Conversations with Scorsese (52 page)

RS:
That’s one of the things I think about a lot nowadays in the digital age. I mean, at least at one time there was a physical object called a film.

MS:
Now, it’s in cyberspace. Does it really exist now? And as you get older, too, you wonder, do we exist? I mean, in a sense, I guess, we do. But what is existence and what is consciousness?

RS:
For that matter, what is moviegoing? How has that changed in the modern world? You know, we go to movie theaters where we have our popcorn. We’re watching, but we’re not as focused maybe as we should be. You probably are, but I’m sometimes not.

MS:
I used to be. Now, I don’t know. When I was younger, probably the prints we looked at then in these old theaters, if we ever saw them now, we’d think they were terrible. But as a young person if the story took you in—whatever the hypnotic or the dreamlike qualities of the picture—it didn’t matter what the circumstances were.

RS:
There was the shimmer of them too, the sheen of them.

MS:
Particularly all those prints we were seeing in the early fifties were nitrate.

RS:
Yes.

MS:
They glowed, you know. It was like the dream life of the Aborigine, who believes his dreams are real and what we’re living in now is a dream. But it’s nice to think about it, because of the nature of our destiny, the passage we have to make, life into death. You know, existence and non-existence.

RS:
It’s interesting that these things you make, which may or may not be digital, are going to outlive you.

MS:
Yes. I hope so. It seems in a way, at this point, I just want to keep working and making more films—even the documentaries are interesting to me. You can hear one being made now, the
George Harrison music. Maybe by doing so many pictures at once, it’s an attempt to prolong life. I don’t know.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
I want to talk about the processes by which you make movies—designing them, shooting them, editing them.

MARTIN SCORSESE:
Maybe it began with those drawings that I made as a kid. They were attempts to visualize a story, using drawings in sort of a cinematic way. At this point in my life, I’m sort of happiest when I’m in a hotel room doing those designs. We don’t use all of them, but it’s the first attempt at telling a story through pictures. So it’s exciting.

When you move from one frame to the next, you’re making a cut in your mind. I didn’t know I was doing that as a kid. But in a way, I was already in control. I didn’t see any other way. I knew I couldn’t be an actor. I didn’t know about cinematography. I couldn’t tell you anything about light: I always make a joke about it, but where I grew up, there was no light. There were brick walls. And if you look at my movies, there’s a bulb.

RS:
Let’s begin where you began, with drawings, those sort of storyboards. Did you know that your idol, Mr. Kazan, had contempt for people who made storyboards?

MS:
I’m sure. But I like to draw pictures. It just turned out the pictures started to move. What can I tell you?

RS:
In his autobiography, Kazan says he was very insecure when it came to making
The Last Tycoon.
He says he found himself making “shot lists.” He saw that as a symbol of the insecurity that had begun to afflict him.

MS:
Part of it
is
insecurity. I know what he means—you can’t lock an actor into a frame, you know.

RS:
That’s his second point. He says you’ve got to be alert to the fact that somebody’s going to do something wonderful that you haven’t storyboarded.

MS:
You can’t lock it in. You can’t. This is the tension I play with. I have to have the ability to realize when something’s not working, and to change it—to go for the truth, the emotional impact. There are a lot of great directors who have total contempt for storyboards.

RS:
Yes, I know.

MS:
There’s one great director who actually said on one film, “I had a laundry list of shots but I threw it out.” What I do or what I learned to do is not necessarily the only way you make a picture, as we know. I have no theater background, I didn’t have a very broad literary background; the only thing I know to do is think in terms of pictures.

RS:
Kazan was not a picture guy. He was a word guy. At least at first, or so he said to me one time.

MS:
He became a picture guy, though.

RS:
He did become one, yes.

MS:
He really became one in
East of Eden,
and certainly in
Splendor in the Grass,
and in
Wild River.
It all culminated in
America, America.

He came to NYU around that time. In
Lincoln Center Theater he was doing
After the Fall.
Professor
Robert Gessner got him to come and speak and students asked him questions. One I remember was “Would you do anything differently if you were starting now?” He said, “Yes. Now I’d start in the editing room.”

RS:
Coming out of the theater, where words are so important, shaped Kazan’s initial approach to movies—so he said.

MS:
Words and also the blocking of the actors. But then, if you look at stills from the theatrical production of
Death of a Salesman,
his use of flashbacks, his use of scrims, is just phenomenal. It’s very cinematic.

But for me, I love the drawing. I love seeing these pictures. I love making the frame and seeing something in it. I stopped taking drawing lessons at a certain age. I wish I had continued, because I could have really done very pretty, interesting storyboards. You know, the look of the wide-angle lens, of an
18 millimeter in an
Orson Welles film, is so important to me. Or how an actor in the foreground is distorted a little bit.

I could draw that. I could draw that with pencils, the Eberhard Faber Ebony, Jet Black, Extra Smooth, 6325. I’ve been using them since the fifties. They no longer make them. I bought the last box of them on eBay for a couple of hundred dollars. It turns out there were a number of people around the world who have been using these pencils for years. There are new versions of them, but they aren’t as good.

I found that with these pencils the shading is wonderful. As I draw, I’m figuring out the lighting, I’m figuring out what lenses to use. I’m thinking, Maybe that should be wider? That character should definitely be in the middle of the frame. This arrow means that he comes in a certain way—he comes into the frame when you least expect it, and I’ve got to do separate drawings of him, and of the other characters in the scene. In something I’m working on now, he’s a deputy warden of a prison. Two marshals are in the scene, and they start walking forward. The warden has got to step into the frame and say, “Hold it.” That’s the image I want. The idea is that these pencils are the ones I’ve used over the years. This one has the word “Design” on it—and that’s the new kind. And that isn’t as good, the shading isn’t as good. But they stopped, because they found a way to make them cheaper. Now I only have a few more of my preferred pencils left.

Mean Streets
storyboard sketches.

RS:
Then what are you going to do?

MS:
A friend of mine asked, “Marty, how many pencils does it take to make a picture?” I answered, “One or two.” “So, okay,” he said, “you may have enough, then.”

I had also Paradise color lead pencils. I loved the way the lines were made. I loved the impression that they made on the paper.

RS:
Kazan found himself frightened by that kind of process.

MS:
I always felt I could express myself better with drawing. I get pleasure from making the drawings, which even help me design editing sequences, too. I draw the shots, we get those shots, I put them together. Thelma knows now how to do it because she’s worked with me so long. So it goes, “Remember, we did this in
Last Temptation,
the hammer came up and you cut it three times?” And she goes, “Yeah, but it was a bitch to cut.” And I say, “I know. But let’s try it again.”

RS:
You spent two weeks drawing your little pictures for
Shutter Island.
And you mentioned doing that as early as
Boxcar Bertha.
Storyboarding.

MS:
I used to storyboard everything, literally.
Taxi Driver
was completely storyboarded.
Raging Bull—
storyboarded. Literal drawings, I mean.

RS:
I assume all the boxing stuff had to be a little bit improvised.

MS:
No, that was all drawn, every shot.

RS:
Every shot? That’s amazing.

MS:
I saw the boxing on a videotape, the blocking, and then I broke it down. For example, was Bob going to wheel when he fell. I had a certain idea of how that was going to be built in. I would do the shots as if they were bars of music, as in the
editing of
The Last Waltz.
You see? We did the song “The Weight” on
Last Waltz
in a studio, because we didn’t get it on the stage. If you look at “The Weight,” you’ll see that there’s one shot for maybe two, three bars, and it cuts. That’s what I brought to the boxing scenes. I wanted them to be very special, taken from the point of view of the boxer in the ring.

RS:
Another picture with pretty good boxing material in it is
Body and Soul.

MS:
Excellent.

RS:
And, you know, Bob Rossen had Jimmy Wong Howe [the cameraman] on roller skates.

MS:
It’s brilliant. If you look at the
Robert Wise film
The Set-Up—
I screened it on a big screen when we were doing
The Aviator
—the boxing scenes, the whole picture, stands out.

RS:
It’s a great little movie.

MS:
It was shown in the history of cinema class I took at NYU.
Haig Manoogian showed that as an example of modern American cinema.

RS:
Deservedly so. It makes me crazy that the high critical fraternity looks down on Bob Wise.

MS:
I can’t believe it.

RS:
Bob made five or six movies that are terrific.

MS:
Even a ghost story,
The Haunting,
is one of the greatest.

RS:
I think his little one for
Val Lewton,
Curse of the Cat People,
is excellent. It’s the first movie I ever saw that scared me witless—with such simple devices.

MS:
Excellent. Robert Wise was underrated.

RS:
He was a consummate craftsman, you know.

MS:
Odds Against Tomorrow
is very good.

RS:
Quite good.

MS:
Born to Kill.
And he did one of my very favorite
westerns, which my parents took me to see at the
Midway Theater in Jamaica,
Queens, when we were living in Corona—
Blood on the Moon.

RS:
Excellent movie.
Barbara Bel Geddes and
Robert Mitchum were in it.

MS:
I had never seen anything like it. I was five years old.

RS:
It’s a little like
Raoul Walsh’s
Pursued.

MS:
Exactly.

RS:
It has the same kind of mood about it. It was also with Mitchum, of course. But back to you and drawing: You never brought in a storyboard artist?

MS:
What I did was not good drawing, but I did it myself.

RS:
And then put them up on a bulletin board?

MS:
Yes. When I was doing
Taxi Driver,
I was at the St. Regis Hotel and I put all the drawings all around the room. Michael Chapman [the cinematographer] came in and we looked at them all from scene to scene to scene. I had to have it that way because I was always concerned about final cut. I had no final cut. I don’t think I had final cut even on
Goodfellas.
Years later they gave it to me, but none of my pictures were giant box office successes.
Taxi Driver
was successful, but not like a
Star Wars
or a
Jaws.
So I had to be very precise. I had to know exactly what I wanted to do, and still have room for improvisations. I had to know that we would pan from left to right, that we moved here or there, that we started the scene with the actor coming in from the right. And sometimes you get on the set and someone says, “He can’t come in from the right, he’s got to come in from the left.” So I’ve got to change my screen direction in my other cuts. And so the storyboarding now has come down to a process of making notes, which are in the margins of the script.