Conversations with Scorsese (10 page)

In the American cinema—George Cukor,
Billy Wilder—the angles are precise, they’re intelligent angles. They serve the story, the narrative. It’s very, very clear. And it’s a very gifted thing. I don’t even know how to do that, quite honestly.

RS:
So in this period, are you saying at all to yourself, I don’t know how you do it, I don’t know where I would go learn it, but that’s something I want to do?

MS:
Yes, absolutely. And you really couldn’t say it aloud. That’s why I hid the drawings, because you couldn’t say it. Your parents would think you’re mad. And then everything came together at the end of the fifties, the beginning of the sixties. The
New Wave France and Italy and the
16 millimeter
Eclair camera—the break away from the studios—because that camera gave you freedom. The French were using it, the Italians, the new American cinema in New York.

Yet, at the same time, we were made to feel ashamed of American films—it was snobbery. They were not very intelligent, maybe not completely worthless, but still the more important films were, of course, Bergman’s, and the New Italian Wave. By the time Fellini did
La Dolce Vita,
by the time he did
8½,
you had Bertolucci, Bellocchio, Olmi, Rosi. They seemed light-years ahead. So even though I loved the
westerns, and
musicals, there was something happening to me, something was seeping in from the Rossellini and the De Sica pictures.

But, a little later, right around the mid-to late sixties, the much maligned, or misunderstood,
auteur theory was being expressed. And
Andrew Sarris came out with the
American Cinema
book [1968]. And I just looked at that list:
John Ford,
Nicholas Ray,
Sam Fuller. I didn’t know anybody else knew about these films. There were in those days very few books on film. There was
Arthur Knight’s
The Liveliest Art,
or
Paul Rotha’s
Film Till Now,
the introduction to which already had an inferiority complex about English cinema. And I said, wait a second, I love
The Fallen Idol—

RS:
Just to go back a minute, when you were a kid, maybe you weren’t consciously thinking about it, but some instinctive thing was pushing you toward film—the drawings, the whole obsessive interest in just seeing movies and absorbing them.

MS:
But it was a dream. Or maybe not completely a dream, because I drew them out on paper. And then with a couple of friends I did a little
8 millimeter thing that wasn’t very good, a short film with my friends, two or three of us, which I shot on the roofs of Mott Street with white sheets, in black-and-white. I didn’t understand lighting. I understood some camera movement, I think. And I tried to make this little film.

RS:
At NYU?

MS:
No, no, before NYU. A friend of mine whose father had a little extra money had a little camera, 8 millimeter. We were sixteen years old, seventeen. But I learned some things about camera angles and fooled around. And, what I did was, in my mother and father’s apartment—it was a Saturday night, they went out—I invited all my friends and our girlfriends, and we wound up trying to sync music to the film with a tape recorder. The music was eclectic. It was
Django Reinhardt, Prokofiev’s
Alexander Nevsky,
Lonnie Donegan. It actually worked.

RS:
It was really an insane kid thing to do.

MS:
[
Laughs.
] But we did it!

I had, by that point, seen
Stanley Kubrick’s
Paths of Glory.
It gave me the sense of camera positions. And I’d also seen
Citizen Kane
many times. I was crazed about
Citizen Kane.
It was on
Million Dollar Movie,
so I saw it twice a night for a week, even though the
March of Time
sequence was edited out.

RS:
My God.

MS:
I saw
The Third Man
that way.
The Third Man
and
Citizen Kane
were the ones that actually made me try to direct—coupled with
John Cassavetes doing
Shadows,
which has an improvisatory style. His people seemed like people I kind of knew. It had a freedom to it.

RS:
The Third Man
is—I mean, talk about angles—

MS:
If
Carol Reed never made another movie
—The Third Man
is a beautiful film, and it still holds up.
The Departed
just reeks of
The Third Man.

RS:
Really?

MS:
Yeah. I mean, particularly the last sequence in the cemetery. I shot every angle of Vera [Farmiga, playing the estranged lover] leaving, going past
Matt Damon. We went crazy shooting every possible angle. But I knew that the only angle was the one that was similar to the one at the end of
The Third Man—
not exact, but
similar. And I shot that, too. And in the editing—well, I said, That’s it, there it is, just do it. It was so obviously my reference, anyway.

RS:
Well, in retrospect, I suppose.

MS:
But there was something about the excitement of the camera positions that I saw with Welles, even though I hadn’t seen
The Magnificent Ambersons
and I hadn’t seen
Touch of Evil
yet. The other thing was that when I would go to the Thalia, I saw everything
—Alexander Nevsky,
a lot of
Russian films. Also
Jacob Ben-Ami and
Edgar G. Ulmer’s
Green Fields
and
The Dybbuk,
Yiddish cinema. I saw whatever seemed interesting. Some of the
Mosfilm screen versions of obscure Chekhov plays were staggeringly dull, you had no idea what was happening, as opposed to Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Dovzhenko, who was the best. And even now, Dovzhenko is the one who holds up for me.

RS:
Same here.

MS:
Earth—

RS:
Earth
is a wonderful film.

MS:
And
Arsenal.
It’s just a remarkable movie. It’s just so moving. They sent me a print from Russia. I have it at the office. It’s beautiful. We have it in
35 millimeter, silent, you know. And it was sent in these old film cans, too. It looks like the cans were made in 1929. But what I caught in
Nevsky
[about a Russian prince defeating an invading army in a famous battle on the ice;
Sergei Eisenstein, 1938] was the editing. The battle scenes were amazing in terms of energy and visualization. And very often it was a mixture of silent cinema and sound cinema with a very, very crude-sounding sound track—Prokofiev on the track, very, very crudely recorded, so that the instruments sounded as if they were recorded in the twelfth century.

Catherine Scorsese’s father, Martin, in his
Italian cavalry uniform.

RS:
I once saw that with a live symphony orchestra playing, and I didn’t like it—too slick. The orchestra was too big; it dominated the screen.

MS:
I became fascinated by the editing, because it seems like sometimes time stops. It doesn’t flow. You’re aware of different positions of people in the frame, and it becomes about something else, about forms, in a way. Not that I could intellectualize it at the time, but that feeling was something I wanted to create. And the only way I could do it was to get the camera angles and cut them together.

RS:
Your first two features [
Who’s That Knocking
and
Mean Streets
] seem to me to be very, very camera conscious, though not in the way of a conventional Hollywood movie—I mean, a
Howard Hawks movie is camera unconscious.

MS:
Well, that’s the thing. Now you hit it, because the issue was this: If you look at neorealism, the camera is relaxed to a certain extent. It’s not there. It’s not up front.

RS:
Right.

MS:
Even in British cinema, except for Powell and Pressburger. The only Powell and Pressburger picture I had seen in its original form was
The Red Shoes
.

The thing was, the enjoyment of finding the angle, of seeing an image in your mind. I kind of was affected more by editing than by camera movement. And yet I loved camera movement when I became more, what’s the word, cognizant of it. At that point I was seeing
The Seventh Seal,
I was seeing other foreign films. But I had been used to the American classical cinema—the seamless
editing of
William Wyler,
John Ford.

RS:
Unfairly, I think, your name is very heavily associated with
gangster pictures in the public mind. But so far, in talking about your formative moviegoing years, you’ve scarcely mentioned gangster movies.

MS:
I saw
The Roaring Twenties
on television. But the older ones that I saw in the theater, when I was ten years old, were
Public Enemy
and
Little Caesar,
which my father took me to see.
Public Enemy
is the one that stays in my mind as probably the more truthful one.

RS:
Little Caesar
is not a good movie, if you go back and look at it.

MS:
No, no.

RS:
I mean, there are a couple of shots in it that are great.

MS:
A couple of shots are good, right. But
Public Enemy,
as I say, is probably the most truthful one. I sort of gathered that, I think, from my father’s reaction to it. I mean, as I’ve said, he was not in with those people, but they were around him and he had to behave a certain way with them. And that conditioned his response
to
Public Enemy—
the powerful man, full of hubris, attacked and then falling. The fallen hero.

But the brutality, the toughness, of the picture was something that never left me. Maybe the humor, too.
Goodfellas
kind of has both—in my mind, at least.

RS:
Stop me if I’ve told you this, but Bill Wellman told me this story. They were all at a preview—he,
Jack Warner,
Darryl Zanuck, and Mike Curtiz all went together. And it was a smash. I mean, nobody had actually ever seen a movie quite like it.

Anyway, it was over, and they were standing around outside or sitting in the manager’s office smoking cigars, and looking at the preview cards. And Jack Warner says, “Look, I don’t care. The ending in this movie makes me sick. You’ve got to cut it.” Zanuck says, “No. It’s the whole point of the movie, for God’s sake. I mean, you can’t cut that.” And Bill says, “Come on, it’s the best thing in the movie.” And Warner turns to Curtiz and he says, “You agree with me, Mike, right? It’s just too brutal for the audience.” And Mike Curtiz goes, “Yeah, Jack, I think you’re right.” And according to Wellman, Zanuck reached out and shoved the cigar down Curtiz’s throat.

MS:
It’s something you’d see in a 1930s movie. [
Laughs.
]

RS:
Yeah! And, then Bill said, “Zanuck was a tough little guy. Don’t ever forget that.” And then he adds, “God, that’s what was so much fun in those days!”

MS:
Oh, imagine those guys working together. Oh, my God.
William Wellman making three films a year. Yeah. What was that one,
Safe in Hell
?

RS:
That’s one of the strangest movies.

MS:
One of the craziest movies.

RS:
And it’s so sort of un-Bill, you know what I mean? But the opening, that scene where the girl is visibly being called up by her madam saying, “I’ve got a customer for you, let’s go.” She says, “I’ll be there in ten minutes.” Pre-Code picture, of course.

MS:
Yeah, it’s a tough movie. But they were doing those things, knocking them out. Boy, it must’ve been great.

RS:
There’s a little book that came out recently that Bill Wellman Jr. found, a bunch of letters that his father wrote back from the front in
World War I.

MS:
Wow.

RS:
It’s a wonderful little book. It’s about this kid from Brookline, Massachusetts, joining the
Lafayette Escadrille, going over there, the only American, who doesn’t
speak any French, and all the French fliers are all bonded up and they’re fine. And then every morning you strap yourself into this plane and you’re so cold, you can’t breathe. And you go up into the sky where you could easily be shot down in five minutes. They’re wonderful letters, because he’s keeping up a front for the people at home: “Oh, everything’s fine over here. It’d be great if you could send me a few more bucks.”