Conversations with Scorsese (26 page)

I didn’t think it was going to be a film until I saw the first day’s rushes on the editing machine. And I said, “There’s something special about the look of it, the way they are on the stage.” I had designed it very carefully, because they didn’t move very much—as opposed to the
Rolling Stones, where there’s a lot of movement. It became, over a period of two years, a film we were doing on the side, because I was trying to finish
New York, New York.
But it developed into an exploration of American music, ultimately culminating with them and Bob Dylan onstage. We didn’t know we were doing that, but that’s what happened.

And later on, interviews were put in the picture. Robbie just said, Let’s do some interviews, because people wanted to know a The Band members. So it became more of a view, a vision of an era.

We wanted to record it, get it down. These people were important historically. But the film became something lyrical, I thought, and quite beautiful the way it was edited. It became elegiac in a way, and it took on more import than we thought it might at the outset. The form of it was important to me—the camera movement to music, the editing, capturing the live performances.

Marty directing
The Last Waltz,
his documentary about
The Band’s final concert. It is widely recognized as one of the great concert films.

RS:
You feel you broke some new ground with that film?

MS:
I kind of thought we did. After
16 millimeter
cinema verité in the sixties, culminating in
Woodstock,
this was rather different. This was staged, more studied in a way, much more planned out. And when the footage came on the screen, it revealed something else that was much more powerful than I thought it would be.

RS:
Which is what?

MS:
The presence of the performers, of the way they handled their instruments, the nature of so many of them singing those lyrics for the last time together. And
Muddy Waters up on screen—he was not part of the band, of course, but it is great when he comes on: suddenly there was a special glow to the film. We felt it onstage.

RS:
But you feel it was more intense on the film than being there?

MS:
On film, absolutely. When we saw the rushes, we knew it was a movie.

RS:
Isn’t that interesting.

MS:
Something happened. It just clicked.

RS:
It’s a gigantic version of that notion that the camera loves some people and some people it doesn’t.

MS:
Whether you like that kind of music or not, you cannot deny that there’s a relationship of the performer to the audience. You don’t even see the audience, but you can feel it.

RS:
That’s what’s interesting in that film. Usually you pull back and you see audience.

MS:
Like in
Woodstock.
Michael Wadleigh and Thelma, they edited that picture so there was a lot of audience. The audience, the event itself, was as important as the music.

RS:
They made the right decision.

MS:
They were absolutely right. But with
The Last Waltz
I thought to myself, We’ve seen the ultimate audience movies in
Monterey Pop,
and certainly
Woodstock.
What do we care? We’re the audience.
The Last Waltz
is for everybody, and let’s just go with it.

RS:
You’ve mentioned you were busy with
New York, New York
at this time.

MS:
I was editing it and simultaneously supervising
The Last Waltz.

RS:
Kind of a high-pressure moment for you there?

MS:
Very. A year later we shot the interviews, after they had broken up. What you feel in those interview scenes, I think, is real tension—maybe among themselves, or the situation made them nervous.

RS:
I think it’s what makes the film unique.

MS:
They were being very nice to each other because I was there.

RS:
But you get that feeling of edginess, unease. It makes the movie more interesting.

MS:
It’s constant. There also was an interesting edginess and unease during the actual show. When Dylan got onstage it was very tense.

RS:
Really?

MS:
Very tense. I didn’t know this until years later, but apparently backstage something happened and he said he wasn’t going on. All I know is he finally came on and we were told not to shoot certain songs, which we didn’t. And I was told by Bill Graham, “Shoot it, don’t worry about it. Shoot it. He comes from the same streets you do.” That’s what Graham told me [though, of course, Dylan came from Minnesota].

Bob Dylan joins
The Band in
The Last Waltz.

RS:
I don’t think so.

MS:
I don’t think so, either. So I didn’t shoot it; everything had gone so well, I didn’t want him to walk off.

RS:
That does happen in documentary shooting. You push it that one extra step. That’s the edge the filmmaker has: it’s his choice in the end.

But let’s talk for a minute about documentaries in general. Unlike most directors of your stature, you have what amounts to a full career in that genre.

MS:
The American cinema documentary I did with
Michael Wilson and Thelma and
Kent Jones and
Raffaele Donato: it was an example of something that kept me
alive creatively. Because I kept experimenting with it—with the form, especially the first hour and a half—trying to find the thread.

RS:
What’s wonderful is I’ve never seen anybody play clips so long. I mean, those were real scenes.

MS:
That’s something that Thelma and I tried to do. If I was experimenting in the feature films, I’m not in a position to say if they worked or not. Obviously, at the time I felt they worked. But everything has been done, so I’m not sure it’s really important if it works or not. But the documentaries gave us more freedom. I think it started with
Italianamerican.
It burst through. Sometimes all the plans are wiped away, and a truth, or an emotional power, comes across that you never planned.

RS:
It’s a very strange thing, but I think I’m a better interviewer when I have a camera over my shoulder.

MS:
Over your shoulder?

RS:
Behind me as I’m interviewing. It’s because it feels like there’s something really at stake there.

MS:
Yes. You’ve got to get it on film.

RS:
You don’t know if when you get to someone’s house, he will have just had a fight with his wife, and everything is chaotic, and you’re just standing there. And it’s your only opportunity to film him. Whereas in a fiction film you can make your own reality. I don’t care how simple a documentary seems to be, it’s always difficult.

MS:
Agreed.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
You spoke earlier about the limits of friendship and loyalty. Yet around this time a friend did come through for you. I’m talking about Robert De Niro and his determination that you make
Raging Bull.
This was coming at a time when you were very ill and were, if we’re to believe
Peter Biskind’s book,
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,
part of a fairly heavy drug scene.

MARTIN SCORSESE:
The only good thing about the drug use is that it was very obvious in my case. And I just had to go to that brick wall. Nobody was going to tell me otherwise, whether it was a rock ’n’ roller, or a studio executive, or an actor. People can try to guide me, but I always have to go my own way.

RS:
The only reason I bring it up is because it’s part of the public record of your life.

MS:
Right. After
New York, New York
I was exhausted to the point where a number of people were worried about my health. I said, “Don’t worry, I’m fine.” And then after the Labor Day weekend in Telluride, at the film festival, I got back to New York and suffered a total collapse.

That’s when I finally went to the hospital, and that’s when De Niro came to
visit and asked if I wanted to do the film. Really, we had been working on it since
Taxi Driver.
I realized I had nothing else to do. I had exhausted all the possibilities. Even my friends were all going off on their own. I was alone. And it was time to go back to work. And what I discovered—it’s in
Raging Bull
and it’s in the other pictures later on—is that I had to come to terms with something.

A still from
Raging Bull
(1980), a film that strived for new levels of realism in its brutally stylized manner.

RS:
What did you come to terms with?

MS:
The fighting with myself. You get to the point where you just get used to yourself: that’s who you are, just get on with it.

RS:
Stop there. What were you fighting in yourself? I mean, you were a talented kid. You had done pretty well for a young guy.

MS:
I have no idea. Really.

RS:
Were you fighting the past in some sense?

MS:
Probably the past, I guess. I didn’t trust myself. I’m not talking about art; I’m talking about myself as a person. I’ve surprised myself too many times in the wrong way.

It’s how you treat people around you, how you treat yourself. And then you say, If you make a little bit of peace with yourself, you might be better with the people around you, too. That’s all it is. Maybe it’s maturing to a certain extent, but I don’t think I did. You just get older; you’re a little more tired.

RS:
Was this tied in to people firing you, or saying you were too damned ambitious? Was it pushing yourself to succeed when people thought you already had, given your age, your experience? Or was it that you were pressing against their low expectations for you while you had high expectations?

MS:
I don’t really know. I mean, I just wasn’t comfortable with myself, who I was, what I was trying to be. Was I trying to be a movie director, or a filmmaker? A director in the style of Hollywood, or a filmmaker in the style of Europe? I mean, I didn’t fit either place. I still don’t. It’s about how you’re trying to express yourself. You’ve got this need to do something, and sometimes it’s crazy. People say, Oh, you’re taking yourself too seriously. But I can’t help it. Out of the seriousness comes the humor, too.