Conversations with Scorsese (2 page)

And some sort of relationship began to develop between us. It’s not too much to say that he became my favorite talking head, because his knowledge was so boundless and expressed with such riveting passion. We always exceeded the bounds of our ostensible subject (and the planned length of our talks). Everyone knows from Marty’s many appearances on television and on DVDs that he is an explosive, free-associational talker about movies. But what I was at first unprepared for was his self-deprecating humor. He’s onto himself. He knows he’s an obsessive. He knows that he’s quite capable of driving people crazy with his attention to minute details, not just about the making of his own movies, but about everyone else’s movies as well. Off camera (and sometimes on), he was always shaking his head over his behavior—not that he shows the least sign of self-reformation. Eventually, these sessions led to my making, in 2004, a film,
Scorsese on Scorsese
, about his career, which in turn led to the series of conversations that comprise this book.

Most of these talks took place in an apartment at the Waldorf Towers in New York, where Marty and his family were living while a house he had purchased was being renovated. We would start in at eight or nine at night and I would stagger out around 1 a.m., exhausted and exhilarated by our exchanges, very much needing the long walk back to my hotel, through the deserted midtown streets, to decompress.

But even if Marty’s days had not been filled with preproduction chores on
Shutter Island
, work on his documentaries and on film preservation, I suspect we would still have chosen to meet in the deeper reaches of the evenings. For he’s a
night bird—always has been; his boyhood career as an altar boy was cut short by his struggle to get up for the 7 a.m. mass.

No one can explain someone’s else’s circadian rhythms and I’m not going to try. But as the day’s activities faded from his mind, as the city far below us fell into fitful sleep, Marty’s memories grew more vivid and freewheeling, including everything from his almost demonic early moviegoing to his grapplings with faith and family matters to his childish attempts to create movielike narratives through drawings to his embrace of professional moviemaking even before he graduated from what would become NYU’s film school. Eventually, of course, we talked in some detail about all the movies he has made in the years since.

Every time we met, we vowed to try to keep our conversations on a rough chronological track. Every time we failed to do so. He’s as breathless and excitable off camera as he is on. At some point every night we would just give up on chronology and go with whatever flow had arisen out of our exchanges. These resulted in quite amazing transcripts—full of repetitions and false starts, to be sure, but also full of fascinating autobiography and astonishing detail about the choices he has made over the course of a career that now extends well over forty years. These were never easy to edit, but they were never tiresome, either.

Like virtually every good director I’ve ever known, Marty is not entirely comfortable at explaining his motives, why he may opt for one project over another— or, for that matter, one shot or edit over another. Movie directors are as instinctive as any other kind of artist except that they have to marshal and control far more numerous and often more recalcitrant collaborators than someone working alone—a writer or painter, say. There is, as well, something hypnotic and addictive in the filmmaking process, something that drives its practitioners to immerse themselves in the work to the exclusion of all else. And it’s quite a long process. Preproduction, production, and postproduction cannot take less than six months. Sometimes, as in the case of a difficult project like
The Last Temptation of Christ
or
Gangs of New York
, it can take years, decades. You have no choice but to embrace this addiction—there is no twelve-step program that can cure you—else your picture will fail and eventually your career will fail as well.

You get the sense, when you’re around someone like Marty, that directors are not fully alive unless they give themselves over entirely to the proffered obsession. It may even work the other way. I sometimes think the reason directors occasionally embark on movies that are not up to their highest standards is that the need to obliterate themselves in a project also obliterates commonsense caution. Putting that point less melodramatically, it may, in Marty’s case, account for the fact that he meticulously draws out on paper every shot in his movies before going on set to make them. It’s not quite actually shooting the thing, but it is as close as he can
come to that limbolike state that occurs while he is impatiently awaiting his start date.

This is also a reversionary state. It is exactly what he did when he was a kid, not even consciously knowing that he wanted to become a director: drawing his little movies on sketch pads and showing them perhaps to a single friend. I suppose, indeed, that the most important thing I learned about Marty—or at least had powerfully reinforced—during the course of these conversations was the power that his past exerts on his work. I’m not just talking about his drawings. Or about the films like
Mean Streets
or
Who’s That Knocking at My Door
, which so clearly contain autobiographical elements. I’m talking, for example, about the way violence presents itself in his films. It appears so suddenly. There is rarely much buildup to it, no hint of gathering menace. Some guys will be kidding around in a bar or on a street corner and suddenly, bam, someone is hurt. Or dead. That’s how Marty observed violence when he was a kid. That’s the way he presents it as a grown-up. His deadly confrontations are only rarely blood-drenched. They are more often over before we sense them starting. He wants us to be as shocked—and as wary— as he once was. It is the inbred signature of his sensibility.

I’m also talking about what I’m afraid I have to call his spirituality. In the pages that follow the reader will find much about Marty’s struggles with questions of faith and belief when he was growing up. One thing people with only the most superficial knowledge of Marty’s personal history know is that he “almost” became a priest. That is not true; to his chagrin, he found that he could take only the briefest steps along that path. For some time he counted it as a major life failure (though he seems no longer to feel that). It has also led some people to see his passion for film as a substitute for formal religious belief, which is far too easy an explanation for this career. But just as the kind of violence he observed as a kid is present in his movies, so are his youthful yearnings for belief. It’s obvious, of course, in pictures like
Kundun
. But there are hints of those aspirations, a longing for some kind of transcendence, or, at the least, relief from reality’s harsher limits, in so many of his secular films. It’s obvious in such early films as
Mean Streets
, less so in films like
The King of Comedy, Goodfellas
, and
The Age of Innocence
. But in one form or another, in small ways and large, his concern with matters of belief is nearly always present in his work.

So is his concern with betrayal. The picture for which he won his too-long-delayed Academy Award,
The Departed
, is a kind of festival of double-dealing, with
Matt Damon’s and Leo DiCaprio’s characters acting as spies—one in the cops’ camp, one in the criminals’—and a rich variety of subsidiary characters joining in the deadly game the film portrays. Something similar occurs in
Goodfellas
. In a film as relatively minor, yet darkly farcical, as
After Hours
, a square young
uptown man ventures into downtown New York persuaded that he’s going to get laid by an attractive pickup he’s met in a coffee shop; he nearly gets killed by her and her self-absorbed and heedless friends. And when you come to something like
Raging Bull
,
Jake LaMotta’s suspicion that his wife may be betraying him—she is not—drives much of the story, and a large portion of its violence.

I don’t believe that Marty is himself particularly paranoid—though he does have mirrors up in the “Video Village” from which he operates on his sets and in his editing room, so that no one can catch him unawares, from behind his back. And he does speak of being taught, as a kid, not to react to the suspicious behavior that went on around him. Eyes front (and blank), lips sealed—that’s how he passed many of his years in
Little Italy. Where he grew up, almost all the deadly behavior he observed stemmed from someone betraying or attempting to betray someone else, whether the business at hand was criminal, familial, or something as simple as an attraction to a pretty girl (see his
first feature,
Who’s That Knocking at My Door
, which seems to me underappreciated, especially by Marty himself).

Finally, there is this irony to contemplate: Marty is obliged to make his living in an “industry” controlled by people who have always wanted to impose rationality on their enterprise, have always tried to tame its wild children. Or ostracize them. Or break them. The idea that making movies at the highest level can ever be a fully reasonable activity has always struck me as laughable. But forget that. The point I am making is that the studio and the filmmaker have different motives and that the relationship between them is bound to be mistrustful, therefore rife with the possibility of—yes—betrayals. There’s this cliché about Hollywood— “It’s high school with money.” But you have to wonder: What if it’s actually Little Italy without gunplay?

If that’s the case, it becomes possible to imagine that what Marty observed and learned in his formative years was the best possible preparation for the career he later took up. Which, in turn, is a way of saying that in a fairly deep sense he is an autobiographer—not so much an anecdotal one, but one of his inner life, his yearnings, his feelings, his fears in his formative years. Nor is that impulse limited to his portrayals of criminal life. To give just one example that came up in the course of our talks, he observed that the codes of conduct enforced by New York’s upper classes on Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska in
The Age of Innocence
are as harsh and unforgiving as any administered by the modern-day Mafia.

His is not the only way to make good movies. There is much to be said for the show of calmness in a line of work where the pretense that reason rules may be the nuttiest idea of all. But I’m here to tell you, there’s also much to be said for sitting up half the night listening to the spiraling enthusiasms—and the occasionally
drowned dreams—of a man who cannot help but make the kind of commitment Marty has made to every aspect of filmmaking.

In a sense, Marty’s passion is his saving grace. It is so intense that when you’re in its presence you have only two choices: embrace it or flee it. The former course is, for me, at least, infinitely more rewarding. You can learn so much from him—not just about old movies you really ought to see, or re-examine more thoughtfully, and not just about how to achieve all kinds of potent movie effects (how to stage a scene or fire up an actor or find a solution to a technical problem). Somehow, as I’ve grown closer to Marty in recent years, that famous formulation of
Henry James’s keeps tugging at my mind: “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

It would be nice someday to apply that grandiose sentiment to a mere moviemaker without feeling a twinge of embarrassment. But there it is—it fits this case. And the case continually redeems himself by knowing what an absurd figure he can sometimes cut. He is also, in my experience, a courtly man—impeccably dressed in his European suits, a generous host, a man widely read in Greek and Roman history (some of those sketch movies he made as a child were epics about the classic age), and in the writings of men and women who share his need to lift himself out of the quotidian, to find something more than the brute reality of everyday life.

“I’m not an animal,”
Jake LaMotta murmurs to himself when he finally touches bottom in a jail cell. And he is not the only such figure in Marty’s films. They may be full of “animals,” but for the most part these are balanced by figures who, following dim and enigmatic instinct, aspire to transcend their ignorance and their circumstances, to find some touch of grace in their grim and circumscribed lives. But there never has been and there never will be “a triumph of the human spirit” in a Scorsese film. He’s too intelligent for that. And too sternly moralistic. What I respond to most in his films is not just that they are unsettling, but that they generally remain unsettled. His stories reach their firm narrative conclusions, but they remain open-ended. You are always left wondering what might happen next to his survivors. And thinking that probably their fates will not be entirely contented ones.

To consistently achieve that effect, especially in a society that, at least in its entertainments, is devoted to optimism, to the unambiguously happy ending, is no small matter—the onetime altar boy as existentialist. But you get all that, I’m sure. It remains for me to say only that I feel privileged that he has allowed me to hear and record his reflections on his long and still unfinished journey. It has been a pleasure, sir.

—R.S., July 2010

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
Let’s begin with the basics: Where and when were you born?

MARTIN SCORSESE:
I was born in 1942 in Corona,
Queens. My parents had moved there earlier from the Lower East Side. The idea was to leave the old neighborhood, for them to better themselves, as they used to say. I loved Corona. We lived in a two-family house. There was a little yard in the back, a little tree. You could go to a park—I saw the trees, I saw something. But then my father got into big trouble with the landlord, and we had to move back to Elizabeth Street, in Manhattan, which was, in a sense, a humiliation—back literally into the same two and a half rooms where he was born, to live with my grandparents, until we found rooms down the block at 253 Elizabeth Street.