Conversations with Scorsese (56 page)

The director overcome by Michelle Pfeiffer’s beauty in
The Age of Innocence.

RS:
A lot of directors still don’t always use monitors.

MS:
I think that’s good.

RS:
So then what’s the advantage of using a monitor from your point of view?

MS:
The exact framing. I can tell the energy of the camera movement that I want. I can tell if I have the right cut points.

As far as acting is concerned, it helps a little, too. But, believe me, when you screen the rushes, that’s when the acting pops out. And it’s a dangerous thing. Some actors like to look at the tapes, and that can be a problem. There are a couple I trust. Nicholson, though, never looked at a take. He had total trust that way. There are a couple of actors who see the rushes and know how to handle it, how to assess them and move on.

I don’t think I’ve ever been involved with an actor who wanted to study them over and over and redo things. I point out to them, That’s a tape. It’s a small monitor. Even if the film is on television later on, it’s not going to look like that.

There are pictures of Kubrick working on
Eyes Wide Shut
and other films with actors around him, looking at videotape playback, and he’s improvising with them. He improvised with Peter Sellers in
Lolita.
Imagine if they had video playback at that time. I think he would have done that with Sellers, or in
Dr. Strangelove.
It really depends on the person making the film.

RS:
Can you contrast that with your way of working with actors?

MS:
By the time I did
New York, New York,
I expected more from actors like Bob De Niro, because they brought so much to their work to begin with. But I expected a lot from everyone. I kept pushing and pushing everyone, sometimes into very bad states. In a funny way, I didn’t understand the nature of what they bring to their work. They go through a great deal before they get on that stage that you don’t even know about.

Yet I’m aware of and ultrasensitive to everything a performer goes through as he is doing it. In fact, my set is, very often, attuned only to the actor. It’s always very quiet. If the actor wants to do ten takes, usually, if I have the time, we do it. If he doesn’t want to do any more takes, that’s it. Early on, everything was about what I wanted, and I thought everybody would just snap to and do it.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
Through the years you’ve been closely associated with four leading actors in several films apiece—Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro,
Daniel Day-Lewis, and, lately, Leo DiCaprio. These are very disparate actors. But do all of them give you a comfort zone, an ease of communication? What?

MARTIN SCORSESE:
The explanation is in part that making films with your friends, spending time with them, gives you the opportunity to share feelings with them about many different things.

RS:
What about Leo, for example? Did you see him and say to yourself, I love this kid?

MS:
Bob De Niro told me about working with him on
This Boy’s Life.
A couple of other people told me about him, too. Then I saw the movie, in which I thought he was excellent. But then I saw him in
Lasse Hallström’s film
What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.
I thought he and
Johnny Depp together were fantastic.

RS:
They’re both very good.

MS:
But really, it was just that Bob said, This is a young boy who has that something special. You’ve got to work with him.

RS:
There’s something different about him, though, in one respect: Unlike your other leads, when he first came on the scene, he was a big teenage rage.

MS:
Not for me. I was going on what I saw in
Gilbert Grape,
and
This Boy’s Life.
Titanic
sealed his popularity. But I still saw him as the young actor who was so extraordinary in those other movies. Mike Ovitz put us together. It turned out that Leo liked the pictures I made over the years, he wanted to work with me. Hopefully, we can do a few more.

RS:
How would you characterize him, compared to Keitel, De Niro, and
Daniel Day-Lewis, as an actor?

MS:
I see a great similarity.

RS:
In what way?

MS:
In the way he works. He’s very specific, and if you need some powerful emotion from him, it’s going to be there. I don’t think he necessarily needs to spend three hours on preparation for certain kinds of things. He’s a real pro. He gets in there and he gets it done. When I least expect it, he finds an emotional level I didn’t think was there. He surprises me, moves me. Which is very hard to do when I’m on a set.

You know, I’ve got lights around me, I’ve got the producers yelling at me because they want me to finish. All these problems. As you get a little older, you have to be in great shape and you have to be focused. And I found that Leo’s very similar. His instinctive feeling about the world around him is a lot like mine. The major difference is I’m thirty-five years older, a totally different generation, and he grew up in
California. But we think similarly.

I always tell a story about what happened on
The Departed,
that scene where Marty Sheen gets thrown off the roof, and he’s lying in a pool of blood. We had to go back to that location a thousand times—it was just one of those pain-in-the-neck shoots. It was very difficult for other reasons, too, including the actors’ schedules and finishing on time.

So I needed to go very quickly that day. And I needed a medium close-up of DiCaprio’s reaction. He comes running and the body falls right in front of him. In the original Chinese film, apparently, the guy falls on a car. In
Collateral,
Michael Mann, whose work I admire greatly, has a character fall right on a cab.

RS:
I remember that vividly.

MS:
So I said we couldn’t have that in this script. So how was I going to do it? I decided we would stay on Leo and never see Captain Queenan being pushed out a window; we just see him falling through the air. And suddenly, he would fall in front of the kid. So we got that shot, which was a problem because we had a dummy, and blood being sprayed—too much blood, not enough blood. Then I needed a medium-close shot with Leo as he went around the body. In the meantime, these other guys, these animals, are coming down the building. If he’s late, he could be exposed as the rat. And, of course, he was just talking to Queenan on the roof, who was going to get him out of the whole thing.

On take one I should have been in front of the camera and watching the actor. But I was a little tired, so I was watching it on the monitor. And Leo did something in his reaction that suddenly moved me to tears. Son of a bitch, I said to myself. That’s why I make these movies. That’s why! [
Laughs.
] And I told him, “That was beautiful.” And he said, “I think I can do it better.” “Okay, let’s do another,” I said. We did three more takes, I think. But I decided [
laughs
] that first take was beautiful, and I used it.

One of the several mad scenes in
The Aviator.

RS:
We’re talking pure actor’s instinct here, aren’t we?

MS:
The instinct was extraordinary. And it was instinct under a lot of pressure. But the kid locked in, he had a certain kind of truth—he gave a whimper, like the whimper of a poor little animal that was stuck in this world, knowing it would get killed.

And that wasn’t the end of it. Marty Sheen wanted to be off camera for him, in the blood, lying on the ground, you know. And Leo didn’t want Marty to do that. But Marty was a pro, he was going to do it. And, bless him, he did it. Then, in editing, we struggled, Thelma and I, to work it out so that we stayed on Leo the right amount of time and didn’t cut away too soon. We tried different cuts. I said, “Keep it the way I felt it that day.” I said, “Let’s keep it long.” And then I had to struggle to keep all the sound out. They’d keep putting sound in, background noises. I said, “What’s that? It’s interfering with the sound in his throat.”

RS:
But there’s even more to that sequence, isn’t there? I recall that Marty Sheen’s death is followed with shots of
Matt Damon, back at headquarters, trying to figure out what’s happening.

MS:
Yes, Matt is in his office after Marty falls off the roof, and you cut back to Matt at the desk. He has the walkie-talkie on the desk, and he’s listening, and he’s saying, Who fell off the roof? What are you talking about? Every time you cut, it’s a different angle and slightly different lighting, and the camera’s moving a different way. Until finally you’re in very close. All that was designed. And it was shot very quickly.

RS:
And what is the editing saying?

MS:
There’s an implied tension in the frame if the sequence is working.

RS:
So it’s related, in some measure, to the dialogue he’s speaking?

MS:
And the intensity of how things are going out of control on the other end of the walkie-talkie. The more things go out of control, the more the camera is moving in closer to him, but off on an angle. The more he’s worming out of it, the more he’s taking the coward’s way out, the more I felt that, instead of tracking in faster, zooming in, I wanted it to be slower—to convey the feeling that he’s set in motion a series of events that are going to go out of control and everybody’s going to die.

But the editing is very controlled, because the frame has to have that tension. It’s almost as if you want to hit him with the camera. But you can’t. The camera’s holding back. The tension arises out of the contrast of its pace, enhanced by the editing, with the hugeness of the events going on in the sequence.

Normally, a picture like that develops into a big, climactic shootout—you know, a bravura set piece in terms of camera movement, lighting, explosions, this
sort of thing. But we had that to a certain extent earlier when Jack gets killed in the car. So it’s almost perfunctory, that scene. The only thing we could do was be as objective as possible about it. It didn’t need any embellishment. There are a few cuts, and then basically it’s a wide shot. It’s the opposite of what Hitchcock does with suspense. Maybe the Hitchcockian way would have been to show Barrigan [one of Nicholson’s hit men] coming up the stairs with the gun, Leo in the elevator with Matt, Barrigan getting closer with the gun, Leo in the elevator, the door opening, and Leo getting shot.

RS:
Well, as you know, Hitchcock liked to give the audience information the characters don’t have, to enhance the suspense.

MS:
It
was
about suspense. But when I was growing up, I was in situations where everything was fine—and then, suddenly, violence broke out. You didn’t get a sense of where it was coming from, what was going to happen. You just knew that the atmosphere was charged, and, bang, it happened.

In this particular story, I wondered what would happen if you just took out Jack’s character. Immediately, Colin [Matt Damon] then has to think about where his allegiances lie. The audience has to think about who they have to care about.

RS:
I was with both those boys. I didn’t choose.

MS:
No. But I saw an audience reaction in Chicago, a preview, where they were stunned. They didn’t know who to care about. All bets were off. All plot points were thrown out the window. It was [
snaps fingers
] like a moment in time: You exist, then you don’t exist. That is the nature of who we are and what we are as human beings. It happens that fast in life, whether it’s a violent death or a natural death.

RS:
Oh, God, yes.

MS:
I think of that all the time.

RS:
Me, too. But, you know, we’ve drifted kind of far from Leo. Any more thoughts on his work habits?

MS:
Well, I really respect what he did in
Aviator
as
Howard Hughes, how he worked with the Hughes accent, how he went through all the meetings with
John Logan. The thoroughness of Leo’s approach—I just know I can count on him.

RS:
Is he an actor who does more research on his parts than other actors?