Conversations with Scorsese (59 page)

Something we do may be a good film, or a bad film: it may not last, or maybe a hundred years from now somebody will still be looking at it. But whatever we’re doing she will defend to the death. She’s a very good ally. Sometimes you get tired, you start to waver, during the battering process, when you’re first screening a film. It behooves you to listen to others, but often as you get near completion of a picture, you get bad advice, or pressure. Thelma’s very good at steadying the course. A couple of times she’s actually told me, Stay strong, we’re going to get through this one. She respects the purity of the picture.

Thelma knows the way I choose takes, in rushes. The hardest work is done usually while I’m watching rushes. I will not watch them with anybody else but her, though when I was working with
De Niro in the seventies, he would watch rushes, too, particularly on
New York, New York
and
Raging Bull.
He’d be in the room and sometimes he’d say, “I like that take,” or whatever. I didn’t mind that, because I had a very good relationship with Bob and that’s what part of that collaboration was. We seemed to hit it off so well with choosing the same material. Not that we could articulate it. We kind of started to trust each other very strongly.

RS:
Right. I know that.

MS:
He just needed to know that I went through the process, tried things, worked things out. But the bottom line is, I never would have gone so far with Bob if it had been a situation where he said, “I want that scene cut,” or “I think you should use another take,” and demand another shot. There’s no way I could do that. Watching the rushes only with Thelma, I can be open.

Thelma hardly comes on the set, you know. She reads the script only once. She just gets footage. Every day she gets to see what happens next.

RS:
That’s interesting.

MS:
She doesn’t get involved in set politics that way. She doesn’t know that during a particular take somebody got sick, or somebody was angry. She simply writes down all the takes, in great detail, then types it all up. It’s a long process. She knows my preferred takes, second preferred, third preferred, the possibility of a whole other way to go. Come back to the fifth take and she’ll remember it. Then she edits it all together so that you just punch up the takes, they’re all there. That takes a little longer, but when we’re looking for something, she can always find it easily. And her comments are so helpful. She might say, Look at his eyes here. Look at her eyes there. We need some more emotional impact, we need some more warmth. There was another take where he seemed a little more that way. Things like that. And I’ll look at what she is referring to and maybe say, I don’t know if that’s any different. She might look doubtful. And then I’ll say, “Well, put it in. Let’s see.” She’s very good with keeping the heart of the picture foremost, in terms of emotion.

Thelma usually doesn’t cut anything until I see all the rushes. I go through the process with Thelma, and we don’t like anybody with us if I can help it. I have to be able to say, for instance, “I don’t like what he’s doing there.” Maybe later I’ll say, “Oh, that’s better. I see where he was going, okay.” She writes all of it down, and we record it.

She types up all my notes and organizes them in her computer. So that if I say, “Scene 42, in the third shot,” she’ll punch it up and she’ll say something like, Okay, your preferred is here, take 11. Your second preferred was take 8.

Beginnings: Editor Thelma Schoonmaker works with Marty in the
Woodstock
editing room.

RS:
It becomes like that American Express commercial you made, where you say, “Too dark, too light.” And you’re just looking at snapshots of your imaginary nephew’s birthday party.

MS:
Very funny, I think. I just took it to an absurd level. Which isn’t that far.

RS:
That’s what I was about to say.

MS:
Sometimes Thelma and I are laughing, sometimes we get depressed. I might say, We lost the entire dramatic thread of this. They should shoot the director.
That’s why I don’t want people to be there. It’s for me. I want to be able to say what I feel about the actors, what they’re doing in the frames, uninhibited by anybody. Thelma is the woman I trust.

RS:
So Thelma knows all the secrets.

MS:
Yes. Everything. Volumes. Anyway, almost inevitably we use the preferred takes; in many cases, even the third preferred.

RS:
Is there any particular reason for that?

MS:
Because the tone of the picture changes somewhat in the cutting. The look on this person’s face makes it feel angrier here, or happier there, for instance. One take that I didn’t particularly like at first may flow from the preceding scene better; we can only see that as the film is shaping up.

Thelma memorizes it all, and I memorize it, too, in the rushes with her.

Endings: Schoonmaker and Marty went their separate ways after working together on
Woodstock
(1970), reunited on
Raging Bull,
and have been editorially inseparable ever since.

RS:
You’ve mentioned that 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.

MS:
I edited
Mean Streets
myself. I don’t have credit on it because I’m not in the union.
Sid Levin put his name on the film for me, the editor of Marty Ritt’s films.

Then I started working with Marcia
Lucas, George Lucas’s first wife. That was
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Taxi Driver,
and
New York, New York.
Tom Rolf did some of
Taxi Driver,
a couple of scenes, including the famous “Are you talking to me?” scene. He’s a master editor. It’s the one sequence where I didn’t say to the editor I needed something changed.
Yeu-Bun Yee worked on
Woodstock
with me, and he and
Jan Roblee worked on
The Last Waltz.
That took place over a period of two years. After that I asked Thelma to do
Raging Bull,
because at that point Marcia had left the business pretty much. I hadn’t really stayed in touch with Thelma—she was working in Pittsburgh. There was almost a ten-year gap. I think she came to look at
The Last Waltz
once or twice and gave some opinions on that. I wanted her to work with me on
Raging Bull.
I told
Irwin Winkler that, but she was not then in the union. We were almost finished with the film—mixing it—by the time we got her into the union. She’s been with me ever since.

The editors working in the system didn’t want me in the editing room. Well, I am sorry, that’s how I work. Thelma knows who I am, knows the best and the worst of it. Her loyalty to the film we’re trying to make is the key.

RS:
I don’t remember your ever saying it quite that way.

MS:
A loyalty to the film, to what my initial instinct was, what some people would call an idea, a vision, whatever. We are constantly being buffeted by all kinds of turbulence while making a movie. And you have to hold that plane straight as best you can. Thelma is very good at refocusing me. We’ll think about someone else’s idea, try it out sometimes, maybe even show it to the person whose idea it was. But, in the final analysis, it’s my call. She’s very loyal to that concept.

I’ve had editors try to make changes without my noticing. And I’ll say, “No, something happened there.” And the editor says, “I didn’t think you were going to notice that.” I don’t need to play games. It’s hard enough as it is. I have to work together with an editor I trust.

Thelma and I usually have a good time when we get into the editing room. The hardest time and the best time.

RS:
Thelma asked me the other day, “How do you and Marty work?” I said, “Oh, we kind of go on until midnight or so.” And she says, “Oh, we sometimes used to edit all night.”

MS:
We enjoyed that so much. We used to edit only at night.
Raging Bull
was edited only at night, so nobody would call us.
King of Comedy
was edited at night, and we got into a rhythm. That’s when making a film is really the most fun.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
Music is almost as important to you as film has been over the course of your career. Did your father ever take you to the Metropolitan
Opera or to a concert, anything like that?

MARTIN SCORSESE:
No. But eventually my friends and I would see operas. We’d have seats way up at the top of the old Met.

A lot of classical music I learned from Hollywood films. The first LP I bought was Tchaikovsky—the
1812 Overture.
Some of my uncles had twelve-inch records of Tchaikovsky’s
Capriccio Italien,
Debussy’s “Claire de Lune,” and I would listen to those, along with
“M’Appari,” the aria from
Martha
that
Enrico Caruso sang. I listened to a twelve-inch record of “Sing, Sing, Sing” by Benny Goodman. There was a great deal of music around me. In the sixties, I brought into the apartment Stravinsky,
Le Sacre du printemps
and
L’Histoire du soldat,
things like that. They began to get on my parents’ nerves a bit.

I took several music courses at NYU. I had a choice between the history of painting and the history of music, and I took music. I don’t regret it. Music was more useful in filmmaking.

RS:
So where does pop music come in?

MS:
Well, my interest in pop music, I guess, was born of the swing music I grew up listening to—records of
Django Reinhardt and the
Hot Club of France, and
Al Jolson: Jolson’s records were rereleased for
The Jolson Story
at the time. His theatrical persona was amazing, extraordinary. Have you seen the restored version of
Hallelujah, I’m a Bum
?

In
New York, New York,
Liza Minnelli played the naturally gifted band singer who marries Robert De Niro’s driven bandleader, to their ultimate sorrow.

RS:
No, I haven’t.

MS:
I saw it on television as a young kid. It was a bad
black-and-white, scratched, edited-down version. But they restored it about two years ago. It’s a masterpiece.

RS:
Really?

MS:
Lewis Milestone was the director. The editing was almost like Russian editing. Sometimes, too, the effect is almost Brechtian. It was a major revelation. It’s edgy and tough; it deals with the
New Deal, and
Marxism. It’s just extraordinary.