Conversations with Scorsese (36 page)

MS:
Well, there were a lot of people who said that it wasn’t as pure as the original B film. My view is that the B film comes from one time and place, and we come from another time and place.

RS:
It really wasn’t such a B film, not with
Gregory Peck and Mitchum starring in it.

MS:
Maybe so. But one thing I can tell you: Now that I’m older, I don’t know if I would do a picture that’s purely action, just for the sake of doing action.

RS:
The family in
Cape Fear
is your most dysfunctional family.

MS:
They really are.

RS:
She’s miserable. He’s playing around, has played around. Their child is a basket case.

MS:
I just wanted
Nick Nolte to play it as a guy who did something once or twice and no matter what he could say or do, it would never be the same. He wanted it to be an “I’m home, honey” kind of life. But the mother and the daughter will have nothing to do with him. He’s trying, but he can’t get it done.

That was the biggest change we made from the original script. In the original film the family was a very wholesome, together family. They were singing songs together, stuff like that.

RS:
As far as I know, it’s your only WASP family. So I think you’re saying something there, pal.

MS:
Maybe. I don’t really know much about that. I know something about Mediterranean families. I was just relying on what I had observed in WASP families.

I’d see these movies—you know, Andy Hardy, and his father, a judge, little white picket fence. To me that was fantasy. I’d never met people like that, until maybe when I got out of NYU, and started to meet people who were not ethnic.

RS:
Well, I think this film references those movies to a degree—the white picket fence and so forth. But I think the key scene is the one between the daughter [Juliette Lewis] and Robert De Niro [Max Cady, the psychopath who believes he was wrongly prosecuted by her father] at the high school, so let’s go back to that. What the hell was going on there?

MS:
It was about the betrayal of trust. As I said, it was the final blow against her father. In the original, with Peck and Mitchum and
Polly Bergen, there’s a scene where Mitchum shows up at the school and chases the kid through the halls, as I said. In the original draft of our picture,
Steven Spielberg, who was the producer, and
Wesley Strick, who was the writer, had a terrific chase sequence, a scare sequence. The kid was on kind of a ledge hanging on to a shade and the shade is starting to break off. And I said I could do it, but I’m not the best at that, I don’t really do that as well as other people. Maybe you’re looking at me for the wrong picture.

I said, I’d like to make that scene about the violation of the kid. It should be quiet. It should not be a chase. You know, a
genre film—I always think I can make one and then I always work against its conventions. But Steven said to me, Marty, you can do anything you want. You can rewrite the script if you want with Wesley.

Did I want the family to live or die? Well, the family’s got to live, Steven said. I said, Fine. I got hold of Wesley, and we started talking about this idea of a scene that was very quiet, but one where he could really destroy the family by taking the last vestige of trust that the kid had in her father, which wasn’t very much, and destroy that. And do it as a sexual violation in a way.

Right before we shot, Bob De Niro had this idea of putting his thumb in her mouth. I said, Just do it, don’t tell her.

Cape Fear
is a twisted—and far more interesting—remake of the 1962 original, which starred
Gregory Peck. Now the family being terrorized by the psychopathic Max Cady (Robert De Niro, shown here with Scorsese) is anything but the loving unit portrayed in the earlier film.

RS:
Everything Nolte does in that movie is a failure.

MS:
He tries, though. He really tries, and it should work. But it doesn’t. He’s completely powerless.

RS:
Because he is up against, what, absolute evil?

MS:
I think so. I think that’s what Bob really wanted to play. And the whole idea of him hanging on to the bottom of that car—I mean, you couldn’t actually do that. But at that point in the movie, it really becomes a heightened kind of reality, particularly ending in the Götterdämmerung of the storm sequence, which I always wanted to try.

It was a technical thing for me. I wanted to see if I could do a real action sequence with boats, and that sort of thing. It took us quite a while, but we did
it—Freddie Francis on camera—and it was quite something. It has a lot to do with
King of Comedy.

RS:
How so?

MS:
Well, the intrusion. The violence of the intrusion. You know, in this case Cady was wronged.

RS:
And so was Rupert Pupkin, I suppose, in a way.

MS:
Exactly. Jerry wronged Rupert to a certain extent—in Rupert’s mind, anyway. Jerry talked to him in the car, so therefore he’s his friend. So when he says to the assistant, “Are you speaking for Jerry?” he’s turning toward retribution. He’s got to get even. In
Cape Fear
Bob was even more interested in the violation of the family—of the
Juliette Lewis character in that “theater scene,” where he destroys the last vestige of trust she has in her father. Then he also wanted to play Max—almost like
The Terminator,
like a machine. Ultimately, at the end of the picture, he’s the incarnation of everything they ever did wrong or felt wrong or thought wrong. He’s putting them through it.

I don’t know if they ever will be the same after this story ends. Some viewers thought, Oh, the family’s back together. Yes, they’re back together, but think about what they’re going to be like afterwards.

RS:
You can’t quite imagine them, two weeks later, sitting down and having a nice roast beef dinner together.

MS:
Nope.

Twenty years ago, on television, I saw a British series called
Survival,
black-and-white documentaries. It was about people who had gone through a great deal of suffering, being stranded on mountaintops and the like. One was about a family being stranded in a lifeboat—a mother, father, daughter, and son. The family was talking about it years later. The parents were divorced. They had been the closest family until they got in that boat. They spent four weeks in that boat, and they described everything they did. Just the matter of moving a foot into one another’s space, for instance, was huge. They are intelligent people, educated, filled with love. But they had to divorce after that. It was absolutely shocking.

MARTIN SCORSESE:
I think
The Age of Innocence
is interesting because it has to do with responsibility.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
But no one in it is in the classic sense nurturing.

MS:
No. If they are nurturing to anything, they seem to be nurturing to their class, their society. Do you see what I’m saying?

RS:
Yes.

MS:
Which is better for Newland Archer [Daniel Day-Lewis, whose passionate, yet unconsummated, love affair with Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer) threatens the comfortable class structure of 1870s New York]. He doesn’t realize that because passion has taken over. In the long run it’s better for him. It goes back to the idea of responsibility.

RS:
But then what about the Polish countess? Does she have any nurturing in her?

MS:
Well, I think so. But would he be able to benefit from that, the kind of person he was bred to be? Would he be able to handle being in Europe with her, and dealing with the situations she would be dealing with?

RS:
Interesting point.

MS:
I don’t think he was meant to be that way.

RS:
The standard line on
The Age of Innocence
is that its people live by a rigid code of conduct, so intensely that analogies between them and the Mafia have been drawn. These people wouldn’t kill you, but they could isolate you.

MS:
Ostracize you. The more I learned about that world, working on the film, the more shocking to me it became. We tried to get the authenticity of Visconti, even though I couldn’t hope to achieve the beauty of
The Leopard
or
Senso
or
The Innocent.
I loved those pictures, I watched them over and over.

But, anyway, the brutality of the flanking movement that is put upon Newland Archer by his wife, and by the heads of the family, the van der Luydens and his wife’s mother, was extraordinary, I thought. There is that wonderful revelation when he finally understands that everybody knows what’s going on between him and Ellen, when he sees his wife smile at him at that party. Everybody’s known all
along. Two people are in love with each other, and they think nobody else knows and everybody knows. It’s the slow and agonizing and brutal way in which they undo him—and it’s all done extremely politely. It’s pretty brutal, I think.

The Age of Innocence
was seemingly Scorsese’s most anti-Scorsesean film: an elegant yet large-scaled adaptation of the
Edith Wharton novel about a blighted romance in nineteenth-century New York high society. The director, seen here in costume for his small role, saw analogies between the social controls exerted by his muscular mobsters and these more subtle guardians of the status quo in another insular society.

RS:
But he’s so passive.

MS:
That’s what everyone said. You know, that was the last film of mine my father saw and I dedicated it to him. When I was making the film, I was thinking very much about my father’s sense of obligation and responsibility—what he did for us, whether he was massaging me with alcohol to get a fever down or going through all this madness with doctors, not having an education, not knowing how to deal with all this. I thought that Newland Archer, when he decides to stay, is demonstrating that kind of responsibility. The boy says to him at the end of the film he knew they would be safe because his mother told him that when it came down to it Archer would give up the thing he loved most to stay with them. I admire that. Now whether he’s passive earlier in the film or not, that’s something else. But his decision—I admire it.

So I think he’s much maligned.
Jay Cocks said later—he gave me the book originally—that people never forgave the fact that
Daniel Day-Lewis and
Michelle Pfeiffer don’t get to make love in the film. But that’s the story.

Even at the end, when we were shooting in Paris,
Michael Ballhaus, my DP [director of photography], looked at me, and goes, Oh, why can’t he go upstairs? When, at last, he could safely embrace Ellen, I said, He can’t. He can’t go up. That’s what she loved about him. What are you going to do, be inconsistent at the last minute? But the thing with the children was very touching, I thought.

RS:
For me, it was something that only had impact when I saw the film a second time.

MS:
Maybe it is too studied, the
homage to Visconti. But
Jacques Tourneur’s in there. There’s the influence of the beautiful narration of
Dorian Gray,
and the narration of
Barry Lyndon,
of course—how the narrator’s voice helps get you to a certain contemplative state, almost like reading a novel from the nineteenth century. You hear the voice of
Joanne Woodward, as Edith Wharton, right in your ear.