Conversations with Scorsese (11 page)

MS:
I admire that. I really do.

RS:
Well, Bill was, of course, a sensational guy.

MS:
A film I like a lot of his that is being shown recently is
Island in the Sky.

RS:
It’s strangely static, that movie. I mean, they’re up there in the Arctic, they crash and they sit there.

MS:
But there’s something very mystical about it—especially the fellow who goes out and dies. He thinks he’s miles away from the plane, and he dies right by the plane. It’s very moving. I watched it again last week on television. Not a great one, but something unique.

RS:
Well, I think his great period was the early 1930s when he was at
Warner Bros.

MS:
I have one of these films here called
Other Men’s Women
I’d like to look at.

RS:
Oh, that’s a wonderful picture. And
Heroes for Sale
is great.
Wild Boys of the Road
is great.

MS:
Yeah.

RS:
And
Central Airport.

MS:
Oh, really? I haven’t seen that.

RS:
It’s very minor, but a real pre-Code-er. You know, she goes to her room, he goes to his room. There’s a door between them and, you know, he walks in and they just start screwing—no preliminaries, no sweet talk. And they’re not married. But it’s a good little story—you know, the cashiered-flier-seeking-redemption story.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
We’ve talked very little about the director I know was your favorite:
John Ford.

MARTIN SCORSESE:
When I was a kid I liked him because of the cavalry films, and
The Quiet Man
was very funny to us when we saw it as eleven-year-olds, twelve-year-olds. The look of the original Techni
color of that film is magical. But
The Searchers
was the key one, because of the nature of
John Wayne in that. And the look of it. I saw it in
VistaVision. What happened was that I realized there was one way of making a picture, which was the classical cinema. I didn’t call it classical at the time. And then there were these foreign films that just seemed to erupt, almost like comics in their radical angles and their changes from frame to frame.

Three of us went to see it at the age of thirteen. We graduated from St. Patrick’s. Then we went off to dinner that night at
Toffenetti’s, off
Times Square, then on to the old
Criterion Theater. We walked in in the middle, you know. And there it was up on the screen.

And we never stopped talking about the picture, because of the complexity of Wayne’s character—his anger, his longing for his brother’s wife, his obsessions. We didn’t quite understand it, but we went with it. And then it came on television,
and we saw it in black-and-white constantly. And we’d be having something to drink in a bar on Hudson Street, and Joe would say, “Did you notice that scene where John Wayne is standing there and
Ward Bond has just talked to him, and he looks over in the doorway and he sees his sister-in-law, and she’s folding his coat? I think there’s something between the sister-in-law and him.” I said, “I didn’t notice—I’ll take a look at it again.” And so the film got deeper and deeper and deeper.

Marty, in cap and gown, graduating from junior high school at
St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral.

RS:
I think Ford was so often careless, and so often sold out to the lowest popular tastes.

MS:
I have a problem with
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
I saw it on the giant screen at the
Capitol Theater the second day after it opened. And I was taken aback by it, because there was a lack of authenticity in it.

RS:
There are a number of soundstage westerns. But that’s almost the worst of them in that way.

MS:
But it’s got great things in it, great things.

RS:
It’s a pretty good story. But Jimmy Stewart is playing a guy maybe thirty years younger than his real age.

MS:
Yeah, it’s a great story. I guess it’s a great film. I just missed it, you know.

RS:
I don’t think it’s a great film. But I do agree with you that of the three cavalry westerns,
Fort Apache
is the best.

MS:
I think it is, yeah.

RS:
I don’t know why it is. Maybe it’s because of Henry Fonda.

MS:
I agree. It’s that Colonel Thursday—

RS:
It’s an amazingly good performance by him. And it’s not Fonda as we had known him before. I mean, he’s this ramrod hard-ass—

MS:
And he brings down total destruction on everybody. And yet there’s something about him. You care about him, particularly in the scene where he has to dance with the, you know—

RS:
The sergeant’s wife? At the noncommissioned officers’ ball. It’s a brilliantly staged scene.

MS:
Watch the editing in that scene and watch when he moves the camera positions as the people line up. First they come out in twos and then fours—and eventually they’re all marching forward together. It’s just dynamic. It’s like the dancing scene in
My Darling Clementine,
which is quite beautiful.

RS:
Right. Beautiful.

MS:
And this is very carefully put together. But the greatest scene is his conference with Geronimo, where he has the nerve to open up that little camp stool and sit down.

RS:
And he’s wearing that stupid thing on his head [a kepi like those worn by the Foreign Legion in Africa].

MS:
Yes, that French Foreign Legion thing. And Ford has
Pedro Armendáriz in the middle. Watch the intercutting of that. It’s just wonderful.

RS:
Oh, that’s beautifully shot, that sequence.

MS:
He actually has to translate and repeat what he says to Geronimo. And ruin everything. I always find stories about pride taking a fall so interesting.

RS:
Oh, absolutely.

MS:
Like the
Howard Hughes thing, you know. So Colonel Thursday is classic.

RS:
But aside from those scenes, what I really hate in John Ford movies are those Irish guys going down to the barracks and singing all their stupid ballads.

MS:
Rio Grande.

RS:
But there’s one moment like that in
Fort Apache:
they’re bawling those ballads.

MS:
Oh, they are? I mean, I may have blocked it out.

RS:
Yes, you did. Because I did, too. Until I saw it again recently. But
The Searchers
is an infuriating movie to me.

MS:
Why?

RS:
Because it has greatness, and it has banality.

MS:
It has problems in it.

RS:
It’s almost like, Oh, Jack, you’re doing it, it’s so great, and then—

MS:
Then he has that comedy, and—

RS:
And then the fat, horny Indian woman.

MS:
I know, that’s a problem.

RS:
I mean, it is so close to being a true masterpiece.

MS:
It really is. But I loved it as my favorite film, because, among other things, the scenery in that film is a character.

RS:
Oh, absolutely.

MS:
It’s not just scenery. If you see it on a small screen, it’s okay, but on that giant
VistaVision screen—

RS:
But those people—how much corn are they going to get out of that land, do you really think?

MS:
Nothing.

RS:
You couldn’t grow a radish out there!

MS:
Desert, red dirt, you know. And then there was a period of time where I realized, too, that the comedy may have been strained.

RS:
And the romance—Vera Miles waiting and waiting and waiting for
Jeffrey Hunter back home.

MS:
But when I saw it again a year and a half, two years ago, I got involved with it again. And the archness of the humor actually wasn’t as arch as I remembered it. I watched their faces. I saw Jeffrey Hunter’s eyes. He really was so earnest, you know. I still have some problems with it in some areas. But for some reason, seeing it on a big screen in the right atmosphere, it seemed to carry itself along in a way. Even the Indian woman has her moments; when he mentions the name Scar, the music score kicks in, and she gets upset. And that changes everything. You actually see it in her eyes and her face. I’m just saying, Give it another chance, if you can ever see it on a big screen.

RS:
It comes up in your very first film, doesn’t it? I mean, Harvey Keitel is riding on the Staten Island ferry and trying to pick up this girl, and they’re talking about
The Searchers.

MS:
Oh, yeah, because he’s looking at the picture in the paper of
The Searchers.
We just didn’t know what else for him to talk about.

RS:
I guess that was generational. I know
Steven Spielberg loves it.

MS:
Steven grew up the opposite of where I grew up, and he felt that way about it.
John Milius, of course,
Paul Schrader—both very much the opposite of Spielberg and me.

RS:
You were all at the right age for a movie to take you over.

MS:
Thirteen, fourteen years old. That was it.

RS:
It happens to everyone at that age—“the impressionable years,” I call them. You can never get those movies out of your head.

MS:
I remember Leo DiCaprio mentioning to me that
Fight Club
was like that to his generation.

RS:
I never much cared for it.

MS:
He’s a very interesting guy, David Fincher [director also of
Seven, Panic Room, Zodiac
]. I like his pictures. But you’re right about certain pictures hitting you at a certain age. There’s no way to argue about them.

RS:
No, you can’t argue those movies.

MS:
It’s like you’re stuck. And that’s what was so interesting with
Lindsay Anderson’s take on Ford for so many years. I got to know him a little bit in the early seventies. And it was so clear that he rejected
The Searchers,
while it was accepted by us.

What hit us at the age of thirteen or fourteen was Wayne’s character. I mean, he reflected America. We couldn’t articulate it, but that was the tone of everything around us—the
Cold War, the
racism, all that was reflected in his face.

RS:
Well, that’s a good point I hadn’t actually thought of. In the fifties we knew it was wrong—the racism—and yet we practiced it. And that’s in that movie.

MS:
And don’t forget, he was a Confederate, too. Pro-
slavery. He was the flawed, crazed hero of the fifties. I guess coming out of the Kazan films and coming out of Preminger’s and
Stanley Kramer’s pictures, it was natural for us to accept that kind of character.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
I know you think highly of
Warner Bros.’ role in American movie history, and
The Searchers
was a Warner film. Did that have any influence on your opinion of the film?

MARTIN SCORSESE:
No, I don’t think so. But Warners is still a great studio.

RS:
Oh, it’s the greatest.

MS:
I love that
Mean Streets
was bought by Warner Bros. And then
Alice
was done there. And
Goodfellas
was made there.
The Departed
was made there, in the tradition of Wellman’s
Public Enemy.