Conversations with Scorsese (9 page)

De Niro one time had a good answer for that. He went on for about five minutes in a meeting that I don’t see it as solely an Italian-American problem. I see it as
what is in us, in every one of us. And I have to face what I think is not good about myself. And it’s realized more truthfully when I deal with it in those particular stories of the Italian-American world.

All this comes together and it feels almost universal to me, and ultimately it seems that I found it more comfortable, more accessible to me to do in the stories that happened to involve Italian Americans. There is one more film about it called
Neighborhood,
a
Nick Pileggi film, that one day I might make.
Elia Kazan always told me to make it. It’s sort of a story about my mother and father.

RS:
Art has to be specific. Generalizations are the enemy of art.

MS:
I was thinking about it the other day, this idea of becoming a priest. Maybe it wasn’t really a serious vocation after all. Maybe I just wanted to be like that neighborhood priest,
Father Principe. But, as I said, my parents were not religious.

RS:
Christmas and Lent Catholics?

MS:
Kind of. The last time my mother went to confession she said, “That priest asked me some questions. It’s none of his business.” She never went back.

RS:
That’s funny.

MS:
But, you know, what were they going to do with me? For about two years I was an altar boy. It was something to do and the priest was nice to me. But I got thrown out because I couldn’t make it to the seven o’clock mass. I’m not very good in the mornings.

RS:
I’m guessing that even that early you had some sort of half-formed doubts about the priestly vocation. Maybe it was too focused on you, your own needs.

MS:
Yeah, and it should be the other way.

RS:
And you felt that if you had a priestly vocation, it should be to help others.

MS:
Well, no. I understood that you have to help others, you do things for people, you work in schools, you work in the streets. But I was only thinking what was in it for me, not for what really mattered. And that’s what interests me about the
Dalai Lama, about any truly spiritual or religious figure.

RS:
Talk a little more about that.

MS:
I don’t say I believe it now, but at that time I wondered, What’s the sense of hanging around here? If you die, you can go to heaven. So why be here? I mean, I put it in childlike terms—ultimately, maybe it’s just a matter of marking time until you’re dead.

RS:
The thought occurs to me all the time. Or I’ll say to people, “Well, you’ve got to do something between the cradle and the grave.”

MS:
We have to do it. I mean, I look back, I think about it a lot. But, anyway, I went to Cardinal Hayes, and in two and a half years at Cardinal Hayes I sort of straightened out—at least got focused. For what, I wasn’t quite sure.

I wasn’t focused on movies. There was no such thing as that. I was focused—how should I say?—on not living the way the others were living, the ones who hadn’t gone to high school, the ones who hadn’t gone to college. I wanted to go, after Cardinal Hayes, to Fordham, but I was in the lower quarter of my graduating class, I hadn’t applied myself, or whatever.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
Was there any film, when you were a kid, where you would say, Well, that’s a knockout cut. Maybe you wouldn’t even have known to call it a cut. But a juxtaposition, maybe?

MARTIN SCORSESE:
I think I was aware of it. There was no doubt when I was very young and I saw
Duel in the Sun
[the epic, heavily sexualized
western of 1946], there were some edited sequences, spectacle sequences, not the melodramatic stuff.

RS:
When they gather from all over the ranch—it’s beautiful.

MS:
I’ll never forget that.

RS:
It’s one of the best sequences ever.

MS:
Ever.

RS:
I mean, it’s a wacko
King Vidor movie, from what
Andrew Sarris once called his delirious phase, but boy, that’s a great sequence.

MS:
Yeah, yeah. And I’m trying to think. I’m trying to project myself back now: Is that something I noticed, the editing? Or didn’t I? I think I did in some way,
because, you know, there’s the one cowboy and then there’s the two cowboys.

Marty’s merry Christmas.

RS:
And then there’s twelve cowboys.

MS:
And how about, finally, hundreds of them coming over the hill to stop the railroad.

RS:
It’s just classic filmmaking.

MS:
Another one I remember liking when I was a kid was
I Shot Jesse James,
Sam Fuller’s first film. My father took me to see that when I was about six or seven years old. That ending. And those close-ups are amazing. I remember those close-ups very strongly. But the thing is, I knew it wasn’t your traditional western—a
High Noon
kind of thing. Something else was going on there. It was more intense. But I think the big one for me was
Shane.

RS:
Really?

MS:
Because I was the same age as the boy. And there was something about the way the director [George Stevens] used the medium. For example, the fight scenes, the way the action erupts. And the way Shane goes for his gun—the use of sound effects and editing. And it cuts to
Brandon De Wilde and his eyes open. And, of course, the fight in the bar.

It’s beautifully constructed. You watch how it builds, and builds, and builds. Now, these days, I notice the music helps it to a certain extent. But, still, it’s got the traditional scene, which I did in
Gangs of New York
—you know, the intimidation at the bar. And again in
The Departed
with the cranberry juice, which is [Ben] Johnson in the bar with
Alan Ladd, and Alan Ladd ordering sarsaparilla.

I watched it while I was doing
The Departed.
And I liked the way it’s constructed. I don’t know if it holds together completely. I think there are elements of it that kind of get bogged down.

RS:
Well, I have observed this a great deal in interviewing directors, where directors do not look at movies the way movie critics do, or the way the audience does. Director conversations about movies will always come down to a cut, an angle, something to do with technique. Which the audience mostly skips. They’re really there for the story. And the story of
Shane
works for them.

MS:
Yeah, especially at the end—I was a little boy, and Shane’s the kind of father I wanted. It’s the kind of father any boy who saw it wanted. In the meantime, the kid’s real father, Van Heflin, is a good man.

RS:
Well, Van Heflin was kind of like your dad. I mean, a dutiful man.

MS:
Dutiful. And it’s also about taking responsibility for yourself, I hear that again. It’s hammered into my head.

I disagree with you about the audience, though. The audience is affected by, for instance, the way the level of the sound effects were raised in that movie. And the
editing of the scene—technical things, even if they’re not aware of them as technical. But a filmmaker may well be more aware of them.

RS:
And a filmmaker will be able to talk about it later, may even be able to trace influences on his work. It’s just an entirely different way of looking at movies.

MS:
Well, it is. Another example:
Bonnie and Clyde,
which was, I thought, an extraordinary film. I remembered a scene where they all get shot up in a motel that they’re in one night. And they get in the car, and they start to drive away. And they’re firing at this other car. And I swore there was a close-up of a gun coming toward the window and shooting into the car and hitting
Gene Hackman in the eyes. I could have sworn there was a separate cut. But if you look at the film, it’s a medium-wide shot.

So then I’d go back to see why I felt that way at that moment in the film. And often it isn’t just that moment—it’s scenes that build up to that moment. And acting for me was very important. When Brando came on the screen in
On the Waterfront,
my whole idea of acting changed. That doesn’t mean I didn’t still like
James Mason or didn’t like
William Holden. But for me, until Brando, cinema was the rhythm and the timing of the performers, like
Judy Holliday and
Broderick Crawford and William Holden in
Born Yesterday:
George Cukor directed that, and these films were plays, but yet they don’t feel like plays. You know, they don’t feel stagebound.

RS:
George was really good at that.

MS:
Yeah. I think it’s the actors and the timing. Also it came from watching some of
David Lean’s films. I saw
Breaking the Sound Barrier
on its first release, and I think it holds up better than
Brief Encounter.

RS:
I’ve always loved that film. [David Lean’s 1952 film about the development of supersonic flight is also a tense family drama involving a tyrannical airplane designer, his daughter, and the test pilot she marries.]

MS:
If you watch it now, it is really mystical, the whole relationship between the father and the son and
Ann Todd at the end. It is really a beauty.

RS:
Yes.

MS:
And I learned a lot about sound editing from it.

RS:
Oh, really?

MS:
About the plane, and the way it was landing, the way the director cuts to the plane. They hear nothing, nothing, and then suddenly the buzzing gets louder and louder, and comes right at the camera. I used that a lot in
The Aviator.

RS:
I wasn’t aware of the Lean connection.

MS:
But the
Powell-Pressburger films are much more influential for me, of course. There was something about watching
The Red Shoes
that was all-encompassing, the excessive performances—Anton Walbrook,
Moira Shearer—the makeup on their faces, it was extraordinary, the beauty of the production design. Then this very strange ballet sequence, which visually had more to do with
silent cinema than anything else.

RS:
I don’t know if you felt it when
The Red Shoes
came out, but all the girls wanted to see it, and us hearty guys were saying, “Aw, don’t wanna see that!”

MS:
The guys were not going to go see the ballet. But for some reason my father took me to see it.

RS:
I remember going to it and, kind of against my will, being sort of strangely enchanted by it.

MS:
[
Laughs.
] But, you know, I guess what I’m getting to is that I became aware of those angles—even in something like
Sam Fuller’s
Park Row.
It was again on
Million Dollar Movie,
and that obsessed me. I began to really notice long takes with a crane that he used. Granted, it was a very volatile picture, and maybe it was the energy of it that grabbed me. And maybe the way he moved the crane in the scene of rioting in the streets. And it ends with him fighting with somebody at the base of the statue of
Horace Greeley. There’s something that was so explosive about the way the camera relentlessly kept moving.

RS:
But it seems to me important to point out that you’re probably the only person you knew at that age who was paying attention to that.

MS:
I know.

RS:
Everybody else was going, Oh, that was a neat flick.

MS:
Yes. But I did have my friend whom I had tortured by showing him all these drawings I had pretended were movies. And there was my other friend, Joe—we were altar boys together, and we hung out a lot together, and we just kept seeing all these movies. And we loved Ford, we loved John Wayne in these films, and I admit we didn’t really talk about technique. We talked about story and character, mainly character.