Conversations with Scorsese (39 page)

RS:
I love the moment where Chairman Mao leans into him and says, in effect, You do understand, religion is the opiate of the masses.

MS:
Yes, he says, “Religion is poison.”

RS:
It’s the turning point in the movie, because what he says is very powerful. And we’ve already seen the Chinese marching through. He’s putting poison into his ear.

MS:
He’s telling the Dalai Lama it’s over, that his system is no good, that theocracy is out of date. The Dalai Lama says he’s going to institute reforms. Mao says it can’t be done fast enough, it’s not good enough. Everything’s got to go. Because religion is poison. And the Dalai Lama said all he could look at was Mao’s shoes—the shine on his shoes. He watches the shoes go by and he knows he’s finished.

I mean, it was the end of the world for them. I’m always interested in people who lose their world. Like in
Mean Streets,
or
Goodfellas,
or
The Age of Innocence.
Here the Dalai Lama is losing the Tibetan Buddhism of the past sixteen hundred years, wiped away in a very cruel way.

Marty’s storyboards for a key
Kundun
sequence.

RS:
That’s actually a theme I hadn’t thought of.

MS:
In
New York, New York
they lose like mad. But they learn. I mean, we hope they learn.

RS:
Henry Hill is a big loser.

MS:
Yeah, but he came out the other side.

RS:
He should perhaps use some of his extensive free time to see
Kundun.

MS:
Oh, good Lord. In one of the first two shows of
The Sopranos,
I was supposedly coming out of a car with an actress going to a preview, and one of the guys from
The Sopranos
says, “Hey, Scorsese, Marty, we love
Kundun
!” I loved that.

RS:
When worlds collide …

MS:
I went to a ceremony in Washington, where the
Dalai Lama was getting a gold medal. There was a Tibetan gentleman, a very small man in golden Tibetan robes. I think he was a monk. He had little glasses and a very chubby face and he had written a book. I forget his name. As we were streaming out of the rotunda, he saw me, took my hand, and said, “I thank you so much for making that film. Thank you so
much.” He was very sweet. Then he went on: “I saw your other movie,
New York, Gangs.
Violent, violent.” I frowned, apologetically. “But it’s all right. It’s in your nature.” [
Laughs.
]

On the
Kundun
set Marty directs Tenzin Thuthob Tsarong, playing the grown-up Dalai Lama.

RS:
Very funny.

MS:
I had tears in my eyes.

RS:
Really?

MS:
The acceptance of it. If it’s in your nature, okay, it’s in your nature.

I mean, that’s the movie. That’s the feeling. That’s why it’s dedicated to my mother. The Dalai Lama spoke the next night in Washington and said it doesn’t matter if you’re Christian, Jewish, Muslim. You’re talking about the same thing. It’s compassion. It’s in the
New Testament, when they ask Jesus what the most important commandment is. He says, “To love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

That’s it. For me, it comes from my interest in the priesthood. That’s why
Kundun
is so important to me. It’s about the changes in you as a person, as a filmmaker, whatever; the change in your body, the change in your heart and your soul as you grow and embrace new ideas. And the tendency to fight those instead of accepting them.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
Bringing Out the Dead,
though it’s radically different from
Kundun
in setting, style, and subject matter [it’s about emergency medical teams trying to save lives on the streets of Manhattan], has, I think, some thematic relationship to
Kundun.

MARTIN SCORSESE:
Scott Rudin [the producer] sent the galleys to me and I thought, It’s
Kundun,
but in a modern urban setting. It was the first contemporary film I had made in years. It’s the same thing that brought me to
Kundun:
the spiritual nature of the
Dalai Lama’s life is the same theme I saw in
Joe Connelly’s novel.

RS:
The Dalai Lama doesn’t think you can bring people back to life.

MS:
No, but there are spiritual figures who can be a bridge between ourselves and the spiritual nature of the cosmos. So you may be able to open a door in our consciousness.

RS:
Maybe.

MS:
There’s a more searchable longing in Nick Cage’s character, the ambulance driver who can’t save all the victims he’s supposed to attend. And there’s the
spiritual conflict in him, expecting too much of himself—his pride, the idea of being able to bring back the dead.

RS:
Pound on their chests and they’ll breathe.

MS:
I thought that was an interesting state of mind to be in: (A) to have the compassion to be able to do that on the street, and (B) to lose sight of what you’re really there for, which is, as he says, to witness and to share the experience with the victim, learn from it, as much as possible.

RS:
But witnessing is different from bringing them back.

MS:
Well, yes, you can’t bring them all back. None of us is God.

I think what Joe Connelly is saying is that not bringing somebody back to life is a loss. When you lose them, you feel responsible. Another person may go through it and lose ten, twelve people and still be able to continue, but this particular man—

RS:
It’s an interesting risk, isn’t it? On the one hand it offers you the chance to be the person who gives the gift of life. The risk, though, is that you are unable to save them. You’re always poised on that terrible precipice.

MS:
That’s why the character’s breakdown occurs. That’s why I was drawn to the story. I wanted to explore what we expect of ourselves.

It’s very difficult for me to fully understand the nature of people who devote themselves to a spiritual life—the kind who deal with their own spirituality and don’t deal with others. But there’s the other kind—like Nick’s character—who, literally, lay healing hands on others.

RS:
These are people whom we admire almost in a perfunctory way. We say, A schoolteacher does the most important thing, but is underpaid …

MS:
We believe it. But we don’t live it. Yes, you’re right that these people should be paid more, but it’s more than that.

RS:
All I’m saying is that that is the conventional way to look at people who do nasty, ugly, underpaid jobs, that often involve them with death, and drugs, and terrible things: We admire them, but we don’t really support them.

MS:
Right, we don’t support them. It’s interesting that Joe Connelly, who wrote the novel and the screenplay, went back into EMS [emergency medical service]. He’s still dealing with things we would never go near.

I relate this to my Skid Row experience—my self-criticism for, as a child,
thinking of those people as subhuman, while around the corner in the church they were talking about compassion and love. I was frightened and wanted to move away from those Skid Row people as much as possible.

Are we all capable of that reaction? Think of
World War II. Think of the genocide. I am amazed by those people who confront the problems, face them, deal with them. Anyway, when I read the book, I thought it was extraordinary— moving, and funny, and tough. And not cynical—they were dealing with life and death. The characters have a certain hard edge to them.

Nick Cage’s character is cracking. At the beginning of the story he begins a three-day-and-night crack-up: it’s been two or three weeks and he hadn’t brought anybody back to life. He knows he’s not God, but there’s a pride because he has the power to bring someone back to life. He thinks he is divine to a certain extent, and it’s very moving when it strikes him that he may not be.

As I mentioned before, at one point he says, “I’m there to be a witness.” Maybe that’s all it is. It’s like the Tibetan who told me what was in my nature. You have to accept it. If you fight it all the time, you’ll be extremely unhappy. I mean, if you have this violence in your nature, it doesn’t mean you have to act it out.

I’ll never forget when Nick says, “You know, I’m a grief mop.” He’s saying, I
just stand there and I witness the grief. But there’s too little of that. Coming from where I came from and remembering listening to certain priests who were important to me, I just think there’s too little of it in our society. We’re being inundated with so much information, and yet numb to suffering around the world.

That made it a highly difficult picture to shoot because it put us in dangerous areas, shooting at night—seventy-five nights of shooting.

But Nick Cage was great. All the actors were great—with great senses of humor. It was a good script by
Paul Schrader, too, I thought.

Taking back the night: Nicolas Cage, as an emergency ambulance driver, fends off demons, real and imagined, in
Bringing Out the Dead
(1997).

RS:
In some of its tonalities—don’t laugh now—that movie reminded me of
After Hours.
Do you know what I mean? It’s New York at night.

MS:
Crazy things happen.

RS:
Well, of course. And it is someone being pushed—

MS:
—to the limits.

RS:
Yet this movie is not unfunny.

MS:
It’s terribly funny, and kind of audacious. I mean, you have the drug dealer impaled on a fence, hanging off a twenty-two-story building. And as he’s talking to Nick Cage—the actor’s name is
Cliff Curtis—suddenly there are fireworks over the city. And he just shouts, “I love this city!” [
Laughs.
]

RS:
It’s one of the great crazy scenes.

MS:
Yeah, that’s sort of my
homage to Manhattan. With the fireworks at the end of
Manhattan.

RS:
You mean, your homage to Woody’s
Manhattan
?