Conversations with Scorsese (46 page)

That’s very important, because he meant so much to so many different people at different times—they want him to be this, they want him to be that. The hard thing is to follow your own path.

RS:
Especially in the world he lives in.

MS:
And you have all these people pulling at you.

RS:
That’s right.

MS:
You have good people pulling at you—Pete Seeger,
Joan Baez, you know. And I wondered what made those other people so angry and bully him from the stage by calling him Judas. What did he do that was so bad? Some of those people were planted, from what I understand.

RS:
Oh, really? So he picks up an electric guitar, big deal. I mean, I still don’t fully understand it.

MS:
The electric guitar actually made me listen to the old stuff.

RS:
Why would his life turn on this one simple, stupid little question?

MS:
Phenomenal. And where did it take him? The motorcycle crash. He just stopped playing then. He realized he had to take care of himself. He wasn’t going to listen to anybody. He didn’t want to be a voice for anybody’s generation. He would do what he had to do.

RS:
Anybody who wants to be anybody’s generational voice is full of crap. There is no such thing.

MS:
I know. But younger people put that on him.

RS:
Obviously he wasn’t part of your growing up musically?

MS:
No. But I did use a quote from him on the title page of the script of
Mean Streets
—from “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: “Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift.”

RS:
In a funny way, then, the Dylan movie was a learning experience.

MS:
Yes.

RS:
More so than doing the Stones movie?

MS:
Yes.

RS:
Or
The Last Waltz
?

MS:
Yes. The humor of it. And also then I began to realize, you could re-create for a younger audience what it was like in the late fifties, early sixties, in the Village, in
Tin Pan Alley with its characters, on Broadway. They all contributed to the new music of the time.

RS:
That’s probably true.

MS:
But also they’re like
Damon Runyon characters. These kids are not going to see people like that on the screen anymore. We only wanted to go up to the motorcycle crash in 1966. We just intimated what was to come. I wanted to show that if you lived that life, this is what you would do. You take chances. Some people make it and some don’t.

RS:
That’s absolutely true.

MS:
You know, I didn’t want to do things about his personal relationships. Dylan, a young boy in his teens, going on the road. Like with
The Band: People got very annoyed because
Ronnie Hawkins told Robbie, You come with me on the road, you’ll get more pussy than
Frank Sinatra. Some people were furious. [Film critic]
Penelope Gilliatt was furious about that.

RS:
Was she?

MS:
And the film got an R rating because of that.

RS:
I can’t imagine Penelope Gilliatt—

MS:
I was told a bottle rolled down the aisle at the screening.

RS:
I wasn’t at that one, you know. But Penelope, by the end of her career, was drunk at every screening I was ever in with her. And when she first came here, she was one of the most beautiful creatures I’ve ever seen. She had a beautiful little body and that red hair.

MS:
And she was a great writer.

RS:
Poor old Vince Canby, you know, kind of just holding her together for years.

MS:
But those young guys, there was a bravado to their lives.

RS:
Well, sure. Of course.

MS:
And so the Dylan thing became for me—

RS:
—what you said before: you trying to find this guy.

MS:
The artist.

RS:
And you do find him by the end of it.

MS:
I think so, by the end. Especially that long line of people waiting for him, and finally his saying, “I want to go home. I want to go home.” It’s all there, I think. It’s interesting to me that he was able to follow his own impulses creatively, he seemed to just find his way. Now, you may ask, What’s so great about that? Well, he just evolved and kept working and working and working. In spite of all the criticism.

RS:
There was always a lot of phony piety associated with the criticism.

MS:
I only began to discover that as we were doing the film. But in any event, the Dylan film was a lifesaver for me, because I felt creatively satisfied with that picture.

RS:
In a way that you had not lately felt satisfied?

MS:
No.

RS:
This is coming right after
Gangs
?

MS:
Right after
Gangs
and all through
Aviator,
and after
Aviator.
Even right before
The Departed.

RS:
Were you frustrated after
Gangs of New York—
did you feel you needed to do something somehow purer or more authentic?

MS:
Maybe. I don’t know if I did it intentionally. But I felt good when I finished the Dylan film. I feel that the power, sometimes, of a documentary moves me so much more than a feature. Who knows if they’re better than the features I make? I have no idea. What I know is that I felt emotionally and creatively satisfied having gone through two, three years of working on the Dylan film. It was very exciting to me.

RS:
Well, there is something, I’ve got to say, even in the kind of documentaries I do, where you do an interview, and somebody says something to you that you feel is unique.

MS:
Yes, and
you
got it. The same thing happened with the Italian film documentary, which we were doing when we were finishing
Bringing Out the Dead.
It brought out quite terrific stuff, which I was not going to get again.

RS:
That’s correct.

MS:
It’s like when an actor does something in a film—an improvised move or line, or in many cases a written line—and it’s sublime. I’m talking how I feel when I watch it. I’m not talking about critics or the audience.

RS:
You have to have been there.

MS:
Yes. And documentaries do that for me. They free me, in a way, to hope and pray for those moments in the features. It’s what [Elia] Kazan did. In
On the Waterfront,
where the moments between the actors were so powerful—it’s something I said when I started making films—it would be something just to be on the set, just to be in the presence of a moment like that. That was reinforced by my mother in the beginning of
Italianamerican,
when I started to run the camera to try to get them used to the film. My parents sort of took over the film. And I went with them. I asked my father a few questions as we went through. I realized once again—I always talk about this—that the close-up of the person speaking, that’s cinema.

RS:
You know, that’s something
Andrew Sarris wrote years ago; I think he was writing about one of the
Eric Rohmer films,
My Night at Maud’s
perhaps.

MS:
I liked that.

RS:
It’s a wonderful film. He said, and I think I’m quoting him absolutely accurately, “The cinema has no greater spectacle than that of a man and a woman talking.”

MS:
He’s right. It’s something I hope for in each one of my pictures—somehow to get moments like that.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
The Departed
was based on a pair of Japanese crime movies that were quite well received critically. And, of course, it eventually brought you your long-delayed Oscar. I gather you hesitated about making it at first.

MARTIN SCORSESE:
For me to make a movie I have to become really enthused about a project. As excited as I was by the script by
Bill Monahan, after a few weeks I decided I didn’t want to do it. By that point the studio,
Warner Bros., was very interested in doing it and Leo DiCaprio was involved. And they said, We really think you should do it. But it didn’t seem right for me.

RS:
Did you feel that you been here before, done it before?

MS:
To a certain extent. Not on the level of the schematic of the story, the nature of the plot; I hadn’t done that before. And the characters were interesting to me, even though they weren’t fully there yet. But I just didn’t know what I would do with this story.

RS:
What conclusion did you come to?

MS:
I had an anger about the story, about the world it’s set in and how it reflected the world we’re in now. That’s the emotion and the energy that I worked from.

RS:
Explain that a little more.

MS:
It has to do with the nature of betrayal. The nature of a morality which, after 2001, has become suspect to me. I’m concerned about the nature of how we live, how we’re living in this country and what our values are. This new kind of war is going to continue. Our children are going to inherit it. It’s not going to be over with by the time we’re dead. It’s like a worldwide civil war. How does one behave in that context? What’s right and what’s wrong in that war? On the street level of
The Departed,
no one can trust one another. Everyone’s lying to each other. It fueled me in a way. It got me angry, it got me going.

Double agent: Leonardo DiCaprio pays a price for the dangerous game he played in
The Departed
(2006), the film for which Scorsese finally won his directorial Oscar.

RS:
So how nuts was
Jack Nicholson by the end of that movie?

MS:
Just as you saw on screen. Jack is very interesting because he will stay that way off camera, in the daytime and nighttime—always coming up with ideas, always pushing and shoving to the point where the other people in the picture come up to that level. That’s where you experiment a lot, you try things.

He was always inventive. We knew we had to embrace this character in a different way from other characters like him in other movies I’ve made.

RS:
I felt that Nicholson’s work was very underappreciated. I thought he gave a superb performance.

MS:
I thought so, too. Maybe it’s the same kind of thing that happened when some people first saw
The Shining.
They thought Nicholson’s performance was over the top.

RS:
I thought it was great.

MS:
Me, too.

RS:
It was great in part because he can make you laugh without the laughter yanking you out of your involvement.

MS:
I was stunned by the performance. I must say, though, that the first time I saw
The Shining,
I was taken aback. I didn’t quite
know what to make of it. Then the second time, I was locked. I mean, yes, there are problems in the ending of the film, but the nature of his performance with
Shelley Duvall is just … I don’t have the words for it.

You know in
The Departed
he found things to use from his own past and his life. Jack’s interesting in the way he’ll go off in different ways. It’s fascinating to try to jump in and hang on and go with it. He always struggles with the issue of whether he’s gone too far. He’s always asking, Should I go further?

RS:
In a way, that’s the art of acting.