Conversations with Scorsese (40 page)

MS:
No, my Manhattan, but referencing Woody’s film.

RS:
That may be the essence of Marty Scorsese right there. [
Laughs.
]

MS:
[
Laughs.
] He’s crucified! [
Laughs.
] Twenty-two stories up. Why save a drug dealer—he’s such a creep? But he’s got to be saved.

And Nick is just taking his blood pressure, holding on. “They’re sending up relief, they’re sending up people, relax.” And, actually, this is true, a lot of this really happened.

They had to use acetylene torches to break the wrought-iron fence. They take the guy to the hospital with part of the fence in him. He’s sitting there forever waiting for the nurse to come by. And she goes, Well, hopefully, you’ll go to the ER.
He says, Hopefully I’ll go? What do you mean? I’m sitting here with a fence up my ass. Let’s go. I mean, there’s street humor in that.

RS:
Absolutely.

MS:
But
Joe Connelly told me stories that are not that funny. The hell nights in the emergency room when everybody is freaking out. The horror of what he described to me—a terrible subway crash about ten or fifteen years ago, for example.

RS:
I remember it.

MS:
Some of the things he described seeing you can’t talk about. And the self-doubt: If you had taken your finger and held it in his heart long enough, you could have stopped the bleeding. I mean, this is real stuff. This is happening every night, every day.

They have patients they call frequent fliers, people who keep coming back, homeless people. Or people who drink too much. “Just put him over there. It’s George again.” We’ve seen those people. I’ve been in hospitals—I tell you, a lot of that film came out of taking my mother and father, my father particularly, to the emergency rooms for over ten years. In and out of hospitals, getting phone calls: Something has happened, come down.

It wasn’t like I was a great son. Somebody had to go down. Then when my father died, the same thing happened to my mother. Three years of that. You walk into an emergency room at two in the morning. I’ll never forget one place, it was run by nuns. One of them must’ve been four feet tall, about seventy years old. She had wrinkles in her face. She was Italian, really tough. It was like the nun who took the guy down from the tree in
Amarcord.
She just climbed up and hit him in the head and brought him back down. This nun was tough.

It was almost surreal. I walked by a room and I saw a man bandaged, full of blood, who had cut his own throat. It was one of the most horrific images that I ever saw. And these people deal with that every day.

RS:
I know.

MS:
And nobody wants to know about it. We, as a society, don’t want to know about it. It’s like
Europa ’
51,
the Rossellini film, the woman who tries to help people in different ways. Ultimately she realizes you just can do one thing at a time, the best way you can. I’m not saying everybody has to go out and do these kinds of things. I’m just saying we need to be aware of it.

RS:
Yes, of course. But there’s something else about the film. It’s very New York—you see the humor of it within the horror. People from other places don’t see the world in quite that way.

MS:
I see what you’re saying. No, I am an urban person, there’s no doubt, a New Yorker, really, Manhattan.

RS:
In a way, it’s one of the things you had in common with
Elia Kazan. He used to say to me, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, how do you live out there [in California]?” I said, “Well, I don’t like it, Elia. But you know …” “Ah!” he would say. “I walk ten minutes around my house and I see more life in that ten minutes than I see in a month in Los Angeles!”

MS:
It’s true. You’re sitting in a car out there, isolated. But I tried to be Californian, I really did.

RS:
You talked about how horrible it was shooting
Taxi Driver.
And here you are, right back in the same environment!

MS:
You’re right, you’re right!

RS:
I mean, it’s maybe not quite as intense as
Taxi Driver.
They’re at least a lot of the time up in their cab, kind of at a height looking down.

MS:
Drifting through, and looking down.

RS:
But they have to get out of the cab, and they have to deal with people who are grievously sick or injured.

MS:
I rode with them one night. It was quite something. And the music’s playing, you know.

RS:
Is Nick Cage’s character, or, for that matter,
Joe Connelly, fated to be there?

MS:
Let’s say there’s a pattern to life. There probably isn’t, but there’s supposed to be a pattern. And Joe Connelly is out there on EMS right now. It is like fate for him to be dealing with these people.

RS:
Going back to
Bringing Out the Dead
now, I see much more in it than when it was released. But speaking of fate, it seems to me, looking back, that the movie was sort of fated to fail, both critically and commercially.

MS:
The picture was tough for audiences, and that was a moment [1999] that those kinds of films weren’t being supported by the studios.

RS:
That one was not supported by the studio at all, I believe.

MS:
Not at all. And it was gone.

RS:
But here’s the only thing I know for certain: History is the only judge of movies, books, paintings, anything.

MS:
I know.

RS:
Whatever they said at the moment may or may not be correct. The real truth is revealed when we look at a movie fifty years later and think, God, it really is terrific. And lots of times, of course, the film is really not as great as I remembered it.

MS:
I agree. But you know, it was tough, the film disappearing, but it was also a great time because two weeks after the film came out, my daughter Francesca was born.
Bringing Out the Dead
was the end of something that was very special, though.

RS:
Was it the end of a kind of New York obsession?

MS:
No, I think it had more to do with a philosophical cycle of my own. It had to do with trying to evade the fact that you’re going to die, we’re all going to die. You know, when I was staying at the Waldorf while my house was being renovated, even forty-one stories up, I heard the sirens constantly, from eight at night until about two in the morning. It got to the point where I had to use earphones to shut the sounds out. It was like the city was screaming in this agony and this pain.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
I suppose the most tormented project you ever did is
Gangs of New York.

MARTIN SCORSESE:
Gangs,
and
Last Temptation. Last Temptation
was the worst shoot.

RS:
Gangs
at least didn’t present the same kind of powerful religious conflicts that
Last Temptation
did.

MS:
What I’m referring to is the physical making of the production.
Temptation
was a matter of shooting time and the weather. We all had a kind of passion for it and just kept pushing through. Whereas in
Gangs
we had the sets and the actors—everybody was there. It was a different kind of pressure.

I’m too close to the pictures. A lot of them are too damn personal. I’ll always be negative at first, but then I’ll talk to some colleagues and think, Well, this was pretty good, even on
Gangs of New York,
which, at times, was nightmarish. Still, some of it was the best time we had in our lives, for a lot of us who worked on it.

RS:
Why was it the best time?

MS:
Just the nature of what we were able to put together, the world we created, and the enjoyment on the set.

Everybody was exhausted. There were conflicts all around. We had language problems—there were stuntmen from Yugoslavia. We didn’t know what was happening sometimes. Yet somehow it was a wonderful place to be at that moment, whatever you may think of the film.

A dream realized: Marty developed
Gangs of New York
for over two decades and finally realized his ambitions in 2002, in a flawed, brilliant film bedeviled by cost overruns and compromises.

RS:
I think the film has brilliant stuff in it.

MS:
But as you’ve said to me, If I could have finished the
Draft Riots … But we never got the money to do the Draft Riots [in massive opposition to the Civil War draft laws, which permitted the well-to-do to buy their way out of military service].

RS:
I think it festered so long with you—well over a decade—that something got lost in the festering.

MS:
Yeah, if I had maybe done it earlier. But in any event, even knowing that, still they were some of the best times we ever had. And some of the worst, really.

RS:
What was so hard about making the film?

MS:
The fact that we were running out of money. The pressure to finish. People were leaving, props were being taken away. Extras were leaving. We still had to shoot certain things and I wasn’t sure we could shoot them with only three people or whoever was left. We managed, but it was hard. Did I use those shots? Maybe not, but still … To be honest, I could’ve kept going. It was almost like some of the big films in the seventies where directors just kept shooting.

But I couldn’t go any further. The studio and my backers tried to help me. But at a certain point they said to me, We don’t have any more money. That’s when I put my money in. And it was swept up within a few days. It was just an obsession for me. I think of the world that I was in when I was making it. And that affects saying whether I like the film or not.

RS:
Why did the movie take so long in the conceptualizing and writing stages? I mean, it became kind of a legend.

MS:
Well, obviously, I grew up in that area. And when I became aware of
St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral and the graveyard around it, with the names on the tombstones, I realized the Irish were there before the Italians. I became fascinated by the history of the New York City downtown. The cobblestones talked to me. I started doing research on it in libraries—on the church, on Archbishop [John] Hughes, the power of the Catholic Church, the Irish at that time. And in 1970, on New Year’s Day, I was house-sitting with some friends on Long Island somewhere and I found this book called
Gangs of New York
by
Herbert Asbury, and I started reading it. Clearly it related to where I grew up. The section we took from the book was from the 1840s to the 1860s. There also were sections on the Bowery, where I grew up.
Raoul Walsh drew on that for
The Bowery
with
Steve Brodie jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge. Everybody still talked about that when I was growing up.

RS:
Seriously? That was a long time before you were a kid.

MS:
Oh, I remember, my father used to talk about Steve Brodie, some guy jumped off the bridge on a bet, and he lived. The whole struggle between the Irish and Italians was part of my youth in that neighborhood.

RS:
So when you were growing up there were still Irish-Italian tensions?

MS:
No. There were no more Irish—but we heard about it. We heard stories of how rough it was. My father was growing up there—he was born in 1913—and there was a lot of fighting, a great deal of tension. When we were living there, the Puerto Ricans were moving in. So it was a similar thing, but not as strong. Elizabeth
Street at the turn of the century, after
Gangs
is set, was the street that had the highest infant mortality rate in the city—cholera, all kinds of disease. I didn’t know that. Growing up, my father would tell me about different politicians, about
Tammany Hall. My father would talk about
Al Smith. My father was a Roosevelt
New Dealer, until the fifties when he became more conservative.