Conversations with Scorsese

by Richard Schickel

  But the framing is the issue—whether it should be even a 2.35 aspect ratio. I honestly don’t know. I mean, I saw a lot of Japanese films framed that way, but then I saw Mikio Naruse’s films and he framed them in 1.33, which was fascinating. I can’t use 1.33 today, but what I’m saying is, you think of Japanese films in the sixties, and immediately you think wide screen, 2.35.

  RS: Since you brought this up, is framing the first question that occurs to you?

  MS: You’ve got to be true to that world they’re in.

  RS: In other words, looking at that movie, we as viewers have to look at it with the eye of a character who’s in the movie?

  MS: No. The eye that I present that world to you with has to do justice to that world. I have to understand the layers of that world. You just don’t photograph a house. I have to ask, Should there be a tree behind it? Should there be a river behind the house? What does the river really mean to these people? Should I include it in this or that frame? Should I wait for later? Should I track out from the river? Should I pan over to it? This sort of thing.

  But it isn’t second nature to me. Jean Renoir in The Southerner understood people, through the landscape, through their relationship to nature. It’s very hard for me to understand that. You’ve got to be true to that world they’re in.

  RS: Silence—what is the film as you see it?

  MS: Well, I don’t want to give too much of it away, but it’s about the very essence of Christianity. It’s a true story about two Jesuit priests who steal into Japan to find a missing teacher who’s become an apostate. The film is full of paradoxes. For example, one of the priests has to choose between his love of Catholicism and his love of a more broadly defined Christianity. Then there’s a character he can’t stand who keeps running around asking for confession, and keeps ratting on all the Christians. It turns out that’s Jesus. Jesus is the man you can’t stand. He’s the one you’ve got to forgive. He’s the one you’ve got to love.

  The book was given to me by Archbishop Paul Moore of the Episcopal Church.

  RS: How curious.

  MS: He gave it to me in New York, the night after he saw Last Temptation. He said, The choices he makes are the very essence of his faith.

  RS: It sounds like a really good story to me. Are you having trouble getting a studio to commit?

  MS: I just think that in this day and age they’d rather do something more like In the Valley of Elah [Paul Haggis’s 2007 film about a father’s search for his missing soldier-son], which is more contained, and can’t be misinterpreted as solely a religious story. It’s about who we are as people. But, you know, it also behooves them to make pictures that make a lot of money.

  RS: I’m not sure they make a lot of money all the time.

  MS: No, they don’t. But the risks, the gambles, are so big. It’s amazing when you have meetings with the studio people and you hear their concerns and you try to make something for them and for yourself. You’ve still got two responsibilities. In this case it isn’t that the studios totally don’t want to make the picture, it’s that it’s not that attractive to them—put it that way.

  RS: It’s a tougher sell for them, when it comes to promotion and marketing.

  MS: Yes, a tougher sell. Yet I could make it for a good price. It’s very contained. It’s not set in the shogun’s palace. It’s set in Kyushu, in southern Japan. It wouldn’t be that bad.

  RS: When you mentioned that you have a responsibility to the studio—it is, after all, their money and they’re not necessarily your enemy—I thought of your father’s lectures on responsibility.

  MS: I know! It doesn’t mean that I’m always responsible, and I certainly haven’t always been responsible in the past. I try to be, I really do, but at a certain point if I’m getting something on film that’s better than a studio ever thought it would get, then it behooves me to try to convince them to let me finish the job properly. A constant dialogue with the people who are financing the film is really important.

  We worked very closely with the studio on Gangs of New York. The studio wanted to be kept abreast of what was going on, and I did every step of the way. They’d raise an issue, I’d discuss it with them, try to deal with it. Sometimes I couldn’t. Sometimes I tried to and still couldn’t. The Aviator was a very big movie, but it was on schedule, so I got a little bit of credit that way. The only difficulties we had were in the last month, over distribution. But that’s a matter of one person’s will over another. That’s not about the film. That’s something else. You just flail your way out of it, or into it. The only exception is if you’re involved with the financiers. Sometimes you get into that kind of thing—like Selznick and Hitchcock maybe.

  Marty directs Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon on a Boston rooftop on The Departed.

  RS: Hitch and I talked about that one time. He really didn’t like him.

  MS: In Rear Window Raymond Burr [who played the murderer] is made up to look like him.

  RS: I wasn’t aware of that.

  MS: Somehow Hitchcock came out of it stronger. Some people don’t come out.

  RS: It wasn’t just that he became stronger. It was that Selznick became weaker, addicted to uppers and downers, that sort of thing.

  MS: Yes. And then he made A Farewell to Arms, unfortunately. Oh, my God.

  RS: Let’s go back to you, Marty. Do you have a favorite or two among your films?

  MS: No.

  RS: Really?

  MS: Mean Streets was very hard to make, but everybody was working well together and it was a good time in my life. I liked that. Italianamerican, the one on my parents, I learned a lot from that. I liked The Last Waltz. Goodfellas was like a rebirth. I was having a hard time. I sort of found myself again with it. Kundun is also a picture I like.

  RS: I know that. But why, particularly?

  MS: The mood, the tone of it.

  RS: The spiritual quest?

  MS: The quest of a person who is raised from a child to lead the spiritual life. That makes it a very interesting movie to me. I can’t quite grasp it yet, though.

  RS: Is it something in the selection of the child that’s moving to you?

  MS: No, it’s the nature of loss, and the acceptance of it. The loss of a whole culture, a way of life. The loss of life, loss of friends, loss of relatives, the very transitory nature of our existence—accepting that, and moving on. That is where the texture and the color of the film come from.

  RS: Silence—perhaps it has spiritual dimensions not unlike those of Kundun.

  MS: Correct.

  RS: When you were coming off an enormous success with The Departed, at some cynical, practical level, you could get on a crime story more easily than you could get on a Japanese movie. What I’m saying is that then you went to a studio and you said, I’d like to do the Japanese movie, they said, Yes, Marty, but we really love the one about the criminally insane set near Boston.

  MS: Right.

  RS: So, you know, that’s the practical side of things.

  MS: And you can’t go on a set and say, I don’t want to be here, even if you want to be on another set.

  RS: But you have on your mind all those personal matters we’ve discussed.

  MS: Yes, I’m getting older. As I said, there are certain responsibilities with the family at this point.

  RS: That’s the point I’m trying to make here.

  MS: Shutter Island is about truth and illusion, too, you know. And guilt, a lot of guilt [laughs].

  Marty, Elias Koteas, and Leonardo DiCaprio lost in the shadows of Shutter Island.

  RS: A lot of guilt, as usual. I know.

  MS: But my aim, finally, is to make Silence, the way my aim was to make Gangs of New York, and my aim was to make The Last Temptation of Christ. Or Bringing Out the Dead.

  RS: Is the last temptation of Marty Scorsese to make something like Charlie Wilson’s War, a political film?

  MS: I’d like to make something that has some body—something that one would not only
be able to enjoy as entertainment, but also to think about. That means being moved by it or repulsed by it at times. To leave the theater saying, You know what, that’s a very interesting point of view. I guess that desire goes back to the impulse of a young boy looking at those American films in the theater, and then seeing the Italian films. And later being affected by seeing Children of Paradise for the first time. And then seeing Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring and practically every Bergman film that came out every six months or ten months, whatever it was.

  RS: They sure did come out in those days.

  MS: If you ever look at what was playing back in 1960 in New York—I mean, it was amazing.

  RS: I was at the movies three, four nights a week. You know, you’d go to 8th Street in the Village. You’d go to the Waverly, which played old American movies. I probably saw Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men eight times.

  MS: I saw Treasure of the Sierra Madre there for the first time. There’s a part of me that loves European art. And there’s a part of me that loves Hollywood film. Those are two very different traditions.

  But always I want to communicate to an audience. I want them to enjoy the story, to go with it, to enjoy it.

  I guess it goes back to that idea of good men doing bad things, and our not always judging them harshly. Creating a story around that. I believe I grew up in a world like that. A lot of my friends experienced it differently. But that’s what I perceived. That’s what I saw.

  There’s a Jacques Tourneur film, Canyon Passage. Did you ever see it?

  RS: Yes.

  MS: It’s a beautiful film.

  RS: It is.

  MS: There’s a wonderful moment where Brian Donlevy is in the back room— I think Hoagy Carmichael sees him—and he’s weighing some gold out of a pouch. It’s not his. He’s just measuring it and marking the weight down. Then he looks at it again. He takes some for himself. That’s where the problem begins. He’s a decent guy, but he’s got some business problems.

  That kind of dilemma fascinates me. But I like entertainment in movies, too. I enjoy making an audience care about people, or laugh. I watch films from Africa, from South Korea. I see them as expressions from different cultures. I wonder about the value of a lot of the stuff that is being made here. I’m trying to look at other places for their personal expression—even the very, very long takes of Béla Tarr; at times it’s a major investment, to sit down and watch Satantango for seven hours.

  RS: No kidding.

  MS: As I get older, I find I go back to early Carl Dreyer. I’ll screen Passion of Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath [about witchcraft]. Ordet [a meditation on religious and profane love] is a masterpiece. What I guess I’m getting at is that I am still part of the American culture.

  RS: You can’t escape that.

  MS: I’ve been looking at It’s a Wonderful Life again.

  RS: Frank Capra had a wonderful life. And he was a wonderful director.

  MS: He saw America from the point of view of the immigrant coming over from a decaying European society. He flourished in the worst time, the 1930s.

  RS: As long as you honestly put your experience into the work, it doesn’t make any difference what your experience is, even if it’s an unfashionably happy one.

  MS: That’s the key. Honestly putting your experience in. Crafting it in such a way that it has that honesty and the love from your heart.

  RS: I agree.

  MS: And you have to like the people you work with. That’s why Capra was so great with actors—you could see he loved them.

  RS: He was a very empathetic man, Frank.

  MS: I never met him.

  RS: I did, and I liked him a lot.

  MS: Meet John Doe was on the other day. Thelma and I were looking at just a couple of cuts. The sound was down; I said, “Look at this,” the scene where they choose Gary Cooper to be the American Everyman, when all those different men come in, looking to be cast as John Doe. I said, “Watch the cutting here.” Barbara Stanwyck’s face—it was great.

  RS: Frank Capra was, technically speaking, one of the greatest directors who ever lived. The cutting—

  MS: The frames.

  RS: The way the shots are set up.

  MS: That sequence in Meet John Doe, the rally at the ballpark in the rain, and the police. Do you know how hard it would be to set that up?

  RS: It’s one of the most complicated, brilliant pieces of filmmaking I’ve ever seen.

  MS: What he was doing there was amazing. They shot eighteen months, they shot different endings.

  RS: Yes, I know. And it’s still not a movie that ends quite right. But up to that point there’s so much fabulous shooting. And that rally in the rain sequence, if I were teaching film, that’s one of the ones I would take and say, Look, guys. This is a gigantic sequence with thousands of people in it. Just look at it and die a little bit.

  MS: I hadn’t seen Meet John Doe in years when, one night, when I was shooting The Departed, I was in the trailer waiting. TCM is on with the sound off, and I watched Meet John Doe. I hadn’t looked at that sequence in such good quality in years. That’s when I realized what an amazing piece of filmmaking it is.

  RS: Another great scene is the wedding at the end of It Happened One Night. It’s breathtaking how he does that. You know, he has matching swish pans, cameras going, the girl going—

  MS: People tend to overlook it because they only remember the characters.

  RS: Well, you remember the funny, the sweet—

  MS: But when you look at the film closely, the characters have a glow to them that’s quite extraordinary. The lighting is brilliant. The editing is great.

  RS: I had done the Frank Capra film for the series on TV, The Men Who Made the Movies, and they hired me to write another Capra show. Somebody else was going to direct it. I said, Sure, I can do that. The producer was a good guy, a former film editor, Carl Pingatore. We put the film together, and we took it to somebody at NBC, and he said, “But it’s not funny.” And I said, “Yeah, well, that’s right, because, you know, Frank Capra isn’t funny.”

  MS: I know.

  RS: He’s warm, but he’s not funny. It’s Depression America. I mean, what’s funny in American Madness?

  MS: Nothing.

  RS: And look at the run on the bank sequence. It’s beautiful, though.

  MS: Fantastic, yeah. My wife heard his voice the other night on TV. She said, “Who’s that?” I told her and she said, “He sounds like a nice man.”

  RS: He probably wasn’t, entirely, you know, like all of us. But he wasn’t the monster Joe McBride portrayed in that biography he wrote.

  MS: You could feel the love of the actors, for characters they played; it’s like a Jean Renoir picture.

  RS: Frank was, at his height, when his was “the name above the title,” a driven man, and a huge egotist, but he was also, I always thought, a fundamentally good person.

  MS: A work of art comes out of something, and it’s got to be criticized, it’s got to go in front of an audience. It has to be dealt with. This is its nature, its fate. Coming from a Catholic background, a Christian background, with its sense of order in the world, I still have to deal with the lack of order in the world.

  RS: The crisis, it seems to me, that has been more and more vividly played out in our time is existentialism versus the orderliness of organized religion. We are, most of us, now used to the notion that we live in a chance universe.

  MS: Yes, exactly.

  RS: I’m here with you. I ask you one final question that just happens to pop into my mind. I step out in the street and a car comes around the corner and kills me. If I hadn’t asked that question, I’d have been across the street.

  MS: That fascinates me. I actually think about it all the time. That’s one of the ideas behind Nick’s character in Bringing Out the Dead, thinking he can make a difference.

  RS: Well, he does—to some degree.

  MS: Yes, but he can’t control the world. He can�
�t control the cosmos. He can’t control people’s lives. He can’t really bring people back to life, except almost by luck.

  RS: It comes back to something that was so important in Elia Kazan’s way of looking at the world. He said, Look, life is full of choices. If you married this woman, it means you didn’t marry that woman. Marrying this woman your life goes in a certain path. But what would have been your path had you chosen the other woman? That’s what we never know. That was the fascination for him. You know, he chose to testify at the HUAC hearings. Had he chosen not to testify, how would his life have been different? That was the most vivid example in his life. But the fundamental idea occurred to him in all kinds of situations, even very minor ones—I chose to shoot this scene this morning instead of that scene this morning.

  MS: There are some who believe there may not be any design at all, that the design just works itself out. Where does God fit in this? Does He in any way? Is there some sort of a force?

  My daughter comes into a room in Los Angeles. She flew out because we were going to one of these awards ceremonies. She was very happy to be there. She sits down and asks, “So why are we here?” Her mother says, “We’re here for the event tonight.” My daughter says, “No, I mean, why are we here on this planet?” I looked at the three of us and I said, “Well, if you weren’t here, who’s going to take care of the dog?” I said, “I’m here to take care of you, to take care of us, to take care of Mommy, we all take care of each other.” That’s it. It ends here.

  RS: There appears to me to be some truth in that.

  MS: That’s all we know. And the next step is that the person next to you is somebody who cares about you. Maybe that is the nature of who we are.

  RS: This has come up in different forms in a number of our conversations. It’s obviously something you’ve wrestled with all your life. Now it seems to me, coming from a very different tradition from yours—

  MS: Yes!

  RS: I’m just done with it. I’m not having that wrestling match anymore. I believe it’s a chance universe. I believe when I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m not going to some better place—which I bitterly regret, of course.