Conversations with Scorsese (67 page)

Alone among the world’s major directors, Marty maintains an incredibly active life as a filmmaker in other fields. For example, he was in
London from spring 2010 to the end of the year directing (in 3-D) the film version of a very fine children’s book,
Hugo Cabret.
The story recounts the years in which
Georges Méliès, the magician who pioneered the delightful special-effects films of the cinema’s early years, was forced out of the business and eked out a living as a shopkeeper in a Paris railroad station. As the movie would have it, he meets a young boy, also living in the station, with the film retailing their fantastic adventures. The aim is pure delight, but Marty being Marty, he found himself increasingly fascinated by the “sculptural” possibilities 3-D offers him. They are something new—and exciting—to his restless eye.

Meantime, his
documentary
Letter to Elia,
virtually completed before he began shooting the feature film, had its first film festival screenings, at Telluride and, later, at the
New York Film Festival. It is a very personal tribute to one of his
most revered directorial masters, Elia Kazan, and was meant for limited theatrical and wider DVD release. It followed by just a few weeks the HBO presentation of
Boardwalk Empire,
an historical epic about the criminal history of Atlantic City, for which he served as executive producer as well as the director of the first episode of the series. Beyond that he was directing the epic-length documentary
Living in the Material World:
George Harrison,
about the life, music, and spiritual questings of the onetime Beatle, as well as the more modest
Public Speaking,
a very funny documentary about
Fran Lebowitz, the comic writer, who is a personal friend of Marty and his wife, Helen. He was at the same time looking forward to shooting
Silence,
his long-dreamed-of film about Jesuit priests in
Japan many centuries ago. At the same time, a script for his biopic about
Frank Sinatra was in preparation.

Just recounting the range of his activities in the fall of 2010 leaves everyone except Marty a little breathless. He says that at his age (sixty-eight during this flurry of activity), he more and more feels the pressure of time and his own mortality. So much to do, possibly so little time. Moreover, he has never banked as much money as other directors of his stature have done; he’s always plowing it back into film preservation, his collections of posters and film, his
film foundation. He therefore worries about leaving enough money to assure his children’s future, especially that of his youngest daughter, Francesca.

But more than practical considerations account for his pace. All of the work of 2010 and beyond has serious meaning for him; he wasn’t and will not be bowling for dollars with any of it. Take
Boardwalk Empire,
for example. It may be full of menacing and bloody activity. But it is also a serious representation of the rise of organized crime in the early twentieth century. The New Jersey playground was, Marty says, “the template for Las Vegas,” which means that it holds high intrinsic interest for him. I’ve never believed that he concerns himself so often with crime, both organized and disorganized, out of an impulse for sensationalism. It’s the extremes of behavior found in the underworld that fascinate him.

And also the ironies it presents. For example, in
Boardwalk Empire
there is, of all things, the question of roads to consider. The rum runners needed paved highways to move their contraband from place to place. The result was the beginnings, at least in New Jersey, of an excellent road network that ultimately benefited the general public at least as much as it did the gangsters. It is this alertness to the curious by-products of criminal activity that distinguishes Marty’s work in this field from that of his competitors. Comedy, like violence, is a form of extreme behavior, and there is a lot more of the blacker varieties of comedy in his films than most people perceive. It is an important factor in making
Goodfellas,
for instance, such an extraordinary experience. And
Boardwalk Empire
is a more than usually interesting television series.

But it is the documentaries that provide him with satisfactions not available in feature films. For one thing, the financial stakes in these pictures are much lower, which means the pressures on Marty are also lessened—especially deadline pressures. “You can approach the material carefully,” he says. “You can let the film grow naturally. You are much more free to play with the form than you can with a feature film.” The Kazan film provides a particularly good example. He worked on it for several years, testing different approaches to his subject, making a multitude of rough cuts as he refined various versions of the piece.

Something similar, though with a different cumulative effect, occurred with the
George Harrison film. He quite quickly determined that he did not want to think chronologically about the man’s life. What fascinated him was Harrison’s post-Beatles life, his disillusionment with celebrity follies, and, above all, the man’s earnest search for some deeper, existential meaning in our passage through life. The film is very long (about three hours) and contains some interesting digressions on less-than-obvious matters. For instance, Marty suggests that Harrison’s late music functions somewhat the way chanting does in Eastern religions, as an aid to meditation, which took Marty back to some of the ideas that underlay
Kundun.
Not that he wishes to proselytize for that notion. It is, he insists, just something that emerged as he worked with his material in comparative leisure.

As for the Lebowitz film, it is a much lighter exercise. “I couldn’t resist it,” he says. Interviewing her, bringing his cameras to her public appearances, he quickly realized that “you could make a different film every night,” so mercurial is the persona she has created and plays with a sort of noisy subtlety. Making the film, Marty was often reminded of
Italianamerican
. However complex his filmmaking, both factual and fictional, becomes, he remains wedded to the idea that the world offers no more intriguing spectacle than that of a man and/or a woman simply talking to each other or to a camera. To invoke the cliché, such figures are capable of containing multitudes.

They are also capable of containing Marty—by which I mean that his work on nonfiction films is not just something that keeps a workaholic busy. It is, I think, central to who he is as an artist. It would be easy for someone like Marty to lose touch with reality, to succumb to the high flattery that is always dangerously available to “auteurs.” This work on limited budgets, for (relatively speaking) limited audiences, on topics that are more interesting to him than they are to anyone else, keeps him grounded. It surely keeps him in touch with his modest beginnings, when getting any film, fictional or nonfictional, into release was a major triumph for him. They must, as well, remind him that maintaining your credentials as an artist in any medium requires that you from time to time devote yourself to topics that do not have broad popular appeal, that offer you more private satisfaction
than public acclaim. This is, I think, especially true of moviemakers, who require so much more in the way of equipment and manpower to pursue their goals than do poets and painters.

So his documentaries are not sidelines or indulgences for him. They are, I believe, a crucial element in maintaining his sense of himself. Marty has lately found himself taken with the notion that there “is more
democracy in our culture than there is in our society at large”—a willingness to take more risks, to experiment more radically with both form and content. His documentaries put him at the center of that sort of activity. They freshen and recharge his energies, grant him the opportunity for serious play, which is essential to any artist. It’s an accident that so much of his work came to fruition in the fall of 2010. But it is no accident that the films were undertaken. They are of the essence as far as Marty is concerned. And they are a large part of what distinguishes his career from any other that comes easily to mind.

Rather obviously, my gratitude goes first and foremost to Martin Scorsese, who embraced this book from the outset and devoted more hours to it than either of us imagined it would require. It’s not just the time that went into our conversations that I thank him for, but for the time I know he spent thinking about and preparing for our talk when I was not present. I have interviewed many directors—Marty included—for a series of television programs I have made about them and their work. But I have never gone into quite the depth I did with Marty, whose patience, concentration, and openness were wonderful to behold—and inspiring as well.

My thanks for their assistance on this book go to a relatively small number of people, but they are all the more heartfelt because they are so few. In Marty’s office, his co-producer, Emma Tillinger, became over the years not just an informal collaborator in my efforts, but a true (and unfailingly good-natured) friend. Lisa Frichette, Marty’s personal assistant, has been a cheerful, blindlingly efficient presence as an arranger of meetings and source of information. She has been dauntless in support of a sometimes daunting task. Marianne Bower, Marty’s archivist, has been wonderfully patient in answering my many questions and in providing most of the pictures that add so much to this book’s appearance.

At Knopf, Jonathan Segal has been—as always—an ideal editor: incisive, demanding, and insistent that this book be as good as I could possible make it. I’ve known Jon for something like thirty years, and his friendship is one of the ornaments of my life. His tireless assistant, Joey McGarvey, has handled the multitude of details that go into making any book with unfailing good cheer and marvelous efficiency.

All these people have conspired to make this book a pleasure to work on and to make it better than I dared hope it might be. I hope that they will enjoy the results of our joint efforts.

Richard Schickel
Los Angeles
November 15, 2010

DIRECTED BY
Martin Scorsese

WRITTEN BY
Martin Scorsese

PRINCIPAL CAST
Zina Bethune  …  Girl
Harvey Keitel  …  J.R.

PRODUCED BY
Haig Manoogian
Betzi Manoogian
Joseph Weill

DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Richard H. Coll
Michael Wadleigh

FILM EDITOR
Thelma Schoonmaker

DIRECTED BY
Martin Scorsese

WRITTEN BY
Joyce H. Corrington
John William Corrington

(Based on the book
Sister of the Road
, by Bertha
Thompson as told to Ben L. Reitman)

PRINCIPAL CAST
Barbara Hershey  …  “Boxcar” Bertha Thompson
David Carradine  …  “Big” Bill Shelly
Barry Primus  …  Rake Brown
Bernie Casey  …  Von Morton
John Carradine  …  H. Buckram Sartoris

PRODUCED BY
Roger Corman
Julie Corman

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY
John Stephens

FILM EDITOR
Buzz Feitshans

ORIGINAL MUSIC BY
Gib Guilbeau
Thad Maxwell

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
Paul Rapp

DIRECTED BY
Martin Scorsese

WRITTEN BY
Martin Scorsese
Mardik Martin

STORY BY
Martin Scorsese

PRINCIPAL CAST
Robert De Niro  …  Johnny Boy
Harvey Keitel  …  Charlie
David Provai  …  Tony
Amy Robinson  …  Teresa
Richard Romanus  …  Michael
Cesare Danova  …  Giovanni

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
E. Lee Perry

PRODUCED BY
Jonathan T. Taplin

CINEMATOGRAPHY BY
Kent Wakeford

FILM EDITOR
Sid Levin
Martin Scorsese (uncredited)

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
Russell Vreeland

DIRECTED BY
Martin Scorsese

WRITTEN BY
Larry Cohen
Mardik Martin

CAST
Catherine Scorsese  …  Herself
Charles Scorsese  …  Himself
Martin Scorsese  …  Himself (uncredited)

PRODUCED BY
Elaine Attias
Saul Rubin

ASSOCIATE PRODUCER
Bert Lovitt

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Alec Hirschfeld

EDITED BY
Bert Lovitt

DIRECTED BY
Martin Scorsese

WRITTEN BY
Robert Getchell

PRINCIPAL CAST
Ellen Burstyn  …  Alice Hyatt
Alfred Lutter  …  Tommy
Harvey Keitel  …  Ben
Diane Ladd  …  Flo
Vic Tayback  …  Mel
Kris Kristofferson  …  David

PRODUCED BY
Audrey Maas
David Susskind

ASSOCIATE PRODUCER
Sandra Weintraub

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Kent L. Wakeford