The camera panned from left to right. And every time we dissolved, the camera got up to a higher and higher speed. So the shots became more and more slow motion. But it was imagined from listening to “I Get Around” over and over again when nobody was home—and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “Sloop John B,” which is still a song I want to use. “Sail On, Sailor” I used in The Departed. Just a little bit of it. Their harmonies are fantastic.
RS: So we have not only films like The Last Waltz, but also the passionate and knowledgeable use of contemporary music as scoring in so many of your films. Was that just a natural development for you, given your history?
MS: That’s a good question. I think about it a lot right now, because I’m deciding what kind of music score to have in a new picture I’m making.
In the forties, those 78s were almost talismans. I’d see the label turning and I’d hear this sound come out of it. Music was a mainstay in our household. There was a lot of communication through music, listening to it, listening to the lyrics. Music was a constant part of my life from the earliest time I can remember up until the time I moved out of the three rooms on Elizabeth Street. After that, I took music with me everywhere.
RS: Rock ’n’ roll wouldn’t have interested your parents at all, would it?
MS: Well, my mother was very tolerant of Presley and some other rock singers, but my father didn’t like it at all, especially the doo-wop and the blues.
RS: In making Mean Streets, for example, was it a natural tropism to say, Oh, we’d better score this with some rock songs and some pop stuff?
MS: I think that came even before we started shooting—a lot of the scenes came out of listening to the music. Certain songs were attached to certain scenes from my past. I remember listening to certain songs in my brother’s car as we drove around the Bowery, seeing the alcoholics in the street. That music is playing over the appropriate images in the film. Music produced a kind of visceral energy which, being younger, I fed on—the kind of aggressive music that’s used in Mean Streets—for example, the Ronettes’ song “Be My Baby.”
The movies of that time had scores by Miklós Rózsa, Dmitri Tiomkin, Bernard Herrmann. I collected all those. My scores had to come from somewhere else, because I was usually reflecting another world, another time. The first time I really needed something more traditional was Taxi Driver—it was so internal I needed something special, and I chose Bernard Herrmann. Later, I worked with Elmer Bernstein.
But the reality was that there was no other way to do it. The only thing that stopped us from doing it was not being able to pay for the music licenses. And so in Who’s That Knocking some of the music isn’t very good. But all the music that was supposed to go into Who’s That Knocking went into Mean Streets ultimately.
At the same time, Kubrick was using Zarathustra and Bartók, that sort of thing, in 2001. Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising was a shock because of the use of music, the images, the whole idea of youth culture, the death wish—all of these forbidden images all thrown together with that sound track. It was important.
RS: In many instances in your films the music is almost running counter to the action on screen. It’s very calculated, but it doesn’t appear to be calculated when you’re in the theater listening to it.
MS: That’s right. Sometimes I take that sync point [the place in the film where the music kicks in] and I go backwards. I create the sync point with another piece of music, not the usual sting, as they call it, though I have used stings. The first time I heard that word was when Bernard Herrmann used it.
The night before he died, working on Taxi Driver, I asked him for a note, and he goes, “You mean a sting.” And he gave me one. It was for when Travis looks in the mirror at the end, and he thinks he sees Ed. I said, “It sounds too straight.” He goes, “Play it backwards.” That was the last thing Bennie did.
In Cape Fear we have it. In Shutter Island we have a couple of stings. I’m trying to find classical music that has stings in it already.
RS: That’s hard, isn’t it?
MS: It requires hours of listening to music.
RS: When I made my film about you that went on the DVD of The Departed, our whole fee went to music licenses—over $100,000 just for the DVD rights.
MS: I know the problem. And when we did Mean Streets, the whole film only cost $650,000. Jon Taplin got that money, and out of that money he was still able to pay the Rolling Stones and still able to pay for Cream and Eric Clapton and the Ronettes.
RS: When you hear music do you think, Well, that would be perfect for a film?
MS: Some music just stays in my head. I still have my original records. And a CD library. I find that I’m listening to music that I heard back in 1949. I play it through and I listen. By 1985 I stopped really listening to popular music. But the earlier songs created images in my head. Somehow some of those images and feelings—not all of them—were able to be used in certain pictures. Certain scenes suddenly reminded me of a piece of music that I thought would be perfect for a film.
RS: Can you give me one example of that offhand?
MS: “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” in Mean Streets. The moment of the downbeat, I knew that Keitel would be taking his drink and it would be slow motion. Exactly what speed I wasn’t quite sure of at the time—I think we went with ninety-six frames per second. I knew that at that downbeat there was going to be a cut. A better example is when Keitel in the very beginning of the film wakes up and looks in the mirror, and then puts his head back down on the pillow. There are three cuts there, and if you listen, three drumbeats: that’s the beginning of “Be My Baby,” produced by Phil Spector.
The editing came to me by listening to the beginning of that song.
RS: So this is kind of a reciprocating engine: the music and the image, the image and the music.
MS: Exactly. It’s very different from the way others use music, I think. Very often a song is played for nostalgia. It’s played all the way through, without alteration. But you can see in Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and Casino particularly that I went in and cut within the song so that certain points of the music or the vocals will be hitting between certain lines of dialogue. Those lyrics are also commenting on the dialogue.
It’s all through Raging Bull. You can hear the Ink Spots commenting on the scene where Bob throws the steak against the wall: the Ink Spots are singing “Whispering Trees.” I used the Brazilian music in the kitchen scene with Joe Pesci and his wife, when he wants more coffee and is trying to convince Bob to take the fight. I did the same kind of thing all through Goodfellas, particularly Ray’s last day as a wiseguy, when he is cocaine-fueled, and you hear Harry Nilsson singing “Jump into the Fire”—“We can make each other happy, we can make each other happy”—and he keeps stretching out “ha-appy.” I just kept mixing that, overlapping Nilsson’s voice, which became like a cry at night—a panicked cry about being happy, very aggressive and very dangerous.
I think that’s the theme of that whole sequence. It starts with the beginning of “Jump into the Fire,” with the guitar and the drumbeats. Then we used that as a refrain. We started to fold the song in, overlapping itself—when Nilsson’s voice is wailing, we put more wailing over that, for a double, triple effect. After a while, it was like a frantic voice in your head, you just can’t take any more, you’re going to explode. The next thing you know, there’s a gun at your head and a voice says, “Turn off the car.” And Ray’s happy. He says, Thank God, because if it wasn’t the police, he’d be dead. The music was great in building up to that point.
There’s so much effective music in that film. There is the scene when Ray slams the trunk down and you hear the guitar on “Memo from Turner” from Performance [the cult classic of 1970, in which a gangster and a rock star engage in a messy, drug-addled relationship]. Then you hear Mick Jagger’s voice coming in. This comes after De Niro in his terry-cloth blue robe says to Ray, “I don’t want the guns. The drugs are making your mind into mush.” Bob slams the do
or on him and Ray says, “I knew he wouldn’t want the guns. I knew it.” And he slams the trunk. It’s funny, too, because these guys are killers talking about selling guns, and they’re getting so petty, getting on each other’s nerves. After Ray slams the trunk, there is slide guitar music, a piece of music I used to listen to a lot by The Who, a track from the Live at Leeds album. It was an improvisatory guitar solo that’s quite beautiful and it just stayed in my head. I thought that would be great because Ray almost crashes into the car in front of him. And I thought, Let’s go right from “Turner” into that, and back into Harry Nilsson.
RS: Is that kind of thing worked out largely in the editing room?
MS: No, usually before. Very often I play the music on the set.
RS: I didn’t realize that.
MS: Not all the time. But I started doing that on Who’s That Knocking. I played music I couldn’t use on the film—a song called “The Lantern” by the Rolling Stones—to get the feeling of a camera move I liked. That was 1968. On Goodfellas, on the first day of shooting, we did the scene with the pink Cadillac with the two dead bodies in it. I knew I was going to use the last section of “Layla,” by Derek and the Dominos, Eric Clapton. So we played that on set. It was great, the music had a grandiosity and a stateliness about it.
RS: When you’re playing the music on the set, do you communicate to the crew what’s on your mind?
MS: Oh, absolutely.
RS: That the music was meant to enhance a certain kind of a move?
MS: Yes. Michael Ballhaus would understand it. Michael Chapman did, too. Making The Departed, too, I’d play him certain music.
RS: I’ve actually never heard of any other directors who do it this way—the intricate working out of the music during the shoot.
MS: We also do more with it in the editing.
RS: That seems to me a unique aspect of the way you work.
MS: Well, the music is inseparable for me. It can be nerve-racking to get it right. It was new territory for me to work with Bernard Herrmann, Elmer Bernstein, Howard Shore. But we developed a wonderful trust. Some of the films that had those scores were in a genre style. I had a burst of energy in the seventies and I felt I could do any genre I wanted. That’s gone now. If I do a genre film now, I really have to think about what new perspective I could bring to the genre.
The found scores—composed of pre-existing music—seem to fit more closely with genre pictures. I feel more comfortable that way. Even in Kundun, which is a special kind of film, we played Philip Glass on the set.
RS: Really?
MS: Yes, a couple of times, to get a certain mood. It’s funny: Your camera’s moving to the music, and you think you’ve got it right. But when you put the music next to it later in the editing room, you say, “I went too fast. I should have done it slower.”
On Who’s That Knocking, the people are in a party or at a bar and there’s music playing, and you have to stop the music so you can hear the dialogue. But everybody still has to act as if the music is blaring. I hated that.
RS: Why?
MS: I want the energy there. That’s a battle I’m having all the time. I try to get the music played back on set as much as possible in scenes like that before cutting it off. I want the actors at a peak. I want the energy going.
RS: Another director would have dozens of takes because he wouldn’t actually know how the music which he’s already heard in his head would work. Or, worse, a composer is going to come in and write a score six weeks later.
MS: Exactly. I don’t feel comfortable with relying on a score. I admire great scores, and they’ve saved my pictures in many cases. But I tend to want to try to create my own score. In some cases Robbie Robertson helps. But not every film I make lends itself to that.
RS: An obvious exception would be Age of Innocence.
MS: That had to have a wonderful score. That’s part of the tradition that film belongs to. I thought Elmer’s music was just glorious.
RS: It’s a beautifully scored film.
MS: You know, I sent that film to Kurosawa. He sent back a note saying, “I do not like films about romance.” He also said it was not his kind of film, that he just didn’t like it. And here’s the point: He also said, “I must caution you, I must admonish you on the use of music. Like all Hollywood films, you’re using music too much.”
But to me it was like The Heiress. I wanted Aaron Copland. That was a key film for me. I wanted a reference back to that. And also in the look of the film.
RESTORING AND COLLECTING
RICHARD SCHICKEL: In the course of these conversations you have often said, “I ran such-and-such before I did that picture,” or “It’s like the scene in …,” and then you name a picture as a reference.
MARTIN SCORSESE: Yes, I’m just giving reference points.
RS: I understand that. I understand you’re not copying the masters—although there’s no reason not to sometimes.
MS: It’s not going to come out the way they did it anyway.
RS: That’s the whole point.
MS: The inspirational aspect of it is interesting to me—the notion of staying in touch with film history, film heritage. I’ve been told I do that more than other directors do. I don’t know, but the view of the movies I carry around in my mind has changed over the years. I now prefer seeing other Welles films rather than Citizen Kane. I’ve reached a certain limit with Kane. Other films now give me more to think about.
RS: Such as?
MS: Renoir’s The River. And The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. I keep finding more and more in that. But I’m kind of done with Kane and The Searchers.
RS: I can’t look at those movies again. I’ve seen them too many times.
MS: I should say that with Kane, there are still moments I can watch. It’s still a reference point even though I don’t watch it in its entirety.
RS: Are there specific sequences or images that haunt you, maybe while you’re actually making a film?
MS: A lot of films changed the way I perceived the world around me at certain key points in my life.
Forty years ago, when I saw Antonioni’s L’Avventura, I didn’t know quite what to make of it. I went to see it a second time, and a third time. And I thought that the filmmaker was forcing me to view life in a different rhythm or with a different frame.
Part of the initial problem I had with the movie was that I didn’t know who those people were. It depicted a world I had no firsthand knowledge of. But once I got past that, I began to see that the images had a melancholy and a power to them. There was drama in every frame. And the panning was different, the tracking was different.
I’ve always tried to capture what Antonioni did, but I can never get it. I just have a totally different sensibility. There’s no way I can get near it. He does it a lot in Blow-Up, though I prefer L’Avventura and The Eclipse. But still there’s this parallel move that he makes which is so detached yet has such spiritual power. It’s a very cool sensibility, very cool. It made me stop and look. He was showing the world in a different way.
RS: Is that what drives you, making people stop and look?
MS: Probably. For example, the biggest problem I had with Shutter Island was trying to figure out the scene when he’s walking down that long, dark hallway, and there are no lights and he’s got to light matches. He’s holding them up, trying to see if there are people in the cells.
There are those glimpses of people whom he thinks he sees, but maybe don’t exist. How was I to shoot something that doesn’t exist? I mean, Buñuel did it the best. He just cut straight to a dream, even though the audience doesn’t know it’s a dream. The camera move, the lights, the cutting—what to do to rivet the viewer?
RS: The way you reference films leads me to your interest in film collecting, and now the Film Foundation, and restoration. It’s admirable, and it’s useful. And a little compulsive. But you don’t do it just to solve your own moviemaking problems.
MS: No, I don’t. It’s a
nother aspect of myself. That’s the guy who thought he was going to be a studio director, and realized the studios were all over. And what could he do about it? Well, he could try to preserve that history. If I had never become a filmmaker, the difference those films made in my life might make a similar difference in somebody else’s life in the future. I’m excited by that. I like teaching. It’s so great when some younger people around you have the curiosity and you can talk, and they get excited. You show them certain things, you give them something to read, and two years later they come back with a film.
First among many: Marty acquired this Belgian poster in Greenwich Village for perhaps $25, when he was a young man. It was his first such acquisition, and to this day it hangs in his editing room.
RS: When did film preservation become a priority for you?
MS: It began in the mid-seventies when I was just trying to get films for research—American films, Italian, British, whatever. We found the situation was dire. The films were falling apart.
There was alarm, really. I felt it, some film critics did. Spielberg would get a print and it had turned magenta and would be cut in five different places and panned and scanned [a process by which a wide-screen image is altered so that it fills the entire frame of a television screen; at the time, federal regulation forbade black space at the top and bottom of the screen]. Sometimes we couldn’t even see the image. We knew we had to try to make sure that these films survived for the next generation.
When I started working on Raging Bull, we started to form a preservation group. A lot of emotion was attached to that effort. The studios and the distributors, who had made so much money on these films, needed to be educated as to their condition.
There was no means of restoring three-strip Technicolor. Every film was being made in color, and the color of old films was no longer stable. Color is intrinsic to the design of a movie, its inherent texture. And within a few years the color was gone, it was disappearing. That was something we really felt intensely at that time.
Conversations with Scorsese Page 38