Conversations with Scorsese (37 page)

RS:
It seems to me a beautifully judged and measured film. I seem to recall that its release was somewhat delayed.

MS:
I’ll never forget it. We finished shooting in May, June 1992, around then. The studio would like to have gotten it for Christmas. But it was a tricky film. The
energy was held back, the emotion was underlying. And then my father died during that period.

RS:
Right.

MS:
It was too held back. The question was, Did expressive camera moves break the form of the traditional costume movie? We did some things which people considered inappropriate for that type of story, as if that type of story should be told only in one way. We did a two-hour-and-forty-minute cut of it. The studio said the picture was going to come out the following year. An article came out in the papers,
Variety
or somewhere, explaining that the film was being postponed; there wasn’t anything wrong with the film, it said, it was just that the director has an “obsessive attention to detail.” Excuse me.

RS:
Every worthwhile director has that obsession.

MS:
I usually take things to the reductio ad absurdum. If I’m not complaining, then I’m not thinking it through.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
When you got to
Casino,
you said, you’d gone as far as you thought you could go with just plain brutality—the way people kick people around, beat them up, blow them up. It’s relatively speaking a late
gangster movie. I have no idea about the origins of that project or why you feel it exceeded what you’d previously done in the realm of brutality—especially when they’re burying poor old Joe alive out in the desert.

MARTIN SCORSESE:
I know, it’s awful. It’s done by his friends. And this is something that is so disturbing.

RS:
This theme of yours of betrayal, right?

MS:
Yes, yes. And the closest people turn on him. Now, he did behave badly.

RS:
Yes.

MS:
And he abused his power. And he was a killer. But it’s the world he’s in. There is no other world. And you have to stop him from breathing. It’s an extraordinary thing how people could do that. But the thing is the calculation. You have to trick him. Then you have to follow through, you have to do whatever you’re
doing, whatever violence you’re committing—until he stops moving and breathing. And did he, as a human being, deserve that from his closest friends? From his closest collaborators and family members almost. When I shot the scene, I shot it very straightforward, very flat. And I figured that’s the final curtain in that world. That’s it. That is my final statement.

The cornfield beating of
Joe Pesci in 1995’s
Casino,
a film about the Mafia’s rise to control of Las Vegas and the decline of Ace Rothstein, played by Robert De Niro, who masterminded it.

RS:
Does that scene at all analogize to the scene in
Goodfellas
where they’ve got the guy in the trunk? I mean, you know, he’s suffocating before they kill him.

MS:
I think it’s different—I mean, murder is murder. But the murder of Billy Batts in
Goodfellas
is out of hotheadedness.

RS:
Right. They’re like young heedless guys—

MS:
Yeah, drinking. They’re like barbarians at the gates. I don’t think they planned on doing it. They knew they were gonna beat him up. They knew they were gonna commit an act of punishment on him. But the point is that it’s like many murders, it happens moment by moment. Unpremeditated murder usually happens where it’s almost inadvertent, where you take one step and the other person takes another, and then you have to keep going.

RS:
I see what you mean.

MS:
You have to keep going. The scene doesn’t start that way. The scene doesn’t say, I’m gonna kill you. No. They’re talking and the next thing you know, the gun is around. And then they become angry and passion takes over. But in
Casino,
it’s planned.

RS:
Just tell me, how did
Casino
come to you? How did you get involved?

MS:
That was kind of a commission. I had a deal at Universal. We did
Cape Fear
there and they wanted another film.
Tom Pollock and
Casey Silver were there. And
Nick Pileggi brought this newspaper article to me about the car blowing up with Lefty Rosenthal in it. [Rosenthal was the brains behind converting Las Vegas
from a pure gambling center to a kind of family playground.] And the revelation of the story of the triangle between Rosenthal, Ginger (his wife), and Nicky, Lefty’s best friend. In any event, that story seemed so vivid—two friends, one was the brains, one was the muscle. And sometimes the brains would use other people’s muscle. And sometimes the muscle also had brains. But primarily they controlled this empire for the Mob; so it’s a story of empire. And the story of, again, the seeds of destruction in our own selves. And the poor woman who’s stuck in the middle. In fact, quite honestly, everybody who was there in Vegas when we were doing the film liked the Nicky character a lot. They didn’t like the Ace character at all.

RS:
Why didn’t they like Lefty?

MS:
They just felt he was cold, tough, and the feeling was that if he had to use violence, he did it through other people. Whereas Nicky was, you might say, up front, hands-on. And the cops, the policemen, who were part of that task force that was supposedly set to get Tony and all his men in Vegas, the kindest words they had were for the woman.

Scorsese and
Sharon Stone, as Ginger, the tragically touching showgirl of
Casino.

RS:
Really?

MS:
They said that she was the one who got the worst of it all. They treated her badly.

RS:
Of course, she becomes this drunk and—

MS:
Oh, horrible. And she died exactly that way in the motel hallway.

RS:
Is that so?

MS:
Yeah. And that night, I remember
Sharon Stone was trembling. She felt she had to channel the woman. And there were so many people who knew her and they were all around us. They were acting in the film. It was kind of strange. I mean, strange in a good way. It worked on her beautifully. And it was quite something—you can’t imagine some of the stuff that went on. We just scratched the surface, and it’s going on now, too.

RS:
I thought the Mob was gone from Vegas.

MS:
It’s just in another place.

RS:
That’s America’s family playground.

MS:
It’s America’s family playground. Yes. What does that say about our values? So the end of the picture is really about us and about our values—that’s what I thought. The last statement on that way of life and that world is the killing in the cornfield.

RS:
I kept thinking—and I reran it just a few weeks ago—I kept wondering: Did you think at all about
The Godfather
? Because, you know, in this film, whenever they go back to the Mob, they’re sitting around in some garage.

MS:
That’s where the real stuff went on, you see.

RS:
Yeah, right. And I’m really laughing at it, because here are these powerful guys and they’re sitting around—

MS:
This dirty place with the oil, the smell of the oil and the grease.

RS:
Yes, and eating really low-level Italian subs.

MS:
I know.

RS:
And I was thinking, this is Marty making a little comment on the Corleones, who have fancy homes and all that …

MS:
I always said, I just knew the person on the street corner who had just robbed a carton of cigarettes and was selling them to somebody else. I can never imagine the Corleones, I couldn’t even imagine the Sopranos living in a big house in New Jersey. I only saw a few of the shows, and it’s not the world that I knew.

RS:
Do you think these guys, like back when you were a kid on Elizabeth Street, do you think they went home from their social club to wonderful houses like the Corleones’?

MS:
No, they lived in apartments in the tenements. There were a few who had nicely appointed apartments. It was decent, it was nice, especially if they had families. But basically, I got to tell you, it was very plain.

RS:
Well, that’s interesting. The American fantasy is that these guys lived these big lives …

MS:
Even if they lived in those tiny apartments, they were the bosses of the neighborhood. If there was a problem, they’d take care of it. They had a florist shop. Somebody had a butcher shop. So they were part of the family in a way. So it wasn’t that they were the men on the hill. It wasn’t like they were separate from us. They were all mixed in together. There was one who had a house out in New Jersey, and I was friends with his son. And they would take us out there every now and then. It was like an excursion.

RS:
A little outing in New Jersey.

MS:
That was a big deal. And they’d put us in this Chrysler Imperial. It was amazing, with the biggest fins you could imagine. And that was the year that the song “Volare” was out. You heard it everywhere. It was so great to go to the country and to be in a swimming pool just for a day. And all these men were in this house talking, sitting at tables, making phone calls, and, you know, lots of fights.

By the way, they’re dead now. They were killed two years, maybe four years, five years, later, those people I’m talking about. They lived in the neighborhood, but they were killed. The son was killed first—he was twenty-two or twenty-three years old.

RS:
Let me ask this, kind of drifting back to
Casino.
It seems to me that its uniqueness in your body of work is that it’s the closest you come to very high-level criminality.

MS:
But that’s about it, I can’t go any further. That’s about as high as I could go, because first of all I’m not that interested in that highest level. It might be more interesting to do a film about the senators’ families in ancient Rome right at the
decline of the republic before
Julius Caesar, and the machinations of which family worked against the other family causing the death of Caesar. They go into a civil war, and they wind up with an empire. They wind up with an emperor. Okay. But it’s interesting why the republic fell apart. And it has to do with Renaissance politics then. But I’m more interested in the incremental moves. It’s a wonderful thing when Lefty keeps his trousers in the closet, because he doesn’t want to ruin the crease. Person comes in, he puts on his pants. That’s no problem. But that little detail reflects something much bigger that could be very damaging to him. The small moves are what I’m interested in. And the personal relationships.
The Godfather
I never thought of.

RS:
I think it’s a great movie.

MS:
I do, too.