Conversations with Scorsese (44 page)

Crash and burn: Leonardo DiCaprio, as Howard Hughes in
The Aviator
(2004), faces one consequence of his passion for flight.

RS:
Let’s talk a little about the style of the film—the
use of
color in particular, which is spectacular.

MS:
The Aviator
is a good example of really embracing two-color and three-color schemes of shooting. And then the scene in the Senate hearing was a more neutral color in a way, which eased the film into the modern world.

RS:
In the early passages it’s very beautiful, and not just in the flying scenes. For instance, when he’s courting Hepburn on the golf course, it has a kind of Hollywood-of-the-time look.

MS:
It’s two-color,
Cinecolor. What we did was we dropped out the yellow. We had only red and green. And her lips are orange practically.

What she wears in the nightclub and when he takes her on the plane—the actual color of the dress is very different. That film’s green.

RS:
Really?

MS:
We made it into literally two-strip
Technicolor. First of all, we did it in the costumes, in the color of the sets. We really had a lot of fun, playing with that. Then, finally, it was enhanced digitally. Until we got to the 1940s, the scene where he takes her to an opening. She’s with
Louis B. Mayer, and he goes to the bathroom and can’t touch the doorknob. That’s when we slipped into three-strip Technicolor. And then from there it stayed three-strip.

RS:
Since two-and three-strip Technicolor don’t exist anymore, how do you re-create that?

MS:
Well, first I showed the crew many different films. Luckily, there was a color show in L.A. at the Academy, and they started with the beautiful nitrate
black-and-white print of
Midsummer Night’s Dream,
just to show how beautiful black-and-white was. Then they showed whatever extant examples of two-strip Technicolor and Cinecolor films were available—some very bad films, but some of the colors were just beyond belief. Then, of course, they went into three-strip Technicolor with
Robin Hood
and
Becky Sharp.
Ultimately, they showed a beautiful clip of
East of Eden
in an original Scope print. And they showed some clips from
Ryan’s Daughter
in
70 millimeter, and it looked very beautiful. So we took the cast and crew to that Academy screening, and then I started screening films on big screens at the Sony studios—everything from
Divorce of Lady X
to
The Mystery of the Wax Museum
to
Dr. X
to
Blithe Spirit.
And then eventually
Leave Her to Heaven,
in color. Some of
Ava Gardner’s clothes in our movie were based on what
Gene Tierney was wearing in that film. The use of blues and the reds.

RS:
Oh, that film seems to me—

MS:
Dazzling.

RS:
I mean, that color is just—

MS:
Lurid.

RS:
Blinding.

MS:
So
Leave Her to Heaven
became very important, and a film which I love called
Desert Fury
—Lewis Allen directed with
Burt Lancaster, Lizabeth Scott, and
Mary Astor.

RS:
Oh, that’s an odd, wonderful film.

MS:
And having designed the costumes and the sets as much as possible in those colors, we then went the extra steps in digital. I would show the designers old westerns in Cinecolor, and say, “You see the way the light is reflecting off the gun? That’s the blue we want.”

RS:
So what was probably pretty easy in the day of three-strip Technicolor becomes an enormous task now.

MS:
It was crazy, but it was fun. [Robert] Richardson did it and
Rob Legato did the visual effects. And the lab did a great job. So the color meant something special.

RS:
Let me stop you right there. The average viewer is not going to know that’s two-color or three-color. You could have done a completely respectable-looking movie that would have satisfied viewers and critics. So why go to all that trouble?

MS:
I don’t know. I never even thought of it that way. I mean, part of it is the enjoyment of doing something special and creating a look, a certain look. It’s just the nature of the process. I just felt it was real important with
Aviator.

I did it in
New York, New York,
too. I would get stills from
Band Wagon
and from all other films like it and literally say “duplicate this” to Boris Leven, and then he would add to it, including painting the sets. And we painted lipstick on the men. And the shoulder pads were exaggerated two or three inches. It was just the way I saw it. I mean, certainly, another person doing
The Aviator
or a
Howard Hughes film could shoot it straight. It would be fine. It’s just a different vision of it. But I thought Hughes had a great love for movies. He was there at that time when movies were making the transition to sound and color. I thought it would be nice to make a little history of the movies, to show the texture of the color changing as the film went on. It kind of fits with the subject matter, you know.

RS:
I hadn’t thought of it that way. But it’s a nice touch—well, more than a touch, considering the effort that went into it.

MS:
It’s a history of color in a way.

RS:
Certainly, though, looking back on the film, it did have a lot of the quality that I imputed to life in Hollywood in that age, maybe even the way you thought of it when you first went out there as a kid—just the way the personalities come into the premiere, for example. It had more excitement than I think those events actually had in life.

MS:
But even when you saw the
black-and-white newsreels of the
Hell’s Angels
opening, it was pretty stirring. I mean, at a certain point we colorized some of that. He’s sitting in the back of the car with
Jean Harlow and, if you notice, the color seeps in. And it gets richer as he gets out of the car. Every shot was manipulated a long time.

RS:
In postproduction?

MS:
Some of that was post. But her dress was exactly what she wore that night, though the color of it was different. It was photographed the way we wanted it to be photographed, but it showed up in another color. That was part of the layers in
the movie. It was one of the incentives to make it. Hughes loved movies so much, and he made all those terrible ones later at
RKO in beautiful Technicolor.

RS:
I know.

MS:
I mean, I think if he had been around twenty years ago, he’d have colorized all those old
black-and-white pictures.

RS:
He might have. Eccentric billionaires get to do that.

MS:
Yeah, they get to do whatever they want.

RS:
Was there something in the contrast between
The Aviator
and
Gangs of New York
that attracted you? You know, the feeling that you could be beautiful and elegant in the old Hollywood manner?

MS:
That
was
part of the attraction. But I liked
John Logan’s script a lot. And also in my mind there was a somewhat religious aspect, flying like a god in the air.

Happy days: Hughes and
Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) attend a Hollywood premiere.

RS:
I never thought of that.

MS:
Being closer to the final mystery, so to speak, of who we are and what we are.

RS:
You’re up there, you feel that much closer to it.

MS:
You’re much closer, and you become like a god.

RS:
Now that I think about it, in your
Hell’s Angels
flying sequences you show him up there in godlike command of the sequence.

MS:
It was amazing what he did. I don’t say that that’s good, I’m just saying he did it. It took us about a year to do the whole sequence. We finally found that
Leadbelly song that’s on at the end of the film. Listen to the lyrics of Leadbelly singing about Howard Hughes: “I’m going to that world up there.” It’s beautiful because he has someone just drifting away into the stratosphere, flying away, never coming back. Which is what happened to Hughes in a way.

RS:
Did you analogize at all between yourself and the obsessive Howard Hughes who’s driving everybody crazy with making
Hell’s Angels
or getting the Spruce Goose built or whatever?

MS:
No, not really.

RS:
What I’m asking is if there is something similar between the way you approach a task and the way Hughes did.

MS:
We were getting the last shot, and there was something going wrong. They had begun to shoot before I had seen the setup. I said, “Stop! This has got to stop!” I said, “This is not worthy of Howard Hughes.” I found myself jumping up and down on the tarmac, with the whole crew surrounding me in a semicircle. They were saying, “What is he talking about?” And I’m yelling, “We’re not doing that shot! Get it out of there!” I had designed the shot according to the structure of what
John Logan wrote in the script. It was the shot of Leo getting into the XF-11 cockpit before he takes off for the test flight that ends in the Beverly Hills crash. I wanted to boom down, but they just shot him getting into the plane. I said, “No. It has to be a boom down when he gets in to the cockpit.”

Then someone said that we were going to have to do the shot again anyway, against a green screen. But I had a feeling—the kind of feeling that builds up in your mind, like paranoia. We were all working together, we were not enemies. But you never know what a studio is going to do. Let’s say we go, God forbid, three weeks over schedule, four weeks over schedule. At a certain point, in order to satisfy the schedule, I might start to feel, You know what, I think I’ll use that shot we did by accident on the set. And we’ll forget the boom down.

But I didn’t want to sacrifice that shot. I felt it would have been one of the worst things you could do—making aviation scenes not on the highest level. Basically,
I was saying, Let’s not sacrifice that shot. Let’s not compromise here, because in desperation to finish, I may sacrifice that idea and use the less interesting shot.

I had a feeling that day. Maybe it had something to do with the hotel we were in. It was an old Spanish mission, and it was haunting. I couldn’t sleep.

And I wasn’t the only guy. Everybody felt it. I looked out the window and across the courtyard there was a monk, a Franciscan monk with a crucifix pointing at me. And I closed the curtain right away. We had just gotten there. It was early evening, and
Joe Reidy came by. I said, “Joe, come in the room.” Joe is an old Irish Catholic. I said, “I just want you to look out the window and tell me what you see out there.” He opened it, and he looked. “Son of a —” I said, “Look at that. It’s a clock tower, and they’re life-size effigies of monks.” I took another look and I said, “Wait a minute, it’s a different monk.” They had different ones. And it was turning. And they were all aiming their crucifixes at me.

I kept wondering why they gave me this suite directly across from the clock tower. Then, that night, Leo and the producer of the film went to Leo’s room and they were talking, and the producer says, “What do you want to do? Do you want to go to sleep now?” “Oh, I don’t think so,” Leo said. So they watch a film. After the film was over, they looked at each other and one of them says, “Why don’t we watch another film?” They didn’t want to go to sleep! There was just something creepy about the place. And everything around us was burning.

RS:
I find I’m very uncomfortable living in
California. I find the place very spooky.

MS:
I do, too.

RS:
I feel much safer in New York.

MS:
Me, too.

RS:
There’s very little chance that an earthquake will wipe your house out in New York.

MS:
Or a major fire.