Conversations with Scorsese (24 page)

A very bad date: Travis seriously misjudges Betsy’s cinematic tastes. Cybill Shepherd was genuinely disturbed by the milieu to which the film exposed her, and Scorsese did his best to get these scenes done as quickly as he could.

RS:
Let me ask you about the character you play—this psychopathic guy talking about all the terrible things he’s going to do to his ex-wife. What about him? Is he the rock bottom, worse than De Niro?

MS:
I don’t know. All I know is that a good friend of mine was going to play the part, but he was shooting another film. It was the last week of shooting. I had gone through all the actors I knew in New York who I liked for that part. So Bob and I talked, and the next thing I know, I agreed to do it. I don’t know if he convinced me, or what. But I thought I could do it. And that’s it. What came out, came out. It was honest, open—and extremely unpleasant. Also, I think, funny at times, because he got me to do a couple of things. He’s very good at that. I learned all about acting there.

But it was very simple. We stopped the cab, and I say, “Put the flag down, stop here.” After the rehearsal, he turned to me and said, “Make me put the flag down. I’m not going to put it down unless you mean it.”

Okay. So then, the improv came. I realized, Wait a second, why is this guy not putting the flag down? I am the passenger. I have control of his life in the next fifteen, twenty minutes. That’s one of the crazy things about driving a cab in the city. A passenger gets in the cab; you don’t know where he’s going to ask you to go, or what’s going to happen. Passengers control your life.

Anyway, all the dialogue was there. And then we improvised some. But the improvs came from bouncing off Bob. It was the back of his head that did it all. I’d say something a little more outrageous and he still wouldn’t move. I was getting him crazy. Because what I was saying was going to instill in him the violence. That was the idea. So I kept thinking of more outrageous things to say, and the words came out, and that was it.

MARTIN SCORSESE:
I had a very chaotic style, on purpose, on
New York, New York.
And I found it didn’t work for me. [The film is both a tribute to old-fashioned MGM
musicals and a dark love story between a bandleader, Robert De Niro, and his singer,
Liza Minnelli.]

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
What do you mean by a chaotic process?

MS:
I improvised. I tried to improvise within scenes. I had a script, but I kept pushing the limits of the scenes. Then at a certain point, I was able to improvise a scene with the actors based on the script, video it, or audiotape it. A good example of it is in
Goodfellas—
that “You think I’m funny” scene with
Joe Pesci and
Ray Liotta that I referred to earlier. We did four or five takes. It was typed up, I had it transcribed, all the takes. Then I constructed from the takes a scene, and had them memorize that scene. That’s what we did in some of the better scenes in
New York, New York—
the ones I think worked.

Then I decided, let’s go further. Let’s not write down anything, let’s just improvise it—whatever feelings you may have, go there. And we literally started improvising ourselves out of the sets we were shooting on. I would say, “Well, what are
we going to do now? The other set isn’t ready.” I tried to have no idea at all what I was going to do, as much as possible, on the day of shooting—as opposed to having a fairly strong idea of what I was going to do. I was really testing the limits.

One long headache:
New York, New York
(1977) was a bold attempt to meld an improvisational acting style on the structure of an old-fashioned, big-studio musical, but it failed to fulfill either ambition.

RS:
That’s a weird picture to do it on. You’re on the street with
Harvey Keitel or De Niro, and interesting stuff happens, and you take advantage of it. But this is a big Hollywood studio picture—

MS:
I know! That was the idea! The convention of the Hollywood studio film meets, or crosses with, a new style, the Italian cinema, the French cinema, Cassavetes—Kazan, of course, going back to him.

RS:
So you just dumped that into a big formal setting. Maybe that’s why the movie disconcerted me.

MS:
I’m not happy with it. But the thing about it is that I still think the idea of mixing a modern foreground with an artificial background, like the old Hollywood, was a good idea. More than homage, it was a re-creation of the old Hollywood, even though I realized that the old Hollywood was gone. So maybe it was a way for a young kid who loved old Hollywood movies to try to hold on to it.

RS:
And you’ve got
Liza Minnelli in it—kind of a throwback personality.

MS:
She comes from a Hollywood family.

RS:
The picture looks somewhat like one of her father’s films.

MS:
Minnelli and
George Cukor, really. I really tried to combine the styles and see what would happen, holding on to the old Hollywood artifice that I loved. I didn’t want the old Hollywood to die. But of course we were the new Hollywood, so we were part of the demise. It was just the natural order of things.

But I didn’t know that until I got there, until I was working on the picture. But, yes, and other movies like
The Man I Love
and
Blues in the Night—
and add to that Cukor’s
A Star Is Born—
were certainly in my mind at the time. [Vincente]
Minnelli, that use of color. But primarily it was meant to be more drama with music, and not musical drama. That was the idea.

And, again, like
Age of Innocence,
it was meant to be an
homage to the old style of filmmaking, meaning the studio system and the studio look of the picture. But with the influences of the newer cinema that was around me.

RS:
It’s a contradiction in terms, and I think it does affect the movie in an adverse way.

MS:
It probably does. I was thinking lately of why I have a negative feeling about the picture. One thing is that I didn’t control the improvisations the way I normally do. The best example is the moment where she and he are rehearsing, and she counts down the band. He takes her aside and says, “Don’t ever do that. I count down the band.” That was done the same way we did other improvisations, but things got too loose. I didn’t guide them. And if I have a criticism of the film as a whole, it is that it is repetitious. I think I could have been more concise. Other people have said it’s tantamount to watching a car crash, or whatever, because of the two styles together. And I said, I don’t know if that’s necessarily a bad thing.

So I think, ultimately, the negative aspect is that I didn’t clarify or distill the drama between the two of them. It’s really about the love between two people who are extremely creative, and their jealousies, their competition.

RS:
But also, they are two people who don’t really belong together.

MS:
Right. They don’t belong together. I’m not defending the picture, but our generation may be focusing on problems that won’t mean anything in ten years’ time.

I also have problems with the picture because of my memory of the actual work, which was very, very hard for me at the time. I don’t like to think about it, so I don’t really see the picture that often.

RS:
When you were doing
New York, New York,
were people like
Irwin Winkler, the producer, or people at the studio aware of what you were trying to do? Or did they say, Oh, Marty wants to do a musical and that’ll be fine?

MS:
They were aware of it. They were hoping I could pull it off.

RS:
I don’t know if you recall this. I think it’s the first time I ever met you. You were in Los Angeles. Irwin ran the picture for me. And then we all went to dinner.

MS:
Didn’t I meet you before? Because I think we were in your apartment, to screen
His Girl Friday
with Jay Cocks one time in
16 millimeter.

RS:
Is that true? It could be.

MS:
In 1970.

RS:
Maybe a little later, because I was starting to work on
The Men Who Made the Movies
[a PBS television series, consisting of interviews with the great American directors of the classic age]. But what’s so vivid to me was that dinner in L.A. being so awkward because I didn’t know what to say to you about the movie, because I kind of liked it and didn’t like it.

MS:
Your first reaction to
Mean Streets
was also not good.
Alice
was good.
Taxi Driver
I don’t remember.

RS:
On that one, I wrote a review and it came back from the managing editor with a note scrawled on it: “You don’t like this movie as much as you say you do.” He was probably right. Now, of course, he would be wrong.

MS:
For
New York, New York,
Irwin was really good. He went along with this idea of combining the styles. He fought for it. He knew what I was trying to do. I was also trying to pull it from being too dark. I mean, in effect, we could’ve gone and made
The Man I Love.
[The 1947 film
noir in which
Ida Lupino’s nightclub singer falls in love with a former jazz great now on the skids.] By the way, the shot of New York City that’s used for the credits, that’s taken from the credits of
The Man I Love.
The bridge and everything.

I’m not defending the film, as I say, and I think if I have any negative thoughts about it, it has to do with more personal stuff. But now the film is looked at in a more forgiving context.

Marty attempting to turn his back on the production, something he could manage only momentarily. Its strain sickened him to the point where many of his friends feared for his life.

RS:
One of the things that struck me looking at it recently was the very opening sequence, where they meet. It just seemed to me it went on too long.

MS:
Actually, we had it longer.

RS:
I’m sure.

MS:
How many times could she say no.

RS:
Right. I had a feeling all along as I watched it that there was a thinner movie struggling to get out of it.

MS:
Exactly. That’s what I mean about being more specific—if I had practiced the craft better, the way I had in
Alice
and in
Mean Streets
with the actors. We were trying new things. But, still, the artifice of the old has truth to it.

RS:
You know, in my mind, I may be more committed to the artifice of the old than you are. I mean, they can go on making movies like that forever as far as I’m concerned.

MS:
Me, too [
laughs
]. Those are the only images I watch on TCM, the old images. If a newer film comes on, I turn it off. Even films from the seventies. I don’t watch them that much, you know. But even more so for you, because you saw more
films on that big screen in 1.33 aspect ratio than I did.

RS:
Well, naturally I did.

MS:
You’re a different generation. When we screened
Out of the Past
for Leo DiCaprio and
Mark Ruffalo when we were making
Shutter Island,
it was stunning. At the end of
Out of the Past,
I was wondering if these younger people would go for it. All of a sudden I hear applause behind me. It was Leo, and he said, “That was the coolest movie I’ve ever seen.” I think he was responding to the authority of these figures on a big screen. But you were saying you prefer the artifice.