Conversations with Scorsese (12 page)

See, the thing is, when I was starting out I would get excited by discovering what lens to use to create a certain feeling from another film. You had all this technique, all these choices, at your disposal. And you had to sort of figure out the ones that would tell a certain part of the story, psychologically and emotionally, more powerfully.

But in the sixties, I went against the established filmmakers, wiped them away, and said, If this filmmaker did a track in on that shot and on that line of dialogue, if I ever come across the same thing, I’ll do a track out—just to see what would happen.

Well, sometimes you’d track out, and it didn’t work. Sometimes it did work. So we were sometimes also finding what to do from watching films we didn’t like.

RS:
But you must have liked some of the kind of routine American, or seemingly at the time routine, guys, right? Surely you must have liked
Howard Hawks.

MS:
Sure. But I didn’t realize it at first. I saw the name Hawks and I began to realize certain films I liked all had the same name on them. [
Laughs.
]

RS:
It’s a very unobtrusive manner of his, you know. I mean, it was never something where you’d say, Wow, I’ve never seen anything like that before.

MS:
But there was something about the way the people behaved in his pictures in the frame. There’s something about the nature of the relationship—the men, the women. And the men together.
Rio Bravo,
for example, or going earlier
—Red River,
of course, is the key one.

RS:
There’s something in Hawksian behavior that maybe only a steady kind of eye-level camera can capture.

MS:
You can’t get in the way of that. Yet you can get in the way—with wide shots, medium-wide shots. It’s very hard today because everything’s wide screen. You can’t get that close. It’s tricky too, when you can’t do the American shot. You know, from below the knees and up.

But what was happening was I’d see the Hawks name showing up and I started to put it together. I didn’t care what it was—if it was the crazy
Monkey Business
or if it was
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,
I’d watch it. Even
Land of the Pharaohs.
As a kid I just became obsessed with ancient Egypt. [The film, co-written by
William Faulkner no less, is about a pharaoh obsessed with building an impregnable tomb so he can take his wealth with him to the next world.] It was really silly—and a lot of fun.

RS:
I have to admit, I sort of loved
Land of the Pharaohs.

MS:
I just loved it. I went to it from theater to theater. It was my favorite film as a kid. And then
On the Waterfront
wiped all that away. It didn’t wipe away the love for it, but I didn’t have to go see it again. But there was something about the ancient world and the way they shot it in modern Egypt that was interesting to me, using wide screen. And the sound, the music, was interesting, with
Yma Sumac on the track, and it made me think of other cultures. Maybe it was all ersatz, but still I liked it a lot.

RS:
I did, too. But in that period I think you enjoyed movies like
Helen of Troy.

MS:
Yes, I did. I was talking about
Quo Vadis
two nights ago. And then me making my own Roman epics from that. Discovering Shakespeare through
Julius Caesar.
And then, yes, about the same time,
Helen of Troy,
and reading
The Iliad
because of it.

RS:
And, of course,
The Silver Chalice.

MS:
Yes, of course; it is wonderful. I saw that uptown at the
Warners Theater. To see that in 2.55 Scope with stereo sound was great. It was astounding to see those sets—the audacity of it. Too bad about the script, but you know—geez. Don’t forget that
Boris Leven worked on that. He did the art direction.

So the ancient world pictures were the ones I just was obsessed with. But the ones that really gave me the impetus to make a film were the other pictures. Because I could never do anything like the Roman ones.

RS:
From all you’ve said so far, I gather that the other
genres—
westerns, historical spectacles, even
musicals—loomed larger in your formative years than
gangster pictures.

MS:
I was thinking this morning, could we mention my films that aren’t gangster films?
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.
To a certain extent
Taxi Driver.
New York, New York.

RS:
Of course, naturally.

MS:
The Last Waltz. The King of Comedy. After Hours,
and so on. I mean, really, the majority of my films are not about gangsters. Most of them aren’t even
that
violent—
Kundun, The Aviator,
The Age of Innocence.

RS:
Right.

MS:
The gangster films make more of an impression, I guess.

RS:
Well, back when you were doing
Mean Streets,
were you saying, Look, this is what I know. This is my world. I can bring a certain amount of authenticity to it that I couldn’t if I was doing a Roman epic, not that anyone would let me.

MS:
No, not really. No, I didn’t think it was my right. That’s why I tried
Alice.
And
Taxi Driver
is very different,
New York, New York.
And that’s why I embraced
Raging Bull.

RS:
Of course, sure.

MS:
After
Mean Streets,
I kind of pretended that that was all past. But by the time I embraced that world again I wasn’t trying to hide anything about where I came
from. It was still very vivid. And at a certain point, my father said, “One day you should do a really good gangster film.” He kind of liked those—they were part of his folklore.

But
Taxi Driver
was easier to finance because of the success of
The Godfather,
the first one. That’s how Bob De Niro was hired. I took the answer print up to show it to Francis [Ford Coppola], and he looked at it, and the next day he called De Niro to play in
Godfather II.

RS:
Really?

MS:
Yes. So Francis was very important at that time for me. But I never thought I would make another gangster film until
Goodfellas
came up.
Mean Streets
to
Goodfellas,
that’s 1973 to 1990.

RS:
We’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. Let’s go back to your teen years, when you were going to movies on your own recognizance.

MS:
In my last two years at
Cardinal Hayes High School, I kind of realized I didn’t know what I was going to do. I mean, I took some elective courses, more to do with business, which is the antithesis of who I am and what I do. So I was miserable. But, primarily, I think, at that point, the idea was to try English literature. And I was going to go to
St. Francis College in
Brooklyn. I was accepted there. I remember taking the exam and going in and discussing literature. Again, as I said, I didn’t think I read much, but I must have, because I was talking about
Thomas Hardy and
James Joyce,
Graham Greene,
James Baldwin, and Dostoyevsky. It wasn’t easy for me to read. You know, it wasn’t part of our cultural makeup, but I was ready to delve further into that.

Instead I saw this catalogue from the New York University
Washington Square College, and they had this department called TMR—Television, Motion Pictures, Radio. And I saw that for the first year you were allowed to take a history of motion pictures course. Everything else was what they call liberal arts curriculum. And so I thought, Well, I’m going to see what that class is like. NYU was in the Village; it was America, and I was becoming more American. It was not Elizabeth Street, you know.

And the day I went for orientation, a member of each department got up, the English department, the French or whatever, and gave a speech. And the gentleman who got up to speak about the Television, Motion Pictures, Radio department was
Haig Manoogian, and he had such energy, such passion. I said to myself, That’s where I want to be, with this person. At NYU at the time, if you could pay you were in, so my father got some student loans and I just joined up there. And, eventually, by my third year, I was making a film.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
At that point you had definitely decided not to be a priest?

MARTIN SCORSESE:
I thought I might go into a seminary, but then I began to think this vocation I had was for the wrong reasons—it shouldn’t be about you, it should be about others, as we discussed before. But for me, it was going to be about cutting myself off from the world, not being a participant in it.

I think I made the decision not to go when I went to my first class at Washington Square College, which had to do with movies.

RS:
Really? With that on-the-spot immediacy? Though by that time it must have occurred to you that all the stuff you’d been doing, all the drawing and movie-going, had somehow brought you to this place.

MS:
Well, yeah, it really was something like that. And it could have been television. I mean, they had one little television studio with two TV cameras. I did a few television plays. So it could’ve been television. It was still using a moving image, you know.

And
radio, I did a little bit of radio. Whenever we could we did radio plays. All on that one floor, by the way, the eighth floor of the East Building on Greene
Street. And by 1960, all these other films were being made: by Cassavetes,
Shirley Clarke, the
French films, the
Italian films. I knew something was happening with film, and I thought maybe I could get something to do in
television or maybe documentaries. Because that’s what Haig emphasized: documentaries, never feature films.

Marty interviewing his parents for his
documentary
Italianamerican
(1974).

RS:
In your recent
DGA Quarterly
interview you talk a good deal about documentaries in that period.

MS:
I love them.

RS:
Did you think, Well, I wouldn’t dare to aspire to do a fictional film, but there are things I see around in life that I could make documentaries out of?

MS:
No, I didn’t feel that. I did feel, though, a power from a documentary that no fictional film could generate—a different kind of power.

RS:
Were there documentaries at that time that you particularly admired?

MS:
Oh, there was work by the
Maysles brothers, and there were Leacock and Pennebaker. There were films coming out of France by
Chris Marker. There were the older ones from the USIA [United States Information Agency] and other government agencies.

RS:
Very formal.

MS:
Very formal. There were pictures like
George Stoney’s
All My Babies.
Then there were pictures that kind of crossed between documentaries and fiction. And I responded to them—a lot of it is because it felt like it was of the street. I don’t want to say “real,” but it had a kind of authenticity to it.

RS:
Right.

MS:
Kazan’s films from
On the Waterfront
on—look at the extras in the background, look at the people
—Face in the Crowd, Baby Doll,
and ultimately even
Wild River
and
America, America.
Somehow, Kazan brought it all together in a way. He was really the one who made me see the combination, I think, of the real and the fictional.

RS:
Doesn’t that reflect back, too, on the Rossellini films?

MS:
You’re absolutely right. It goes back to
Paisan.
But, you see, that was from another world, related to my grandparents and my parents; I wasn’t there in Naples with the little boy with the black soldier. But it is the same impulse.

RS:
I remember Kazan talking to me about
Boomerang,
the picture with
Dana Andrews up in Connecticut, and saying how it was the first time he used real people in a fictional film. And that he really loved it. And then he went down to New Orleans and did
Panic in the Streets,
where he did the same thing.