Conversations with Scorsese (61 page)

MS:
And I went for the grand
opera or rock ’n’ roll.

RS:
Highly emotive music.

MS:
Still, in the late fifties and early sixties, jazz was part of your everyday life. We had
Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five.” We had
Ahmad Jamal’s “At the Penthouse.” We had
John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things.” We were playing those albums. Rock ’n’ roll was more powerful, but still, that music coexisted.

I may not have been delving into it as deeply as rock ’n’ roll, but country and western, country rock, the Dylan stuff,
George Shearing, the
Modern Jazz Quartet, and Gerry Mulligan,
Chet Baker,
Jimmy Giuffre—I knew all of it.

RS:
It was a sort of obligatory eclecticism.

MS:
Very much so. The best
concert film for me is
Jazz on a Summer’s Day—
Bert Stern made it in the late fifties. I screened it again two or three times before doing the Stones picture. I said to myself, What are we going to do with the
Rolling Stones since everybody’s done them?
Jean-Luc Godard had even done the Stones. So I decided the only thing to do was just to do the performance, just stay with the music and stay with the performance.

He had great tension in the frame. He was a still photographer, you know—he may have needed only two cameras, really. I never knew him. But I went to see the film and I loved it! And it really holds up. For me, it’s the key music film.

Watch the opening credits, the way it intercuts the reflections in the water, the boats, the mist, the sails. Jimmy Giuffre is playing his saxophone. There is a medium close-up of him. As Giuffre plays, he keeps moving his head toward the bottom of the frame, because he keeps squeezing out those notes. You think he’s going to go out of frame, but he doesn’t. The tension is wonderful. And the camera doesn’t move. It’s all interior, in a way.

It really holds up. In fact, Jagger and I were talking about making a
Jazz on a Summer’s Day,
about the Stones visiting New York. We came up with all these different scenarios. We went through a long writing process on that before we abandoned it.

RS:
Did it ever occur to you that your burgeoning interest in film and your burgeoning interest in music would ever come together in any way?

MS:
I think so. Music moved me. It literally makes us move a certain way. It makes certain things happen. It’s equivalent to dancing, I guess. You know, you behaved a certain way. Some of the boys were able to swagger. Others pulled back. But the music scored our lives. I was taking it all in, pulling it together.

I mean, the music was scoring what was happening—in the summer the windows were open and you heard music coming from other people’s apartments. The people were eating, or looking out the windows, and the music would be playing. There’d be a family fighting, and the music would be the background to that, too. Music was playing as you saw the derelicts on the
Bowery.

It was a cacophony of all kinds of sounds, but I started to put it together. The piano music of
Fats Domino, it felt like it was rolling, and the camera would move and move and move. That started something working in my mind. The
Beach Boys were the furthest thing from my experience—
California and surfing—but I appreciated them musically, it suggested certain movement and action to me.

Robert Pupkin in full cry.

RS:
I went to see
Tom Stoppard’s play
Rock ’n’ Roll
the other night. It has got a lot of great rock music in it, including a couple of Beach Boys numbers—Stoppard heard their music in Prague. Think about it.

MS:
One of their key songs for me was “I Get Around.” I designed a whole sequence to it in
Who’s That Knocking,
though I didn’t use it in the end. I used “El Watusi” by Ray Barreto in a scene where the fellows are playing with guns.

The camera panned from left to right. And every time we dissolved, the camera got up to a higher and higher speed. So the shots became more and more slow motion. But it was imagined from listening to “I Get Around” over and over again when nobody was home—and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “Sloop John B,” which is still a song I want to use. “Sail On, Sailor” I used in
The Departed.
Just a little bit of it. Their harmonies are fantastic.

RS:
So we have not only films like
The Last Waltz,
but also the passionate and knowledgeable use of contemporary music as scoring in so many of your films. Was that just a natural development for you, given your history?

MS:
That’s a good question. I think about it a lot right now, because I’m deciding what kind of music score to have in a new picture I’m making.

In the forties, those 78s were almost talismans. I’d see the label turning and I’d hear this sound come out of it. Music was a mainstay in our household. There was a lot of communication through music, listening to it, listening to the lyrics. Music was a constant part of my life from the earliest time I can remember up until the time I moved out of the three rooms on Elizabeth Street. After that, I took music with me everywhere.

RS:
Rock ’n’ roll wouldn’t have interested your parents at all, would it?

MS:
Well, my mother was very tolerant of Presley and some other rock singers, but my father didn’t like it at all, especially the doo-wop and the
blues.

RS:
In making
Mean Streets,
for example, was it a natural tropism to say, Oh, we’d better score this with some rock songs and some pop stuff?

MS:
I think that came even before we started shooting—a lot of the scenes came out of listening to the music. Certain songs were attached to certain scenes from my past. I remember listening to certain songs in my brother’s car as we drove around the
Bowery, seeing the alcoholics in the street. That music is playing over the appropriate images in the film. Music produced a kind of visceral energy which, being younger, I fed on—the kind of aggressive music that’s used in
Mean Streets
—for example, the
Ronettes’ song “Be My Baby.”

The movies of that time had scores by
Miklós Rózsa,
Dmitri Tiomkin,
Bernard Herrmann. I collected all those. My scores had to come from somewhere else, because I was usually reflecting another world, another time. The first time I really needed something more traditional was
Taxi Driver
—it was so internal I needed something special, and I chose Bernard Herrmann. Later, I worked with
Elmer Bernstein.

But the reality was that there was no other way to do it. The only thing that stopped us from doing it was not being able to pay for the music licenses. And so in
Who’s That Knocking
some of the music isn’t very good. But all the music that was supposed to go into
Who’s That Knocking
went into
Mean Streets
ultimately.

At the same time, Kubrick was using
Zarathustra
and Bartók, that sort of thing, in
2001.
Kenneth Anger’s
Scorpio Rising
was a shock because of the use of
music, the images, the whole idea of youth culture, the death wish—all of these forbidden images all thrown together with that sound track. It was important.

RS:
In many instances in your films the music is almost running counter to the action on screen. It’s very calculated, but it doesn’t appear to be calculated when you’re in the theater listening to it.

MS:
That’s right. Sometimes I take that sync point [the place in the film where the music kicks in] and I go backwards. I create the sync point with another piece of music, not the usual sting, as they call it, though I have used stings. The first time I heard that word was when
Bernard Herrmann used it.

The night before he died, working on
Taxi Driver,
I asked him for a note, and he goes, “You mean a sting.” And he gave me one. It was for when Travis looks in the mirror at the end, and he thinks he sees Ed. I said, “It sounds too straight.” He goes, “Play it backwards.” That was the last thing Bennie did.

In
Cape Fear
we have it. In
Shutter Island
we have a couple of stings. I’m trying to find classical music that has stings in it already.

RS:
That’s hard, isn’t it?

MS:
It requires hours of listening to music.

RS:
When I made my film about you that went on the DVD of
The Departed,
our whole fee went to music licenses—over $100,000 just for the DVD rights.

MS:
I know the problem. And when we did
Mean Streets,
the whole film only cost $650,000. Jon Taplin got that money, and out of that money he was still able to pay the
Rolling Stones and still able to pay for
Cream and
Eric Clapton and the
Ronettes.

RS:
When you hear music do you think, Well, that would be perfect for a film?

MS:
Some music just stays in my head. I still have my original records. And a CD library. I find that I’m listening to music that I heard back in 1949. I play it through and I listen. By 1985 I stopped really listening to
popular music. But the earlier songs created images in my head. Somehow some of those images and feelings—not all of them—were able to be used in certain pictures. Certain scenes suddenly reminded me of a piece of music that I thought would be perfect for a film.

RS:
Can you give me one example of that offhand?

MS:
“Jumpin’ Jack Flash” in
Mean Streets.
The moment of the downbeat, I knew that Keitel would be taking his drink and it would be slow motion. Exactly what speed I wasn’t quite sure of at the time—I think we went with ninety-six frames
per second. I knew that at that downbeat there was going to be a cut. A better example is when Keitel in the very beginning of the film wakes up and looks in the mirror, and then puts his head back down on the pillow. There are three cuts there, and if you listen, three drumbeats: that’s the beginning of
“Be My Baby,” produced by Phil Spector.

The editing came to me by listening to the beginning of that song.

RS:
So this is kind of a reciprocating engine: the music and the image, the image and the music.

MS:
Exactly. It’s very different from the way others use music, I think. Very often a song is played for nostalgia. It’s played all the way through, without alteration. But you can see in
Raging Bull,
Goodfellas,
and
Casino
particularly that I went in and cut within the song so that certain points of the music or the vocals will be hitting between certain lines of dialogue. Those lyrics are also commenting on the dialogue.

It’s all through
Raging Bull.
You can hear the
Ink Spots commenting on the scene where Bob throws the steak against the wall: the Ink Spots are singing “Whispering Trees.” I used the Brazilian music in the kitchen scene with
Joe Pesci and his wife, when he wants more coffee and is trying to convince Bob to take the fight. I did the same kind of thing all through
Goodfellas,
particularly Ray’s last day as a wiseguy, when he is cocaine-fueled, and you hear
Harry Nilsson singing “Jump into the Fire”—“We can make each other happy, we can make each other happy”—and he keeps stretching out “ha-appy.” I just kept mixing that, overlapping Nilsson’s voice, which became like a cry at night—a panicked cry about being happy, very aggressive and very dangerous.

I think that’s the theme of that whole sequence. It starts with the beginning of
“Jump into the Fire,” with the guitar and the drumbeats. Then we used that as a refrain. We started to fold the song in, overlapping itself—when Nilsson’s voice is wailing, we put more wailing over that, for a double, triple effect. After a while, it was like a frantic voice in your head, you just can’t take any more, you’re going to explode. The next thing you know, there’s a gun at your head and a voice says, “Turn off the car.” And Ray’s happy. He says, Thank God, because if it wasn’t the police, he’d be dead. The music was great in building up to that point.

There’s so much effective music in that film. There is the scene when Ray slams the trunk down and you hear the guitar on “Memo from Turner” from
Performance
[the
cult classic of 1970, in which a gangster and a rock star engage in a messy, drug-addled relationship]. Then you hear
Mick Jagger’s voice coming in. This comes after
De Niro in his terry-cloth blue robe says to Ray, “I don’t want the guns. The drugs are making your mind into mush.” Bob slams the door on him
and Ray says, “I knew he wouldn’t want the guns. I knew it.” And he slams the trunk. It’s funny, too, because these guys are killers talking about selling guns, and they’re getting so petty, getting on each other’s nerves. After Ray slams the trunk, there is slide guitar music, a piece of music I used to listen to a lot by
The Who, a track from the
Live at Leeds
album. It was an improvisatory guitar solo that’s quite beautiful and it just stayed in my head. I thought that would be great because Ray almost crashes into the car in front of him. And I thought, Let’s go right from “Turner” into that, and back into
Harry Nilsson.