Conversations with Scorsese (4 page)

RS:
It’s funny, it’s a movie that in my head I don’t like, but when I see it, it takes me up in some way. Finally, I think it’s a
western for people who don’t really like westerns—I mean westerns that take up more conventionalized stories. This one offers an unmistakable McCarthy-era metaphor for them to chew on.

MS:
And then you had
Baby Doll
[a comic
Southern Gothic film about a virgin bride, her dimwitted husband, and a sexually avaricious neighbor], the
Elia Kazan movie that was condemned by the church from the pulpit, which I never got to see then because I always used to check the condemned list—I was a good kid trying to behave. The C list [it stood for “condemned” by the
Catholic Legion of Decency] was always filled with titles like
Le Plaisir
[Max Ophüls’s three-part film examining three aspects of pleasure—in youth, in the pursuit of purity, in the waning years of life], and
Letters from My Windmill
[directed by
Marcel Pagnol,
it is also an
anthology film—warm, gently sacrilegious, featuring tipsy and devil-tempted priests], and any
Ingmar Bergman film.

There was this contrast between the movies and the place I was living. Where I came from was a Sicilian village re-created on the Lower East Side. You know, in
Sicily you don’t trust anyone. It’s not very evolved, but the reality is that on a certain level you grow up full of mistrust. And I’m sorry, it was pounded into me. It really was. My parents were good people, hardworking people, weren’t in organized crime. But there was that attitude toward the world. If you see that film,
Golden Door,
[Emanuele] Crialese’s film [about Italian peasants immigrating to the United States], those are my grandparents.

Elizabeth Street in
Little Italy. The photo, taken by Marty, was shot from the fire escape outside the Scorsese apartment.

RS:
I’ve seen it. I understand.

MS:
There’s a woman in it who’s a healer, could have been one of my grandparents. Now I didn’t say my grandmother did that, but I know a guy who did that. Basically he was the same age as my grandparents, and he was a healer. And if you had a headache, you had something wrong with your stomach, you would go to him. Women would go into his room and he would do things to them. I mean, my mother said, “Yeah, he was a healer,” and she’d wink. She was growing up American.

But the old ones, I was raised by those people. I was raised by the people you see climbing the mountains in
Golden Door.
In the fifties, it was very interesting trying to be American and trying to buy into something American. I mean, for instance, I just could not reconcile the nature of authority—of, let’s say, Eisenhower playing golf every day—with my own experience. I came from a world where the reality was “Yeah, sure. Just be careful.”

And so what happened with
The Departed
is that what it came down to, dammit, was the same story, the fathers and the sons. I was shooting the scene with Jack [Nicholson] and Leo [DiCaprio] where Jack is at the table and Leo is in the room. We had done the scene, a seven-page scene, the night before, and it was very nice—four takes, maybe, two cameras. But I said to Leo, “There’s something there. I don’t know what it is. Something is not quite pushing it yet.” This was the turning point in the picture for me. I can’t get into how I work with Jack, or how he’d
work with me, but there was something about just being around him and making it easy for him to go to certain places. So I just said to him, “Jack, we’re going to do the same scene tomorrow. We’ve got the whole thing. It’s just two angles. But anything you could think of to put him on edge—”

And then the next day Jack came in, and told me, “I have ideas. I’ve got some ideas.” I said, “Don’t tell me, don’t tell me. Let me see.” And so he sat down. Leo sat down. And the first thing Jack did was sniff the glass and say, “I smell a rat.” If I was that kid, I couldn’t imagine the guts you’d have to have to sit there. And then he pulled a gun on him. He didn’t tell me he had a gun. It was great. And he had all these other ideas. We took a lot out, but Leo’s reaction is in real time. So I said to him, “I don’t know what’s going to happen to you. And he’s capable of doing anything. You have to work your way out of it. You have to make him believe that you are not the rat. And you are the rat.” As we were doing it, I thought it was wonderful.

And suddenly I looked around and I said, “I’ve done this scene before.” Looking back now I find that theme in other movies I’ve made
—Mean Streets,
Raging Bull,
all the way up through the other movies. They usually have to do with fathers and sons, and what a father owes his son, and what a son owes his father in terms of loyalty. It has to do with trust and betrayal. Growing up in that world, the worst thing you could do was betray. And I felt excited, I’m even excited telling you the story now. I think I should go and make the picture again! I probably will!

RS:
You can make all the gangster pictures you want as far as I’m concerned. But my point is, people say, Well, he could do that theme and they could be two upper-crust guys from Long Island betraying each other over a Wall Street deal.

MS:
That’s true. That’s true. Take something like
Casino—
there’s betrayal there. And there’s the downfall. It’s interesting that the downfall in
Casino
is always looked at in terms of people who are of a different nature, so to speak, than we are. But to me they’re just human beings—a downfall in the underworld is just as valid to me as the downfall of a president.

RS:
It doesn’t make any difference at which level of society the betrayal takes place. The interesting thing is that a betrayal takes place and the betrayal doesn’t necessarily mean great matters of state, or even money that the gangsters owe each other.

MS:
No, no.

RS:
Betrayal has to do with—well, you say what it is.

MS:
Well, it has to do with love. It has to do with love between people, and how it’s betrayed. Because there is a bond between these people. Otherwise they wouldn’t
really be affected so strongly. I think that has to be it. Maybe I’m just repeating the same ideas and the same things in the end. But—

Charles and Catherine’s wedding photo. The bridal couple are attended by her sister Frances and his brother Tony.

RS:
Look, every artist repeats themes. Isn’t Hitchcock always making the same movie?

MS:
Oh, that’s true. Yeah.

RS:
I mean, there are different settings, different people, but in the end they are variations on a theme.

MS:
You’re absolutely right about finding those themes. But I found that in
The Departed
it was more incestuous in a way—we don’t know what
Frank Costello’s relationship with
Matt Damon’s character was as a boy, raising him. [Nicholson’s Costello is a kingpin in Boston’s
Irish Mafia who places his surrogate son in the state police, where he acts as Costello’s spy as the cops investigate Costello.]

If you read any of the books based on the real characters—it’s very dark, and it has a lot to do with the sex and the violence. That’s why the sex, the obscenity, is up there in front. It has to do with getting thrills that way. The more we read, the more ideas we got. And, sure enough, the human monster emerges, so to speak.

RS:
But here’s my question. My experience is antithetical to yours: no mortal betrayal has ever occurred to me. But when you talk about this film, you immediately go back to that childhood of yours. So the question arises once again, about Sicilians, and their apparently naturally suspicious natures—

MS:
Not all Sicilians but, yeah, suspicious.

RS:
It’s amazing to me that you took from that experience something that has been so controlling in your life as a filmmaker. What is it? I mean, okay, you were an asthmatic little boy and you needed special attention, but you got it from your obviously adoring parents.

MS:
Yeah, I got it from my parents, who were great with me. But it was a little tough. The household wasn’t easy. That’s why
East of Eden
is such an important movie to me.

RS:
Stop right there. Why is
East of Eden
so important? You’ve never mentioned that to me in this context.

MS:
The struggle of the father and the son. The good brother and the bad one. And the good brother is—

RS:
The good brother is a schmuck.

MS:
Yeah, I know. But the thing was—

RS:
And we don’t like him.

MS:
In my household, the conflict was mainly between my father and my older brother, Frank. I was supposedly the “good” one. But in reality, when I was watching
East of Eden,
I realized that I felt like the bad one—the
James Dean character. I had the same feelings as the bad one.

RS:
Go into that a little more.

MS:
The thing I felt was what all adolescents felt when they saw James Dean in that movie, whether or not the performance still holds up.

RS:
I’ll reluctantly stipulate, for the purposes of this conversation, it’s a great performance.

MS:
Dated at times, though. But it’s about wanting his father’s love—that tension. Somehow I read into that what was happening in my household, with an older brother and my father who had problems.

RS:
These were really angry confrontations? Big, loud ones like there are in
East of Eden
?

MS:
Oh, yeah. Basically, there was a period in the fifties, before my brother got out of the house and got married, when pretty much every night there was a confrontation.

RS:
Over what?

MS:
Over how to live. How to behave. Or how to be a man. I’m not saying one’s right or wrong. And the quiet one, the sickly one, me, had to take it all in and couldn’t say anything. And I was getting pretty angry about it.

RS:
Angry on whose behalf?

MS:
I think it was probably against my father. But I also wanted to love my father. And I know he loved me. But he had to be very stern. He had to be very tough. Besides which, of course, he had to be making a few bucks a week and making sure we were fed, and making sure we went to school, and making sure he took us to the doctor. I mean, you know, that’s what you do as a parent. And it’s amazing the stuff that they did that I haven’t done.

RS:
You’ve mentioned it before to me, and with considerable love and respect. Because these weren’t rich people, every doctor visit had to represent a sacrifice of some kind. And yet they did it.

MS:
Yeah, and there was nothing outside, only an extended family. My father was one of eight or nine children—I keep forgetting, maybe seven or eight. My mother was one of seven or eight also. So there were lots of aunts and uncles and cousins. And then there was his respect for his parents, who lived down the street.

Basically every night, after coming back from the garment district, having dinner, the fighting would start up. Some nights it was okay, but most of the time it was conflict over my brother, whatever the reasons were. He was doing things that my father didn’t think were right, and he was asking himself, “Why doesn’t this kid listen to me?” And he was very excitable, because he had his own problems in the garment district with people he was working with.