Conversations with Scorsese (51 page)

MS:
Right.

RS:
It’s all in his mind in some way. But the movie doesn’t have any wavy dissolves—oooh-oooh, we’re into crazy now.

MS:
No, because you can hallucinate, and it seems very real. I mean, I never took hallucinogenic drugs, but more than a couple of times in the seventies, I could swear I saw something that wasn’t there. It reaches its peak really in
Raging Bull—
the paranoia.

RS:
Well, paranoia is a big deal with you, isn’t it?

MS:
I guess it is.

RS:
I mean, I don’t think of you as at all paranoiac.

MS:
No, not anymore. Again, I guess part of it is where I came from. As I’ve said, we lived in a world where you don’t say anything. To this day, there are people I know—somebody walks up to them in a restaurant and says, “Are you So-and-So’s brother?” He goes, “Excuse me?” “You have a brother who lives on Mulberry Street, name is Al?” And my friend will say, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about. You probably have somebody else in mind.” You become a very good actor. And it’s almost like a friend of mine, a guy I grew up with, who just wrote to me about this thing we’re talking about, and he said, “They don’t understand. You had to reinvent yourself every day. You had to act in the street every day,” and he said, “Also, the church was there. It was basically like being under the
Taliban.”

And it implies a lot. If I were a writer, I guess I could write several volumes about it. But what my friend wrote me last week was true: People don’t get it. They never will. You can’t describe it. You could call it paranoia, but discretion is better. “Discretion” I’m using sarcastically; I couldn’t say anything for the first fifteen years in L.A. about where I came from.

RS:
Really?

MS:
And by the way, this whole thing of me with
noir images: Oh, you’re always doing noirs. But when I grew up, when I looked out the window some mornings
the light would be beautiful; other mornings it was dirty and filthy. Or I would see life through the fire escape. So in other words, what we consider as noir images is what I grew up with. It was my reality. That’s why I wanted to see the
westerns.

The thing that really is the epitome of it all is the one shot in a tunnel in
Raging Bull
with Bob and Joe and Egan, Mr. Egan, asking if he was going to throw the fight. And Bob and Joe were wearing these big hats, and they have this tunnel that we shot somewhere in
Brooklyn. And I thought, Oh, look at this tunnel. Always shooting in a tunnel, shooting in a hallway, but the narrowest hallways. In my old neighborhood, the hallways were amazing. You could also sing in them. And my friends played cards in them—and a lot of money went down.

RS:
And where were these hallways?

MS:
Everywhere. They’re still there. Now they’re chic. They’re charging a lot of money for them.

RS:
Just to take it back to
Shutter Island—

MS:
I want to leave
Shutter Island,
but okay.

RS:
It feels to me in this movie that Leo’s character is literally among the least rooted characters in the history of the movies, because you don’t know in all of this what actually happened to him.

MS:
No. We don’t even know if he really killed that many guards, and if there were that many guards killed in
Dachau.

RS:
I understand that, yes.

MS:
But the idea of the madness of the killing at that moment, where the shot goes on just a little too long, was an expression of what it must be like to lose your senses in killing. You’ve had your finger on the trigger for like five minutes, and you’ve killed about forty people, fifty people, maybe more.

RS:
And you believe that is a reality of his life?

MS:
No, but he feels he did it.

RS:
But he did kill the wife.

MS:
Oh yeah. That we know. And also when he says, “I should have helped her and I didn’t. I’m responsible for the killing of the kids too.” He feels responsible for the killing of the children.

RS:
So that portion of the movie may have a bit of reality in it.

MS:
I think it does, yes. At the end, when he decides, I’m checking out. Sorry, Doctor. I know this may ruin your plans, all your theories, all your experiments. But I can’t take the pain anymore. And it’s better to go out this way, you know, and the doctor knows.

RS:
Knows?

MS:
He knows that he’s not crazy at that point. The look in his eyes was that he knows it’s not Teddy, it’s Andrew who’s going out. It’s not Teddy. Teddy is the person he made up. It’s Andrew that’s going out, Andrew Laeddis.

Mad scene: DiCaprio confronts one of
Shutter Island
’s inmates.

RS:
So in other words the reality of his war is the reality that totally unhinged him.

MS:
I think that set him off. And that’s why I say it has a lot to do with returning veterans and what they call now
post-traumatic stress syndrome. The reality is you can shape a young person into becoming a killing machine. Now, how do you turn it off? But people have come back and have been able to do it.

RS:
Just a crass question while I think of it. Are you astonished by the grosses on this movie?

MS:
Yes—although “astonish” may be too strong a word. But I can’t say I didn’t think about it. I had a very difficult experience making the picture, particularly in postproduction.

RS:
Really?

MS:
And I still haven’t gotten past it.

RS:
What is the nature of the problem?

MS:
It’s just that depression hit. I don’t know what happened. Living in that world, with those people, was very upsetting. And also the pressure of getting it done. And then I said to myself, I don’t want to do it again. I always say that when I make a picture, but it’s just not right anymore for me to do.

RS:
I hear what you’re saying.

MS:
It’s just, at a certain point, well, life is complicated. I didn’t even want to think about it, quite honestly, especially when the film was held back from its original release date—wisely so, I’ve come to think.

RS:
I’d almost forgotten that.

MS:
That’s what finally did it. You’re sort of running a marathon and suddenly, bang! You’re about to hit the finish line and somebody just has a baseball bat and hits you in the chest. And like wham, you go down and—

RS:
I’m going to assume you didn’t believe that was malicious or that they were selling out the movie, that they really thought it would do better in February.

MS:
Absolutely. But it’s still someone pulling a rug out from under you. And so you’re spinning.

RS:
I remember the posters were up, the trailers were playing.

MS:
Yes, it was ridiculous. But the time they chose to open it was very, very good. Hopefully they’re happy, everybody’s happy.

RS:
Of all your movies it’s the one that appeals most directly to the prime movie audience, the kids, who love ugga-bugga.

MS:
But those places were genuinely weird. That’s an abandoned hospital where you could feel, from the walls, the pain and the suffering that it contained. The whole thing had a very strange, eerie feeling to it.

RS:
Which hospital, where was that?

MS:
A place called Medfield about an hour outside of Boston. But he saw the world that way, and he heard things that way, including the music. In his mind that’s how dramatic it is. The way the book was written or the script was written, but particularly where we shot it, lent itself to the thriller or the horror genre. But the place was really uncomfortable, to say the least. You can have all the people you want running around, you can have all the coffee and all the crafts services tables, it doesn’t matter. If you have any feeling at all, you want to get out of there.

RS:
While you were working on this, did you at all look at
Titicut Follies,
Fred Wiseman’s movie about the criminally insane?

MS:
Well,
Titicut Follies—
I didn’t have to see it again. I knew it very well. I saw it when it was playing at the
34th Street East Theatre.

RS:
I was very involved with that. I testified on its behalf in Boston, because they banned it, and there was a big court case when I was a very young film critic. But I knew Fred.

MS:
Yeah, he’s great, a great filmmaker. He’s the great documentarian. He has chronicled everything. Five hours, six hours, it doesn’t matter. And he doesn’t intrude on it. He holds back. And I once saw
Titicut Follies
on a big screen, and I’ve seen it a couple of times over the years. Those were the days when documentaries were shown as a regular feature. In fact, there are moments that the actors [in
Shutter Island
] took directly from certain people in
Titicut Follies.

A light moment in a dark place:
Ben Kingsley, Marty, and
Max von Sydow on the
Shutter Island
sets.

RS:
I felt a lot of that in the film. And it’s been many years since I’ve seen
Titicut.

MS:
And the other thing was that Dr.
James Gilligan, who was our technical adviser, was one of the men who went in after Bridgewater [the prison-hospital where Wiseman’s film was shot] was exposed. He was part of the group that revamped Bridgewater and other places. And he pointed out that Ward C is actually a smaller version of the places he knew at Bridgewater. Pretty horrifying.

RS:
So that reality has infected his imagination.

MS:
Very much so. However, Dr. Gilligan did say that he many times worked out scenarios with the patients and acted out different scenes for different lengths of time. I guess psychodrama is what you would call it. But even more intense.

The directorial problems in the picture were interesting. For example, there are guards in the frame all the time when you see Leo. There’s always somebody there in the background. That’s the way he sees certain places. We took some chances every now and then by cutting a certain way. If you see it one way, it’s just reaction shots. But if you see it another way, it’s complicity. Everybody knows what’s going on. Everybody except Leo. He walks into a room and something’s going on, but he’s not part of it. Everybody’s talking about you. Or at least you think so. But you’re right, he’s not rooted in reality. By the time you get to that cave, with
Patricia Clarkson, his pretended reality has gone completely.

And that put me in touch with the thoughts I was having, when I talked about the idea of cinema being not real in a sense. It’s something not tangible because it’s projected electricity, images on a wall. And it’s that we somehow make up the film in our own minds, in a sense. Yes, the images are created by some people, but you never see them. You don’t know their context even. Maybe you see a film forty years later, you don’t know where it’s from.