Conversations with Scorsese (66 page)

RS:
The crisis, it seems to me, that has been more and more vividly played out in our time is existentialism versus the orderliness of organized religion. We are, most of us, now used to the notion that we live in a chance universe.

MS:
Yes, exactly.

RS:
I’m here with you. I ask you one final question that just happens to pop into my mind. I step out in the street and a car comes around the corner and kills me. If I hadn’t asked that question, I’d have been across the street.

MS:
That fascinates me. I actually think about it all the time. That’s one of the ideas behind Nick’s character in
Bringing Out the Dead,
thinking he can make a difference.

RS:
Well, he does—to some degree.

MS:
Yes, but he can’t control the world. He can’t control the cosmos. He can’t control people’s lives. He can’t really bring people back to life, except almost by luck.

RS:
It comes back to something that was so important in
Elia Kazan’s way of looking at the world. He said, Look, life is full of choices. If you married this woman, it means you didn’t marry that woman. Marrying this woman your life goes in a certain path. But what would have been your path had you chosen the other woman? That’s what we never know. That was the fascination for him. You know, he chose to testify at the HUAC hearings. Had he chosen not to testify, how would his life have been different? That was the most vivid example in his life. But the fundamental idea occurred to him in all kinds of situations, even very minor ones—I chose to shoot this scene this morning instead of that scene this morning.

MS:
There are some who believe there may not be any design at all, that the design just works itself out. Where does God fit in this? Does He in any way? Is there some sort of a force?

My daughter comes into a room in Los Angeles. She flew out because we were going to one of these awards ceremonies. She was very happy to be there. She sits down and asks, “So why are we here?” Her mother says, “We’re here for the event tonight.” My daughter says, “No, I mean, why are we here on this planet?” I looked at the three of us and I said, “Well, if you weren’t here, who’s going to take care of the dog?” I said, “I’m here to take care of you, to take care of us, to take care of Mommy, we all take care of each other.” That’s it. It ends here.

RS:
There appears to me to be some truth in that.

MS:
That’s all we know. And the next step is that the person next to you is somebody who cares about you. Maybe that is the nature of who we are.

RS:
This has come up in different forms in a number of our conversations. It’s obviously something you’ve wrestled with all your life. Now it seems to me, coming from a very different tradition from yours—

MS:
Yes!

RS:
I’m just done with it. I’m not having that wrestling match anymore. I believe it’s a chance universe. I believe when I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m not going to some better place—which I bitterly regret, of course.

MS:
We’re going to miss it, you know. We’re going to miss a lot. Except, following the logic of nothingness, we won’t know.

RS:
I have a friend who says, “What I hate most about it is you’re asked to leave the party, and the party’s still going on.”

MS:
It will still be going on.

RS:
They’re going to be making movies—

MS:
Pictures are going to be made, plays are going to be written, and books are going to be written. And I’ll miss it all. It’s not fair.

Marty lines up a shot in the danker reaches of the
Shutter Island
insane asylum. Cinematographer
Robert Richardson is at his left.

RS:
You are finished, Mr. Scorsese.

MS:
Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, I have one more thing to say.

RS:
It’s funny, but it is not.

MS:
Well, you have to laugh about it because that’s what it is.
Epictetus, I think, said not to be concerned with death, because life is the presence of feeling and emotion and awareness, and death is the absence of all of that, which means you won’t have any awareness. So why worry about it?

RS:
I’ve thought about the suddenness and the apparent motivelessness of violence in your films. There’s a lack of—forgive the pomposity of this phrase—precognitive awareness on the part of your characters in those situations. It makes your movies uniquely intense.

MS:
I don’t know. I don’t mean them to be.

RS:
Of course you mean them to be! What I’m saying is that I see a lot of movies and I admire a lot of movies. Your movies all characteristically have an enormous intensity to them. I’m not just talking about movement in the frame, the way you cut them, all of that technical business. There is a relentless, in-your-face quality to your movies. It’s not present in the work of most of your contemporaries. I admire Spielberg, but he doesn’t have that intensity. It comes out when we talk about, for example, your maniacal layering of music. It’s in everything you do.

MS:
Okay, it is in everything. It has to be worth saying to go through all this, to put it on film. And there’s gotta be somebody out there it’s going to say something to, to grab. It has to be that intense to accomplish that. It’s got to be like DiCaprio’s face when
Jack Nicholson tells him, “I smell a rat.” Leo has to convince him he’s not the rat. Leo thinks, What am I doing here, what choice have I made in my life to get me in this position? It’s all there in his eyes. It has to be.

RS:
Well, where does the feeling that motivates that sequence spring from in you?

MS:
You have to be selfless to be a good servant. Yet I have a giant ego. That’s the way it is.

RS:
It’s the same with me. If I ask myself, What is the purpose of what I do? I have no idea. I think that’s true of most people.

MS:
People think in different ways. But you open up doors. That’s the key, I think. Like the
Walter Benjamin material we discussed. The business about the aura of the work.

RS:
It’s a fabulous piece of thinking.

MS:
It’s quite something. It’s the kind of influence that a priest had on me when I was a kid, and he said, “Look at this book. Go see this movie. Listen to this piece of music.” And suddenly people go off in directions they never would have thought of.

RS:
Well, I guess that’s the ideal. If you make a movie, or if I write something, that gets to a couple of people and—

MS:
It makes some kind of difference.

RS:
If it makes them think a little differently and behave a little differently, then I guess we’ve fulfilled our purpose. I don’t know what else we’re here for. As you say, all the rest is ego.

MS:
Yes, the rest is ego.

Kazan’s
On the Waterfront
meant so much to me. People do affect other people. So many people go up to
Bob Dylan and say, “Your work changed my life.” What is he going to say to them? You can’t say “I didn’t mean to,” because in some way you
did
mean to.

A lot of what I do comes from, again, what I perceived as religion and morality. The nature of the male-dominated world that my father represented, and also specific to that patriarchal religion—that whole way of thinking—as opposed to what I perceived in the “church,” which represented to me a more nurturing, female side of the religion.

In my work, I’ve been trying to develop, over the past ten years, a nurturing compassion, I suppose. Some people say it’s just Catholic guilt, that’s all. But it’s still guilt. I don’t mean guilt from being late for mass or for having sexual thoughts. No, I’m talking about guilt that comes from just being alive. That’s what brings me to these characters.

RS:
Guilt from just being alive? That’s cosmic guilt!

MS:
I mean, it’s not like I’m complaining about it. I just need to live with it and deal with it. Look again at Leo’s face in
The Departed.
What is he guilty of?

RS:
Really nothing.

MS:
Yes, but in his mind, everything. He puts himself in a suicide situation. He’s going to die. He’s twenty-five years old. I’ve seen this happen, you know. I’ve seen people just condemn themselves. I’ve seen people destroy themselves over the years. Why? It’s not that easy. There’s something in our nature, something I gravitate toward.

RS:
Okay.

MS:
People say, You take yourself too damn seriously. But it’s the reality. I’m stuck with myself. I’ve been taking myself seriously. I’d better listen to myself and deal with it.

RS:
Well, you do take yourself seriously.

MS:
I can’t help that.

RS:
All of us do. We can pretend otherwise. But the truth of the matter is almost everything we do is something that comes from some part of our souls.

MS:
A basic core.

RS:
A core, yes.

MS:
Who we are, our heart.

RS:
Do you have any aspiration—

MS:
To make a love story?

RS:
To put it simply.

MS:
I keep thinking, Do I have to? But then I think, Well, if I’m able to do a love story, then I should be able to do an historical epic, I should be able to do anything else. In the time that’s left, I would love to find a story like
Happy-Go-Lucky
[Mike Leigh’s film about an amazingly cheerful schoolteacher’s life in North London], for example, to deal with those two people—Eddie Marsan’s character and
Sally Hawkins’s character, Poppy, in the car.

RS:
Oh, that’s a really interesting entanglement, isn’t it?

MS:
Yeah, it’s wonderful. It’s not a test or an exam, but it’s like a canon of work that every filmmaker or novelist should be able to do.

RS:
Alfred Hitchcock, to name another Catholic-raised artist, made the same movie a hundred times.

MS:
Yes, but there were love stories, like
Notorious.
And
Vertigo,
the most extraordinary one, because Jimmy Stewart loses
Kim Novak twice. If I finally do
Silence,
it will have no women in it, but it’s about love. It’s about love itself. And pushing the ego away, pushing the pride away. It’s about the essential nature of
Christianity itself.

RS:
Is Christianity the ultimate expression of love? I don’t know.

MS:
It is the road I was given, the road that I was put on. If I had been born in the Middle East, I might have felt differently. I don’t know. My first experiences with love, basically, were with my parents. Then the concept of love itself came through indoctrination by the church in the early 1950s.

I’ve gone through a lot of changes since then. But looking at who we are as a species, love does seem to be the only answer. So how is that nurtured? How is that developed in us as human beings? In our actions, particularly.

I often think of
The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
[There are five people on the bridge, all of whom are killed by an earthquake. The
Thornton Wilder novel and subsequent film ask whether their deaths were part of some cosmic plan or merely
accidents.] There doesn’t appear to be a particular reason why they’re there. The nurse at the end—a nun, I think—is taking care of all the other victims and she suddenly thinks, What if there is no God? Then she looks around and says to herself, in effect, They need your help one way or another, and she goes right back to work. That’s the beauty of it.

The image of the dutiful nun
attending to those wounded in the collapse of the bridge of San Luis Rey is one that often recurs to Marty. It’s not particularly a spiritual thing. It’s more a matter of the practical—and inordinate—demands that conscience and the accidents of fate place on the individual.