending up on Henny Youngman. That wasn’t drawn. That was worked out in my head, then on the set.
RS: But something as rough, as seemingly improvisational, as Mean Streets wasn’t drawn, or was it?
MS: That was mainly drawn, because I couldn’t take a chance. If I had six shots and we didn’t have enough time to get two or three of them, I had to be able to say, Okay, do these two. We can redo this in another location if we just take the wall out here or whatever. We had to move so fast. I had to, literally, visually, see what I needed to get from the beginning.
RS: And you always carry the drawings, the notes, in the script?
MS: On the pages of the script. I often have drawings on a separate piece of paper for a scene. I have an assistant who gives me that in the morning, or the night before. And basically I work with that. Then there is improvising on the set. Like, for example, in The Departed, I said, “I want glass walls. But they have to have the blinds”—you know, rather than shooting against blank walls. The blinds had to be a little bit open. I knew that when they report to Marty Sheen behind the desk in the beginning of the film, it had to be a wide shot, I knew it had to be head to toe. I knew the cadets had to be on the left, the other actors on the right. We did the same kind of thing on the rest of the shots.
RS: Does this, among other things, free you to work a little more emotionally with the actors, because you know where you’re at?
MS: It definitely gives you more time with the actors. There are other benefits. For instance, that long sequence that cuts back and forth in The Departed, when Mark Wahlberg keeps attacking Leo DiCaprio, is composed of specific camera moves, all of which were designed in my notes. So I knew that the lines of dialogue would be good for a certain kind of camera movement. And the actor would act knowing that. We didn’t have to overlap, shooting twenty-five different angles or whatever.
RS: This can be a more efficient way of shooting, then?
MS: Yes, it is very precise in the camera moves and cuts. Leo had to be in the frame in a certain way. His eyes had to be seen a certain way. It gets that specific. You can see it in Kubrick films; I like watching how he cuts, and when he decides to cut, and what the size of the framing is. It specifically influenced the way I did the scene in Goodfellas, where De Niro tells Ray Liotta in the luncheonette near the end of the film, “I want you to go down south, and take care of this guy for me.” Then it freeze-frames. And Liotta says, “That’s when I knew I was going to be whacked.” That was very specifically influenced by shots from A Clockwork Orange, where the actor was almost looking in the lens. That is very difficult for the actor because another actor he is working with can’t be where the camera is, so the actor has to put his face against the lens. I’ve worked with some people who have said, “Look, I can’t do that. I’m not going to do it.” We have to get them comfortable. But De Niro and Liotta went with it. It has an immediacy that I think draws the audience in, without the audience understanding why. You see it a lot in Kubrick.
RS: Yes, you do.
MS: And you see it in Hitchcock. I like watching the angles and the way he cut The Birds—just watching the sequences without any birds in them. It’s interesting to watch how the camera moves and how Tippi Hedren approaches when she drops off the love birds as a gift. If you watch her coming up the deck, the camera is pulling back with her, and then it intercuts with tracking shots of her point of view of the barn. Nobody’s there, but it has a little bit of creepiness to it, even though it’s before that part of the movie that takes off.
RS: He was good with those creepy little moves—the almost subliminal hint of menace in them.
MS: The Wrong Man was another film where he did that so well.
RS: I love that movie.
MS: Watch the camera moves in there. I screened that when we were making Taxi Driver. I designed a lot of Taxi Driver based on that.
RS: Based on what aspect of it?
MS: The paranoia of the people. The way the camera reflected the paranoia. It was making Travis feel guilty about something he didn’t do.
RS: Right, it did.
MS: Which was perfect for my themes. I like to deal with characters who have that sense of guilt about them.
RS: The Wrong Man, which is about a man wrongly accused of a crime, is a canonical film for me, and to most people it’s not. I think it’s a great movie.
MS: I think it is, too.
RS: Because Hitchcock rarely went to that realistic working-class place in other films.
MS: I screened it for Aviator, too, for Leo and all his friends. I pointed out to watch when Henry Fonda sits in that jail cell after he’s finally booked, when he sits on that cot and looks up at the corner of the ceiling. Then when he looks at the sink. Then when he looks over at the bars. Look at the inserts. It’s not just a shot of the ceiling. You have to figure out exactly how he looks at it, which corner of the ceiling.
The inserts tell you things. For instance, the inserts in The Aviator, when the man who has polio is in the bathroom and asks Hughes to pass him a towel, and Hughes refuses. It’s the way the towels are looking at him.
RS: The towels are looking at him?
MS: If you look at the insert, the towels are saying, Touch me. Come on, touch me. You can’t do it. The angle of that shot was important. Bob Richardson and I fooled around with the angles; we shot the full day. I think we shot more than forty angles—of everything. Forty-two setups. Even the toilet paper, the soiled towels, the towel in the basket. Hughes realizes that all the towels are gone, and he looks in the basket, and the basket is almost beckoning him: Touch me, touch me. And he couldn’t do that.
As I said, the angles on the inserts are very important. They are all designed and worked on.
RS: It’s possible, isn’t it, that Hitchcock was the most meticulous storyboarder?
MS: Oh, yeah. I loved his stuff. I remember doing my comic strips when we were living in Queens. I did them in 1.33 aspect ratio. It was square. That was like a movie for me. I must’ve been five or six years old. Then, when I was in Manhattan, in 1950, about eight or nine years old, I would watch Suspense Theater, or something like that, on TV and try to do my version of it in drawings. I’d paint them with watercolors. I had a whole bunch of them. Then one day my father saw me playing with them and I hid them, threw them away, as I told you before.
RS: There are really none of those left?
MS: No. I guess I felt ashamed of them. A year or two later, I said to myself, You know what? The hell with them, I’m going to do them again. Those I have.
By that t
ime I was a teenager, seeing things on the wide screen. As I said earlier, I saw Roman epics, one of which was called The Eternal City. I drew gladiatorial combats. I was already thinking in terms of how to do a scene.
Watching Million Dollar Movie on TV, I could revisit a film every night for a week. I was determined to figure out the camera angles, though I didn’t know that terminology. I thought about how the camera was closer or further away from an actor, whether the camera seemed to move in or out. I still have the same problems framing close-ups.
But I was dealing with that when I was doing these little drawings. There would be one panel with three images on it—the beginning, the middle, and the end of the shot. For example, in the opening credits of one of these Roman stories, I drew the soldiers outside on the Appian Way beginning a triumphal march, soldiers coming in and the camera up in the sky. Then I had the camera coming down, the army getting closer. Then I showed the wall on the right, the army on the left. As I came to my name as director, I had the camera boom over the backs of the soldiers, going through the gates with them. I would say to myself, We start here, but we’ve got to wind up there.
RS: In animation, those shots are left to the in-betweeners, and you’re not an in-betweener.
MS: No, I’m not.
COLORS
RICHARD SCHICKEL: We haven’t yet discussed color. Is there a typical Martin Scorsese palette? I mean, some of the films strike me as pretty saturated. But you can’t say that of Age of Innocence. I don’t think you can say it about King of Comedy, which has a nice glow.
MARTIN SCORSESE: King of Comedy was a big departure. As I’ve said, it was a very difficult film for me to make for many different reasons, and that was one of them. I had to try not to do too much camera work that drew attention to itself.
RS: Is there a relationship between that reluctance and the film’s palette?
MS: Mean Streets is very saturated. Alice, too. Taxi Driver not so much. New York, New York, definitely. Kundun, definitely. I tried somewhat in Age of Innocence.
RS: Kundun seems to me very Asian—soft and even misty at times.
MS: The colors are strong, I think, but it might not be as saturated as some of the others. There’s no doubt that three-strip Technicolor had a big influence on me. As a young person, seeing a film that employed it was the most magical experience—seeing Duel in the Sun in color or seeing the rerelease of Robin Hood in color, and those old westerns in Cinecolor. It was hyper-real. It’s the antithesis of On the Waterfront, which kind of wiped the board clean for me.
RS: Hyper-real?
MS: It was good for stories that weren’t on a naturalistic level. And so I associated color with that type of picture. But by the late sixties, Andrew Sarris was writing that the norm for every film would be color. It was hard to believe at the time, but he was right. That’s why, when we started working in color and designing in color, the color fading issue came up. When you design a film in color, the color has to remain stable, the way you originally imagined it.
“Happy Ending”: Liza Minnelli enjoys her stardom in New York, New York.
RS: Hence your passion for film preservation.
MS: We had so much trouble getting the money for Taxi Driver that Michael and Julia Phillips and I were talking about doing it in black-and-white video. We were that keen to tell the story. Of course, eventually we shot in color, but the palette in it was really muted compared to Mean Streets, which is almost operatic, almost like a musical at times.
I tried to adapt the color palette from The Red Shoes. I was trying for a three-strip printed Technicolor look. I couldn’t do that, of course; Godfather II was the last film made in Technicolor. After that the processing machines were gone. For Taxi Driver and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore I preferred a warmer look. Taxi Driver, though, was the key. That was a film that ordinarily would have been made in black-and-white, there’s no doubt about it, but you had to use color, and the colors had to be muted. And so that became a big issue.
RS: I’m trying to imagine Taxi Driver in black-and-white. I like it in color.
MS: Don’t forget the last sequence, when we took the color down for the ratings board [in order to de-emphasize the bloodiness of the violence]. That was my suggestion, to desaturate the color. I guess I was obsessed with what Oswald Morris and John Huston did on Moby Dick, and with Reflections in a Golden Eye.
RS: That’s quite a beautiful film.
MS: I wanted to do something like that with the whole picture. But I couldn’t. Oswald Morris and John Huston had access to a three-strip negative. So it was a little different. I couldn’t desaturate ours like that. So each shot I had had a basic color—green, brown, or blue. I chose brown. And then the color was fused in, 20 percent color, 80 percent brown. The next shot might be 60 percent full color, 40 percent brown. I wanted to do the whole movie that way. That would have been great.
RS: It would have taken a long time to do that.
MS: We did it fast—in a week or two. The opticals were going real fast. We did some trims that satisfied the ratings board, and I liked the way it looked. I remember when we screened it in full color, the blood looked fake to me. Paul Schrader had imagined more of a Japanese film, where the walls would have been drenched in blood. Sort of a samurai look. Paul was very much into those films. He had just written The Yakuza.
That’s when I began to have a real problem with the color palette. In New York, New York, I embraced the full saturation again. And in Raging Bull, I decided no color, because I just couldn’t continue with color anymore. That also helped the period look of the film.
Battered Bull: Jake LaMotta after a long day at the office.
RS: Absolutely.
MS: When I did King of Comedy, the art director, Boris Leven, and I decided to keep it really muted, really down. An uptown New York, Seagram’s Building sort of quality.
RS: That’s what it looked like.
MS: You know, it has a nice, early sixties kind of feel. Boris put a dash of red in, here and there. I love looking at those buildings. That’s New York.
We shot right in the building where the iconic restaurant La Brasserie is; it’s supposed to be where Jerry’s character lived. That was enjoyable to do. After that, After Hours was full, straight color. We didn’t have much of a problem with the color in The Last Temptation. There was a whole ancient world of dust in the desert. In Goodfellas we went garish; you just had to go full blast.
RS: Those guys weren’t going to wear a lot of Brooks Brothers suits.
MS: No way. They made me a suit from the picture, the one that Bob wears when he walks in the first time. Kind of a French blue silk suit. It’s hysterical; I can’t wear it, of course. But it was really wonderful, and I thought the colors were just eye-popping. That was the nature of the beast, the nature of that world.
RS: Yes, it was.
MS: Then I got up to speed, so to speak. Except in The Departed. I wanted all the color out of that.
I got very upset. Everybody was wearing black anyway, for God’s sake. In the modern world, the use of black is ubiquitous. There’s no more style the way I like it. I sound like an old man, but the way I like style on screen is with suits and ties and that sort of thing. Conservative, conventional.
RS: If you look at older pictures, the actors going in and out of a nightclub are always incredibly elegant.
MS: Elegance is a very different idea now. I decided to drain the color out of the damn thing. I thought, It’s so ugly. That matched the way everybody was behaving in the film.
RS: Yes, I can see that.
MS: Anyway, I scouted locations in the winter. I had never been in Boston, but the snow there was beautiful, trees with no leaves on them, black. I thought that would be great for The Departed. I don’t really know the modern world in color. I just don’t get it.
But then Matt Damon had agreed to do De Niro’s film, The Good Shepherd. There was a question as to when he would be available, and I thought, You know what? T
he Departed really doesn’t depend on seasons. Bob’s film did. So I moved my picture from the fall to April. When I got to Boston, I was shocked by the green leaves in the trees. Then I realized, these guys get cut up, they get shot, they betray each other under green trees just as well as under bare trees. So with Departed I became at peace with the color process. I accept now that a color film is made the way they used to routinely make black-and-white films—that is to say, I try not to think about color at all.
SHOOTING
RICHARD SCHICKEL: When you’re on the set—particularly when you’re isolated on a location, with everyone away from their normal lives—don’t you feel that the company often becomes a little surrogate family?
MARTIN SCORSESE: Coming from a very tribal place, the real bond for me was one of blood, of family. Very Mediterranean. When I made the crossover to New York University I brought that expectation with me. I expected that the people around me, the new people I met from all different parts of the world, would become family. I don’t think they saw it that way. I expected from them things they could not provide.
RS: But still, don’t you feel that any movie company, or most movie companies, while they are up and running, are little families?
Conversations with Scorsese Page 33