Conversations with Scorsese (58 page)

RS:
The easy, moralistic part of his story. No one had dealt with the visionary part. They just wanted to deal with the crazy bastard in Las Vegas.

MS:
I thought the visionary part was fascinating. It doesn’t mean there aren’t negative things about him, obviously. But still, to have flown in those planes …

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
I admire the different ways you match your obsessions with those of your actors. Otherwise, what they do is not going to be serious, it’s not going to be worthwhile. It’s going to disappoint you, ultimately. There are certainly directors, Eastwood would be a good example, who appear to be very casual—

MARTIN SCORSESE:
Yes, but you can see he has a lot going on in him. You can see it in his films, his body of work. He is an extraordinary man, in part because he’s very cool about it. Maybe Hawks was that way.

RS:
Well, we’re talking about a couple of real WASPy directors, you know.

MS:
Maybe that’s what it is.

RS:
WASPs have got to stay cool. We cannot let people see us sweat.

MS:
I’m really the opposite [
laughs
]. It’s part of the enjoyment. I had a meeting here with
Joe Reidy, my AD and the writer of this short film we’re doing now. We’re going over every shot. I’m telling him, “No, it’s a medium shot. This is his face. You’re on him. The camera tracks around a door that opens, he doesn’t know, and
a figure comes into frame.” Joe gets up and he says, “So he’s here.” “No, no, no,” I say. He asks, “Are they moving?” I said, “No way.” Confusion, completely. And Joe said about me, “You see, he just takes all the joy out of the process.” And we started laughing. You know, niggling about every little detail, because ultimately, that’s what it’s about.

RS:
Yes, I think it is.

MS:
I mean, if the protagonist is aware of the light, would he turn around? But then, again, if it’s in the style of the films of the period—early fifties
Technicolor—he may not turn around. Will I have a cameraman who knows how to do that light effect? Will the color be lush enough? All this sort of thing.

RS:
Don’t you feel, though, that there’s a danger that self-consciousness is possibly going to creep in there?

MS:
That’s a point. Yet I don’t ever like people hanging out behind me. I have a mirror, usually, over the monitor to see who’s behind me.

RS:
In case some actor—?

MS:
No. I can’t speak freely. I can’t speak freely if somebody’s behind me. Visitors to the set for me are not a good thing.

RS:
I agree.

MS:
If people have to come and say hello, or there’s some political issue involving the studio, we usually do it at a time when it doesn’t disrupt shooting.

But I haven’t gotten the right mirror yet where I can see all that I want. I have one in the editing room. I sit with my back to the door, and the door opens, and I can see who’s coming in the door. Otherwise I’d turn around all the time, and I’d be distracted. My eye can just glance now, and I can get back to work.

In the mixing room there’s a door that squeaks. It’s been that way for ten years now. Every time somebody goes in or out of the booth, I hear the squeak and it invariably makes me turn to my left. We make jokes about it now. The guys in the mixing room say they can’t do anything about it. I say, You’re mixing some of the biggest movies in the world in this room, and you can’t fix the squeak on the door?

RS:
What about the exhaustion factor, especially when you’re shooting? I haven’t done anything like what you’ve done but I find if I’m shooting a
documentary, and it’s going pretty well and I’m really focusing, I come home just drained.

MS:
My problem is not only am I drained, I’m up.

RS:
Yes. Me, too.

MS:
I wind up in such a high level of energy that it’s very difficult for me to get to sleep and get enough sleep to shoot the next day. Of course, there are days when it’s a wonderful tired, a wonderful fatigue, because you feel you did such interesting work. Or maybe the work was not so interesting, but at least you did it, you worked it out, you went through the process. As you get older, naturally, it’s a physically taxing job. I have to make sure I get eight hours’ sleep. It wasn’t true in the past, but now it is. So I’ve got to pace myself. But yes, the fatigue factor is enormous.

And your mind keeps buzzing. I may just be playing around with shots. I may have listed and drawn ideas for twelve to sixteen angles, when in reality we’re maybe going to wind up with four, or in some cases, just one. You think about the scenes where the camera should creep in—creep in, not move in. Or I can focus on a line of dialogue, when there is something unsettling about it. And that unsettles the rest of the scene. That’s the way I think.

Marty directs
Ben Kingsley in
Shutter Island.

RS:
Are we just talking there about the accumulated wisdom of the ages, a trained instinct?

MS:
I think it’s accumulated. If it’s trained, it’s trained from my own films. You can imagine the tension in a scene, or the warmth, or the humor. I think I know the size of the frame, and I think I know when to cut—and when not to. Somehow that comes out of the story, and the actors who are playing the parts. They determine, sometimes, whether you should move the camera or not, whether you should be in close-up, whether it should be a medium close-up. I try to translate all of that into visual terms—the feeling I’d like to get from a scene.

RS:
But there’s something that, to me, is mind-bending. A film is, after all, thousands of feet of celluloid long. A famous scene, something like the one in
The Letter,
where
Bette Davis is screaming—

MS:
“I still love the man I killed.”

RS:
That seems like kind of an obvious shot. But a lot of scenes in those thousands of feet of celluloid are not obvious at all. They might be as effective as a wide shot, a medium one, whatever.

MS:
Absolutely. In fact, coming in on a close-up of her there may be wrong.

RS:
These are big choices you are making. And a movie is composed of hundreds of those choices.

MS:
That’s the problem of visualizing it beforehand. Sometimes I’ll be in a room for hours before coming up with an idea for one scene. Sometimes it flows for two to three hours. And all of this, in most cases, changes when you get on the set.

RS:
So, theoretically, might it be as effective to start work on a film with maybe the first ten or fifteen pages outlined with your drawings, and then as the film develops its momentum, at night you would make the shot list and your drawings for the next day?

MS:
A shot list you can make up anytime. That just tells you you need certain angles to cover the action, to communicate with the audience. But I never found that easy to do the night before a scene. Still, quite honestly, half
The Departed
was done that way.

RS:
Which way?

MS:
When I got there, I was saying things like “Change the locations. Forget it. We’re not using this location.” Or “It’s okay, we’re going to move over here. Put the camera here, come in this way, all you need is a close-up of him.” Basically, the big choice there was to go with buildings that were being restored in the old seaport of Boston.

The choice to cut to
Martin Sheen falling through the frame without seeing him being pushed out the window was not in the script. I decided on that in a hotel room. That was the editing point. When the audience sees his body falling through the frame—I had drawn a little picture of it—it gasps, because he’s in free fall. They want to know what happened. I liked that, but I had the scene shot other ways, too—a little tighter, a little wider—to make sure. I had an idea to shoot it from above, to follow him down. So we shot a stuntman, in a kind of really dynamic angle. But there was no way to use it.

So the way it worked out, we used the shot I had designed. I’m not saying I’m on the money all the time in what I think of originally. And, yes, you have to be prepared to throw it out the window. I’ve been talking about this for years and other directors say, Oh, kids do that, you know. Well, maybe I’m still a kid making
the drawings in a room. But the whole production works around getting that series of shots.

RS:
That reminds me of something
Howard Hawks used to say, that there are only six scenes in a movie that are worth a damn.

MS:
Really?

RS:
It was a conversation he used to have with
John Wayne. The other scenes are just to get you from one of those scenes to the next of those scenes.

MS:
True. But, still—

RS:
So Wayne would say to him, “Howard, is this one of those scenes?” And Howard would say, “No, Duke, it’s okay. Just walk in and pull your gun, it’s okay.”

MS:
And yet John Wayne walking in and pulling his gun in a Howard Hawks–directed picture seems to have better energy, better framing, and be somehow better constructed. It seems to hold together better than other John Wayne films.

RS:
I agree with you. Go figure.

MS:
I don’t know. I can’t figure it out. But for me, there’s no such thing as an unimportant shot. Hawks had a different way of telling stories. I think one of the few films that I’ve had with a plot was
The Departed.
And I did my best to destroy that plot.

RS:
Wait a minute. What do you mean by that? There’s a plot in
Goodfellas.

MS:
No, it was a story.

RS:
Maybe we’re just talking semantics.

MS:
There was a kind of a plot point at the end in that
Joe Pesci gets killed because he killed a guy. Basically, though, it’s
Public Enemy,
the rise and fall of a whole system.

RS:
Well, I see your point, without fully conceding it. But wouldn’t you say that
Age of Innocence
has an enormous, quite intricate plot?

MS:
I guess it does. I mean, that’s
Edith Wharton. I shouldn’t say I don’t do plot. But I do tend to be attracted to stories that are more character-driven. That’s really it.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
You did a lot of your own editing when you were starting out, but I wasn’t aware of how much of it you did until we started talking. Did you just pick it up, learning to do by doing?

MARTIN SCORSESE:
No, I watched it in the movies. I watched Eisenstein—

RS:
No, I was thinking more about picking up technique—in those days it was Moviolas, right?

MS:
Oh, yeah, Moviolas, and hot splices. And the thing was, the falling in love with the actual image in the frame itself, and the sprocket holes, and the flare between the sprockets, and the edge fog. I just fell in love with it.

RS:
What do you mean you fell in love with it?

MS:
Just that. I loved the way film looked. I still do. I look at Thelma sometimes—we’ll stop on a freeze frame or on a section of the shot where the camera stops running—and you get half an image. You see white, red, yellow, and you see an eye. I say, “Look, that’s a beautiful frame.” I used a shot like that at the end of
The Last
Temptation of Christ.
That was the take I needed. It’s just the nature of celluloid itself and what light does to the image. I just love it.

RS:
Thelma has been with you many, many years. What makes her your ideal editor? What qualities does she have?

MS:
She comes from the late sixties. She was not a film student—she just did that six-week course at NYU, and then she went back to Columbia. I think she studied political science. There was something about the nature of what we all did in
Woodstock
—it was serious, particularly on my collaborators’ part. I was still probably too conservative to fully embrace that freedom. I think Thelma still retains that view of the world, from the sixties, an open-mindedness. And she wants to protect—good, bad, or indifferent—the art.