Conversations with Scorsese (62 page)

RS:
Is that kind of thing worked out largely in the editing room?

MS:
No, usually before. Very often I play the music on the set.

RS:
I didn’t realize that.

MS:
Not all the time. But I started doing that on
Who’s That Knocking.
I played music I couldn’t use on the film—a song called “The Lantern” by the
Rolling Stones—to get the feeling of a camera move I liked. That was 1968. On
Goodfellas,
on the first day of shooting, we did the scene with the pink Cadillac with the two dead bodies in it. I knew I was going to use the last section of
“Layla,” by
Derek and the Dominos,
Eric Clapton. So we played that on set. It was great, the music had a grandiosity and a stateliness about it.

RS:
When you’re playing the music on the set, do you communicate to the crew what’s on your mind?

MS:
Oh, absolutely.

RS:
That the music was meant to enhance a certain kind of a move?

MS:
Yes.
Michael Ballhaus would understand it.
Michael Chapman did, too. Making
The Departed,
too, I’d play him certain music.

RS:
I’ve actually never heard of any other directors who do it this way—the intricate working out of the music during the shoot.

MS:
We also do more with it in the editing.

RS:
That seems to me a unique aspect of the way you work.

MS:
Well, the music is inseparable for me. It can be nerve-racking to get it right. It was new territory for me to work with
Bernard Herrmann,
Elmer Bernstein,
Howard Shore. But we developed a wonderful trust. Some of the films that had those scores were in a
genre style. I had a burst of energy in the seventies and I felt I could do any genre I wanted. That’s gone now. If I do a genre film now, I really have to think about what new perspective I could bring to the genre.

The found scores—composed of pre-existing music—seem to fit more closely with genre pictures. I feel more comfortable that way. Even in
Kundun,
which is a special kind of film, we played
Philip Glass on the set.

RS:
Really?

MS:
Yes, a couple of times, to get a certain mood. It’s funny: Your camera’s moving to the music, and you think you’ve got it right. But when you put the music next to it later in the editing room, you say, “I went too fast. I should have done it slower.”

On
Who’s That Knocking,
the people are in a party or at a bar and there’s music playing, and you have to stop the music so you can hear the dialogue. But everybody still has to act as if the music is blaring. I hated that.

RS:
Why?

MS:
I want the energy there. That’s a battle I’m having all the time. I try to get the music played back on set as much as possible in scenes like that before cutting it off. I want the actors at a peak. I want the energy going.

RS:
Another director would have dozens of takes because he wouldn’t actually know how the music which he’s already heard in his head would work. Or, worse, a composer is going to come in and write a score six weeks later.

MS:
Exactly. I don’t feel comfortable with relying on a score. I admire great scores, and they’ve saved my pictures in many cases. But I tend to want to try to create my own score. In some cases
Robbie Robertson helps. But not every film I make lends itself to that.

RS:
An obvious exception would be
Age of Innocence.

MS:
That had to have a wonderful score. That’s part of the tradition that film belongs to. I thought Elmer’s music was just glorious.

RS:
It’s a beautifully scored film.

MS:
You know, I sent that film to Kurosawa. He sent back a note saying, “I do not like films about romance.” He also said it was not his kind of film, that he just didn’t like it. And here’s the point: He also said, “I must caution you, I must admonish you on the use of music. Like all Hollywood films, you’re using music too much.”

But to me it was like
The Heiress.
I wanted
Aaron Copland. That was a key film for me. I wanted a reference back to that. And also in the look of the film.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
In the course of these conversations you have often said, “I ran such-and-such before I did that picture,” or “It’s like the scene in …,” and then you name a picture as a reference.

MARTIN SCORSESE:
Yes, I’m just giving reference points.

RS:
I understand that. I understand you’re not copying the masters—although there’s no reason not to sometimes.

MS:
It’s not going to come out the way they did it anyway.

RS:
That’s the whole point.

MS:
The inspirational aspect of it is interesting to me—the notion of staying in touch with film history, film heritage. I’ve been told I do that more than other directors do. I don’t know, but the view of the movies I carry around in my mind has changed over the years. I now prefer seeing other Welles films rather than
Citizen Kane.
I’ve reached a certain limit with
Kane.
Other films now give me more to think about.

RS:
Such as?

MS:
Renoir’s
The River.
And
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.
I keep finding more and more in that. But I’m kind of done with
Kane
and
The Searchers.

RS:
I can’t look at those movies again. I’ve seen them too many times.

MS:
I should say that with
Kane,
there are still moments I can watch. It’s still a reference point even though I don’t watch it in its entirety.

RS:
Are there specific sequences or images that haunt you, maybe while you’re actually making a film?

MS:
A lot of films changed the way I perceived the world around me at certain key points in my life.

Forty years ago, when I saw Antonioni’s
L’Avventura,
I didn’t know quite what to make of it. I went to see it a second time, and a third time. And I thought that the filmmaker was forcing me to view life in a different rhythm or with a different frame.

Part of the initial problem I had with the movie was that I didn’t know who those people were. It depicted a world I had no firsthand knowledge of. But once I got past that, I began to see that the images had a melancholy and a power to them. There was drama in every frame. And the panning was different, the tracking was different.

I’ve always tried to capture what Antonioni did, but I can never get it. I just have a totally different sensibility. There’s no way I can get near it. He does it a lot in
Blow-Up,
though I prefer
L’Avventura
and
The Eclipse.
But still there’s this parallel move that he makes which is so detached yet has such spiritual power. It’s a very cool sensibility, very cool. It made me stop and look. He was showing the world in a different way.

RS:
Is that what drives you, making people stop and look?

MS:
Probably. For example, the biggest problem I had with
Shutter Island
was trying to figure out the scene when he’s walking down that long, dark hallway, and there are no lights and he’s got to light matches. He’s holding them up, trying to see if there are people in the cells.

There are those glimpses of people whom he thinks he sees, but maybe don’t exist. How was I to shoot something that doesn’t exist? I mean, Buñuel did it the best. He just cut straight to a dream, even though the audience doesn’t know it’s a dream. The camera move, the lights, the cutting—what to do to rivet the viewer?

RS:
The way you reference films leads me to your interest in film collecting, and now the
Film Foundation, and restoration. It’s admirable, and it’s useful. And a little compulsive. But you don’t do it just to solve your own moviemaking problems.

MS:
No, I don’t. It’s another aspect of myself. That’s the guy who thought he was going to be a studio director, and realized the studios were all over. And what could he do about it? Well, he could try to preserve that history. If I had never become a filmmaker, the difference those films made in my life might make a similar difference in somebody else’s life in the future. I’m excited by that. I like teaching. It’s so great when some younger people around you have the curiosity and you can talk, and they get excited. You show them certain things, you give them something to read, and two years later they come back with a film.

First among many: Marty acquired this Belgian poster in
Greenwich Village for perhaps $25, when he was a young man. It was his first such acquisition, and to this day it hangs in his editing room.

RS:
When did film preservation become a priority for you?

MS:
It began in the mid-seventies when I was just trying to get films for research—American films, Italian, British, whatever. We found the situation was dire. The films were falling apart.

There was alarm, really. I felt it, some film critics did. Spielberg would get a print and it had turned magenta and would be cut in five different places and panned and scanned [a process by which a wide-screen image is altered so that it fills the entire frame of a television screen; at the time, federal regulation forbade black space at the top and bottom of the screen]. Sometimes we couldn’t even see the image. We knew we had to try to make sure that these films survived for the next generation.

When I started working on
Raging Bull,
we started to form a preservation group. A lot of emotion was attached to that effort. The studios and the distributors,
who had made so much money on these films, needed to be educated as to their condition.

There was no means of restoring three-strip
Technicolor. Every film was being made in color, and the color of old films was no longer stable. Color is intrinsic to the design of a movie, its inherent texture. And within a few years the color was gone, it was disappearing. That was something we really felt intensely at that time.

I attacked it on an emotional level. Even those who disagreed with me, especially in Hollywood, saw that there was a genuine reason for what I was saying. It was not to advance myself, or the film I was making at the moment. I was fighting for the films of the past. Don’t forget, I said, you’re also making money. You want people to see these films.

RS:
The artifacts of history in film are terribly important. I mean, the worst movie in the world will contain clues to how we lived, how we dressed, how we talked.

MS:
That is what I was pointing out in 1979. There was a film called
The Creeping Terror,
a silly sci-fi film shot in the Midwest. They got everybody in some town to act in it. So you actually saw the way people dressed. And you saw how they behaved in everyday life. They were “acting,” but they really weren’t. The plot was not the point. What was important to me was what it said about America, and about our culture. It was very moving.

RS:
It became a valuable record.

MS:
It really is.

RS:
Yet sometimes I feel that’s not enough for you. However much you contribute through your work with the
Film Foundation, you keep saying you don’t feel you give as much as you should, or in the right way.

MS:
It’s the conflict of the selflessness with the selfishness. You can write a check to a charity and you feel better. But writing a check is doing nothing. You should be out there, if you really care about it.

RS:
You’re very stern.

MS:
It’s true. And it is coming from a person who feels he’s been a failure in giving over the years.

RS:
Wait a minute: For you to put what you put into the Film Foundation, the amount of work you do for it … You shouldn’t feel bad if you support film preservation. It’s a valid thing to do.