Conversations with Scorsese (38 page)

RS:
But it’s a total fantasy.

MS:
It is, yes.

RS:
I mean,
Mario Puzo just made all that stuff up. I don’t think it’s observed reality on his part.

MS:
But does great art have to be reality? No.

RS:
So when we’re talking of a movie like
Casino,
I think you’re saying that some part of you just doesn’t want to go further up the hierarchical ladder. I mean, there’s something in the relationships at a lower level of criminality than Don Corleone that is more interesting to you.

MS:
It is more interesting because I think ultimately it’s the same mind, only the decisions are smarter. The decisions are better informed at the top.

But I’m also interested when they make the wrong decision, the wrong alliance. They’re like
Cicero in the Roman republic when everything did fall apart, how he had to take as allies his enemies. And he wound up having to kill himself ultimately. He was a great man, yet he made the wrong move. And it’s very interesting, because it’s life and death.

RS:
So did you hesitate at all on
Casino
? Did you think, This is kind of out of my familiar range?

MS:
Vegas, no. That was okay—the brashness of it. People enjoy it, fine. I just don’t enjoy it myself. I don’t really gamble that way. I’m not very good at it.

RS:
You gamble in other ways.

MS:
Right.

RS:
I’ve often said to people, What does it mean to me to go to a slot machine? My whole life is a slot machine.

MS:
Are you kidding? Every minute I open that door or pick up that phone. And on top of that, I’ve got a family now and I’m getting older. It’s hard, every gamble you take.

Tilling the field: Marty directs the cornfield scene. He says it is the most brutal sequence he’s ever made and believes he will never make anything like it again.

RS:
It’s absolutely true.

MS:
Okay, it’s all right. We can do it. But the interesting thing was the blast of Vegas, the idea of Vegas, especially in the seventies. In the fifties and sixties, Vegas was for people who liked to gamble. But later you have Sinatra and the Rat Pack and all. And it gains a swagger: Listen, you don’t like it, don’t come here. You can’t take the heat, get out. Fine.

But by the seventies, it went further, and a lot of it was due to Lefty Rosenthal. He brought in
Siegfried and Roy. He made it into one big Crazy Horse Saloon, and also got the place to make a lot of money for back home, for Chicago. But what was interesting to me is that it just reflected a complete embrace of excess.
And that’s why the first image in the film has to be this beautiful car. Man walks out in wide-screen and color, he’s wearing salmon-colored pants. In fact, we had to tone it down from the actual clothes that Lefty had. Anyway, he turns the key, and the car blows up. That seemed to me what we’re doing in our society—the values that we have. Anything that’s good has to make money. How is cinema judged today, aside from a few critics or reviewers? Basically it’s judged by how much money you make on a weekend. Is cinema serious anymore? I don’t know. At the time when I was making certain films, I took cinema seriously.

RS:
You still do.

MS:
Yeah, I still do. But the next generation doesn’t, because of the excess.

RS:
That’s a good point, because of all your movies, this is the one that’s most satirical about excess. I mean, the décor in Lefty’s house is just amazing.

MS:
Toned down.

RS:
There comes a moment where there’s no humor or horror in it for you.

MS:
Nothing.

RS:
No frisson, as we might say.

MS:
There’s no enjoyment.

RS:
I guess it’s saying something that you hadn’t quite said as openly in your previous excursions into this world.

MS:
I think so. And at Universal,
Tom Pollock really wanted me to make the film, and Nick had that story. He hadn’t finished the book yet, and so we worked on the script together for about six months, in a hotel, and we ordered transcripts and whatever other interviews we could get. And we had papers everywhere. And I decided it had to be an epic—a three-hour epic, but very fast. Very fast, because in the world that they’re in, things go faster. You get more—it’s consuming, consuming, consuming. It represented to me—I’ve got to say—what we’re doing in this society. It really did.

RS:
But it’s gotten much worse.

MS:
Yes, much worse. In
Casino
there’s no such thing as law, there’s nothing. It just goes. And then they self-implode.

RS:
One of the things that, again, seems significant, re-looking at the movie, is there appears to be within the city limits of Las Vegas not a single person of any moral stature.

MS:
I agree.

RS:
I mean, who do you tell, what cop do you call?

MS:
Who knows, I can’t even say. It feeds, I think, the worst part of our human nature. But continually. And it’s very hard on the people working there.

RS:
So, even though you made
Gangs of New York
later and it’s historical, I mean this in a certain sense completes … You have the criminal element of, let’s say,
Mean Streets
as it’s perceived by quite a young guy. Then you move on to
Goodfellas
and then this. And one of the significant things about the
Casino
guys is they’re all mature guys, unlike even the guys in
Goodfellas.

MS:
In
Goodfellas
they’re younger and brash …

RS:
They’re younger and feistier and unable to recognize consequences.

MS:
They never fully become members of the Mob, either, because they weren’t considered sharp enough. They weren’t considered trustworthy enough. So definitely
Casino
was the final one.

RS:
You’re not drawn to doing another one of those?

MS:
No; if anything, it would be something that would be from a perspective of somebody who’s in their seventies, looking back.

RS:
That would be interesting.

MS:
I’m talking about working on something like that.

RS:
Because you don’t naturally think of any of these guys living into their seventies.

MS:
A lot of them did, though.

RS:
But the thought is “Live fast, die young.”

MS:
But they do. The ones who think that way get killed right away. You know, they really do. That’s it. It’s like the old Wild West, with the young kids trying to make a name for themselves. Or in Hollywood. Different kinds of producers or studio execs come in and you know what it’s like. They have to make a mark, really, and that’s understandable. It’s just some people go about it in an interesting way.

RS:
In ways that are very self-destructive. There are not so many of them, but they preoccupy outsiders looking in.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
With regard to
Kundun,
you mentioned earlier your looking out your window, down on some guys hanging around the social club.

MARTIN SCORSESE:
Yes, looking down at something going on. God knows what.

RS:
Well, the story of the
Dalai Lama, from childhood through his exile from Tibet, I saw a lot of you in the main character—the young boy observing life through a telescope like you on your fire escape observing life on the street. That young boy with the telescope is also observing, and I thought, Is that Marty?

MS:
Well, yes, that interested me a lot. His always looking through that telescope, through a window. The action he’s observing, when he’s a child, is a little bit removed from him, as in a movie. But he wanted to be part of it. When he left Tibet, he asked who said
Tibetan Buddhism was going to continue to exist the way it had the past sixteen hundred years or whatever. It’s now gone from there. He was taking it out to the world—he is taking with him the moral authority of who he is. He is now out in the world, stirring conversation, making people listen. That’s what I thought was so interesting.

Melissa Mathison’s script was mainly told from a child’s point of view, and we
tried to make the picture as much as possible like that. For instance, he sees the adults whispering, and the next thing you know, his teacher is gone. It obviously implies a lot about what was going on in Tibetan politics.

The chosen one: The new
Dalai Lama takes up his duties as Tibet’s spiritual leader in
Kundun
(1997), one of Scorsese’s most surprising films.

RS:
Another source of information for him is his little movie projector.

MS:
Movies.

RS:
Among other things, he was watching
Laurence Olivier’s
Henry V.

MS:
He was watching newsreels, too. It has to do with my own puffed-up ideas of becoming a spiritual person and a priest, and of course I hadn’t even gotten to first base. But this boy was raised as a person whose life
is
a spiritual one. That’s why I was interested in this character. The question for me was and is: Do you have to be religious to be a spiritual person?

RS:
The movie has a stately pace.

MS:
Yes, it does.

RS:
You could say the same thing about
The Age of Innocence,
but in the form of easily grasped emotions, more familiar elements. I think that in
Kundun
you were
taking a huge chance. First of all, it’s got a Buddhist theme, not exactly in everyone’s top ten. Second, the film is set in remote Tibet. You could say
Goodfellas
is quite obviously in-your-face daring. This film risks alienating the audience in quite another way, almost the opposite way.

MS:
This was much, much tougher. For example, when he’s told that the Chinese have invaded, the camera pans to him, and he just stands there. Its inaction is the action. It’s antithetical to what we know as Western drama. But why can’t there be a film where the drama happens internally? Does a story have to be made the way films are being made in this country? Is there room for a story to be made here a different way? I say yes. In the seventies, you got a fairly good budget for doing it. Now you don’t.

In this case, there was the CIA’s involvement and Chinese intrigue. I wasn’t interested in that. I was interested in the boy’s journey as a spiritual being, when he took Buddhism outside Tibet.

RS:
In purely visual terms, a lot is said about that character when he separates the two fighting insects. And there’s not a word of dialogue.

MS:
It was a very interesting movie to cut, because I felt ritual was so important in it. I thought by showing the rituals in the film, and by dealing with the color and the texture, the tone of the ritual, the sound of the ritual, the body language, that the movie could build to a point where for some people it might be a kind of religious or spiritual experience.