Conversations with Scorsese (13 page)

MS:
When I saw that on television, after
On the Waterfront,
I realized that you could even do a
thriller, or a conventional
genre film, a studio film, within the trappings of a real location.

RS:
He also said to me, “I don’t think I could have made
Waterfront
if I hadn’t made
Panic in the Streets.
”

MS:
That’s right. But you’re also right about my direct line with Italian neorealism
—Paisan
and
The Bicycle Thief,
and
Shoeshine;
real people, non-actors, in real urban settings. There’s no doubt about it. They were more than movies to me. They especially hit me at that age of five or six years old, because it was so personal because of watching them with my family.

But remember, there was no school of the arts at NYU at the time. There was liberal arts. You did your first film, if you could, in your junior year. There was a course where you learned a little bit of technology—the basics of 16 millimeter. But mostly it was English courses and philosophy and French.

And, frankly, I was still involved, in real life, with the group that was in
Mean Streets.
The problem was that I could never survive in that group. I was a
semi-outsider there, because you had to be somebody who could handle yourself in situations …

RS:
You mean muscular situations.

MS:
Muscular. Also, you need a kind of bravado that you also should back up. If you’re going to use your mouth a certain way, look at somebody a certain way, you have to be strong enough to back it up.

RS:
Otherwise they’ll kill you.

MS:
They’ll kill you. And it was constant. At that time, you know, there were a number of kids who were killed. They were—taken out, I should say. It was shocking. And this priest,
Father Principe, made some sense. He made some sense about people and about living—about what it is to be a human being. And what it is to transcend. I don’t mean, you know, becoming beatific and experiencing stigmata. I’m talking about just basically living a decent life.

RS:
Well, the question I have is this: In
Kundun
it’s not just that the little boy is absorbed in his religion. I always see him as this kid up in the equivalent of—

MS:
The window overlooking the third floor front. [
Laughs.
]

RS:
—the window over the street. And he’s looking through his telescope. Or he’s grinding his little movie camera that will show him images of a world he’s never seen personally. And it’s one of the more touching qualities of that little boy that he wants to know more.

MS:
And learn about the world.

RS:
And so I, of course, immediately said there’s some analogy here between him and you.

MS:
I don’t know if I took that in consciously in any way. I mean, that’s from
Melissa Mathison’s script, from the story of the
Dalai Lama.

RS:
But it’s there.

MS:
It might very well be. But I was more interested in the young boy who was devoted to his spiritual life, as in
Europa ’
51,
when the woman becomes a person who tries to help people.

RS:
I’ve never seen that film.

MS:
It’s a fascinating film. [Roberto Rossellini’s 1951 film, starring
Ingrid Bergman, traces a careless, conventional woman’s conversion to sainthood.] I mean, I’m
going to sound like a public service announcement. But there is the danger that if you give to somebody, you might get a gun back, get shot at. But there is something about changing that basic dynamic between people. It depends on whether you’re able to give. I found it fascinating.

RS:
But getting back to NYU and that first, I guess you could call it, life-changing experience of formal film studies.

MS:
The first year at
Washington Square College, if you were thinking about majoring in communications or motion pictures, you had to take a history of motion pictures, radio, and television. And
Haig Manoogian was the one who taught that—once a week, two and a half hours—everything from the
Lumière brothers to
The Great Train Robbery
to
Variety, Greed,
then finally, maybe
Nights of Cabiria
or something else from Fellini. He was a very dynamic speaker, with a magnetic personality.

He’d just get up on that little stage on Waverley Place near the main building of Washington Square College and start talking, and he didn’t care if anybody was listening. He just kept going on and on and on and on. And younger people were coming in and he’d say, Okay, you don’t come back, you don’t come back, “because some of you kids think because we’re showing movies, it’s fun. Get out.”

RS:
That appealed to you?

MS:
Well, he was very serious about it. I’ll never forget, the second week, one of the young people remarked that there was no music with the silent films. Haig said, “What do you think this is, a show?”

RS:
What did Haig think it was?

MS:
He was teaching about film. He was showing different developments, he had so much to tell us, and it was only two and a half hours a week. And an hour and a half is a film. You only have at most an hour to set it in context—he showed one German expressionist film, and then had to talk about the whole movement in less than an hour.

You could see that he cared about this very much. And I felt the same way. So the passion that I had put into the church wound up being placed here, in film.

In Haig Manoogian’s classes in 1960—I always point this out—you only had maybe a little over forty years of cinema to catch up with. Which was very doable. Besides which, only a few countries had a lengthy film tradition: England, France, and Italy, that’s it. We didn’t see anything from Asia until Kurosawa came on in the 1950s.

RS:
It’s a point I’ve often made, too. I believe it was theoretically possible, in the period you’re talking about, for an individual to have an all-encompassing knowledge of world cinema. It’s impossible now.

MS:
Impossible. Especially
silent cinema—it’s a whole other language.

RS:
It’s not just that they’re movies that don’t talk. It’s an entirely different medium. It communicates in a different way. It has nothing to do with movies as we understand them today. But when, say, you show a little kid a Chaplin movie, she won’t care about how it’s different from what she’s used to. She just sees the funny man and the funny gags and it’s fine with her.

MS:
Right.

RS:
She hasn’t gotten so sophisticated that she realizes, Wait a minute, this is not a movie as I understand it.

MS:
She asks, “Will they be talking?” My daughter asks that now, and I say, “The Tramp, the Little Tramp, never spoke. But there will be talking by other people from time to time.” Especially in
Modern Times.

RS:
A little in
City Lights.

MS:
And she was fine with that.

RS:
Getting back to NYU, was it a big surprise to you that there were movements—or moments—like German expressionism in film history?

MS:
Yes, but not a complete one. I suspected it because of all the movies I’d seen as a kid, especially when I saw foreign
films on television, particularly the Italian films. And then I saw
Children of Paradise
in French with subtitles. And other films:
Beauty and the Beast,
for example, was on a great deal in the afternoons.

RS:
Forgive me for saying this, but
Haig Manoogian sounds kind of like a Jesuitical figure.

MS:
Maybe. But I think I may have put that on him. You know, he was Armenian and very, very passionate. He reminded me of the Greeks or, of course, the Italians. I met a lot of Greeks at
Washington Square College—Greeks, Jewish kids, and Armenians. It was a great time. It opened my mind completely, and separated me from where I had come from.

I felt really, really comfortable with it. And Haig was tough. He was a very stubborn man. He was really an amazing man. But that’s when it all clicked. And
don’t forget, by that point I had seen Cassavetes’s film
Shadows.
I realized that films were being made around New York that didn’t depend on the Hollywood studios.

RS:
Right.

MS:
I would’ve liked to have made a film for a Hollywood studio, but it was all changing. We had
Shadows,
and, as I said,
Shirley Clarke making her films, and
Jonas Mekas. And the
avant-garde cinema in general. That opened up a whole lot to me.

Marty at the NYU film school, circa 1963.

RS:
Did you go to
Cinema 16 [the leading film society devoted to
independent cinema at this time]?

MS:
I didn’t go to Cinema 16, because right at that time Cinema 16 changed in a way. But every little storefront was showing film. There was
Stan van der Beek or
Hilary Harris, or Ed Emshwiller’s films [all avant-gardists, making non-narrative films].
Amos Vogel [a leading theoretician and exponent of avant-garde cinema, and the founder of Cinema 16] would be there, and I became friendly with him, and we would just go see everything. It was an amazing time with cinema, the actual celluloid carrying the image—directly drawing on it or scratching on it, whatever.
Stan Brakhage’s pictures, too.

RS:
Oh, those are wonderful.

MS:
Yes. But I found that for me, I wanted to do narrative cinema—traditional narrative cinema. And so, if anything, I was influenced by
Italian films and
English films, certainly. And when the
New Wave started in France, you couldn’t help but be influenced by it if you were twenty, twenty-five years old—Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, Chabrol, all of them.

RS:
But aside from that little technical course you mentioned, NYU didn’t offer—at least in your first years—much in the way of hands-on
filmmaking instruction?

MS:
No. But as
Orson Welles said, You can learn everything you need to know about a movie camera and a movie studio in about four hours.

RS:
I’ve read that often. But, as you know, a lot of mystery surrounds the craft of directing.

MS:
Well, what you know is, basically, This is the lens. This is a longer one, this is a shorter one. A shorter one makes it wider. If you get too close with this, you’re going to have a kind of cartoon effect. But if you lean it against the wall and you go fast with it, it feels like the wall is going faster and therefore you have the corridor shots in all the Welles pictures. Welles says in a
documentary I saw recently, “If I used a 40 millimeter lens at this point, and I aimed the camera that way, I knew what the effect would be.” That much I knew, too. And somebody said it wouldn’t work, and I said, I knew it would work. I didn’t even know what a 40 is except that it’s 10 millimeters less than the normal lens, the 50. I rarely use it. I use usually a 32 or something wider. I don’t like long lenses, which I picked up on from the Polish films—Wajda and Polanski.

RS:
It seems to me directors break down into two categories. On the one hand would be Preminger, who almost never used a close-up and didn’t edit a lot. Then there are the other directors, who love to cut.

MS:
I really like cutting. I think a lot of that has to do with seeing Eisenstein’s
Potemkin
in Haig’s class. I was fascinated by the editing. And it didn’t need sound. It told a story, although Pudovkin [a contemporary of Eisenstein’s in the Russian cinema of the 1920s] became very heavy-handed, especially in
Mother.
But you had to understand the audience that it was being made for, too. Many of them didn’t even have electric light; they hadn’t seen a movie or heard a voice on the
radio.

So I became interested in the effect that these juxtapositions of images created. That sort of clashed with the classical style from Hollywood films, also with some Italian films from the
neorealist period. But the choice of lens feeds into that. And the enjoyment of choosing the lens. You know, if you use too wide a lens it draws too much attention to the camera angle, and it takes you out of the movie to a certain extent. There are a lot of wonderful movies that use long lenses. Kurosawa uses long lenses. But I always feel long lenses are very indefinite. I couldn’t define the actors the way I wanted to. I felt that they were like floating, dreamlike images, and I preferred to have something harder and crisper.