Conversations with Scorsese (64 page)

MS:
I threw most of it in. I only got very little of my salary. I put the rest back into the movie. I was obsessed. I kept pouring it in.

I mean, they weren’t even delivering
The New York Times
to the house. It took me until
The Aviator
to balance out the financial damage that I did to myself. That’s why I did a lot of publicity. I had to; I had to follow it through. I didn’t necessarily think it was going to win awards, but I had to follow it through in terms of box office.

I felt I might not be able to make another film again, in the sense of getting Hollywood backing. If you agree to do a film for a certain amount of money, and if you as director go way over budget, you have to pay overages. I don’t know if I can afford it anymore. But somehow I have to do the films. I’ll find something, I’ll find a script, or a commercial, just to tide me over sometimes.

RS:
I cannot tell you how much garbage I have written in my life for exactly that reason. I have done it all my life. It’s only in the last five years that I don’t have to do it. It’s so hard to do something you’re not really passionate about.

Yet sometimes when people give you an assignment, it turns out great.

MS:
Look at De Niro forcing me to do
Raging Bull.
Very often some people know what’s better for me than I know myself.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
I read an article in
The New Yorker
once that made me think of you, and not you alone—other movie directors I’ve known as well. It was by
Tim Page, a music critic, who suffers from Asperger’s syndrome. He quotes
David Mamet from a new book he wrote about cinema in which he says if there weren’t Asperger’s syndrome, there would be no serious movies in America.

MARTIN SCORSESE:
[
Laughs.
] Why is that?

RS:
Because the syndrome is a form of autism. Page says the symptoms that he suffers from include an insane amount of knowledge about a subject—in his case, music. He has an infinite capacity for detailed work. People who know him say he is out of his mind to do it. It would be like you mixing a scene for the twentieth time.

MS:
That’s the best part [
laughs
].

RS:
As I read the piece, I was thinking, It’s kind of like Marty [
laughs
]. You should read it—it explains what I think those priests recognized when you were a little kid. You’re helpless, you understand.

MS:
Yes, I think I know what you’re saying.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
You’re in your sixties now. You’ve had great success lately. But I wonder—are you beginning to feel age creeping up on you?

MARTIN SCORSESE:
Of course, there’s less time. And there are certain responsibilities. It’s not a matter of luxury, but of keeping your nose above water and making sure my little girl’s taken care of. The amount of work you want to do, the kind of work you want to do—your choices are different at this age.

RS:
Looking at those choices, do you feel sometimes, I’ve done that, I want to move on, or is it, I’ve done it, but I can still do it better?

MS:
That’s the constant struggle, to decide.

RS:
How do you look at it?

MS:
When I talk about exercises in style, I don’t know if there’s any more time for that, because of the nature of the way I make a picture. Given the amount of time and effort I put into a picture, there’s no sense in revisiting a similar one unless I can find another facet to the gem, if it is a gem at all—and maybe unless I can learn something from making the film. Sometimes you think you’re learning from a film, and then sometimes you’re just happy to get through a film.

RS:
Every director has always said that.

MS:
So the choice is, (A) Should I do again types of pictures I’ve done before? I have to ask myself what about it will be different, stylistically different. What is different about the themes? And (B) Should I enter wholly new territory—to try to do a spectacle of the ancient world, for instance? Should I try to do maybe a children’s film?

But because of the way I make films, as I said, those would take longer. I don’t know if I have that time to experiment. In the past ten years, I’ve kind of put them aside. I’m dealing with stories that are similar to what I’ve dealt with before. I think I’m finding new ways of telling them, finding new things in them to say, but maybe I’m kidding myself. I feel comfortable with what I’m doing—to a certain extent—and I feel impatient with it at the same time, because I want to move on in another direction.

Marty, at his Video Village, consults with
Dante Ferretti. This is his vantage point on some of his sets when the cameras are turning.

RS:
Some critics say, Marty is always doing criminals, he’s always doing murderers. Then you go and do
Kundun
and they’re not exactly happy with that, either. Does that get in your head? Do you ever say, Maybe they’re right?

MS:
Oh, yes, sure, when I’m in a weakened state. But I’m constantly testing myself. If the material is similar to what you’ve done before but you still get excited about
it, that’s the key: if you still want to deal with all the problems that you have to deal with to make any picture.

There are a number of scripts I’ve read, a number of books I’ve read, where I’ve said it’d be wonderful to do a film with this. But in the end I don’t know if I could do them, something like
John O’Hara’s
Appointment in Samarra,
for example.

RS:
That’s the one nobody’s ever licked. That would be a hard one for you, because it’s dealing with a very small-town society.

MS:
Exactly. I don’t know if I have the time to put into exploring that.

RS:
In effect, what you’re saying is, If you weren’t in your sixties—

MS:
Maybe I would try.

RS:
You could, perhaps, spend the extra time to absorb a different environment. Now you can’t.

MS:
I feel the onrush of time, but still, I have certain projects ahead of me, like
Silence,
which takes place in seventeenth-century
Japan. I feel I can take the time on that, try to find the center of the picture. The shots are different because it’s not set in a modern world. It’s dealing with nature, and the evanescence of life, as opposed to it merely being about these two priests who are trying to sustain Christianity in Japan after the religion has been outlawed. They claim that God is demanding their—the priests’—martyrdom. And the Japanese are asking, What kind of a god is that? It’s pretty interesting.

But the framing is the issue—whether it should be even a 2.35 aspect ratio. I honestly don’t know. I mean, I saw a lot of
Japanese films framed that way, but then I saw
Mikio Naruse’s films and he framed them in 1.33, which was fascinating. I can’t use 1.33 today, but what I’m saying is, you think of Japanese films in the sixties, and immediately you think wide screen, 2.35.

RS:
Since you brought this up, is framing the first question that occurs to you?

MS:
You’ve got to be true to that world they’re in.

RS:
In other words, looking at that movie, we as viewers have to look at it with the eye of a character who’s in the movie?

MS:
No. The eye that I present that world to you with has to do justice to that world. I have to understand the layers of that world. You just don’t photograph a house. I have to ask, Should there be a tree behind it? Should there be a river behind the house? What does the river really mean to these people? Should I include it in
this or that frame? Should I wait for later? Should I track out from the river? Should I pan over to it? This sort of thing.

But it isn’t second nature to me.
Jean Renoir in
The Southerner
understood people, through the landscape, through their relationship to nature. It’s very hard for me to understand that. You’ve got to be true to that world they’re in.

RS:
Silence—
what is the film as you see it?

MS:
Well, I don’t want to give too much of it away, but it’s about the very essence of
Christianity. It’s a true story about two Jesuit priests who steal into
Japan to find a missing teacher who’s become an apostate. The film is full of paradoxes. For example, one of the priests has to choose between his love of Catholicism and his love of a more broadly defined Christianity. Then there’s a character he can’t stand who keeps running around asking for confession, and keeps ratting on all the Christians. It turns out that’s Jesus. Jesus is the man you can’t stand. He’s the one you’ve got to forgive. He’s the one you’ve got to love.

The book was given to me by Archbishop
Paul Moore of the
Episcopal Church.

RS:
How curious.

MS:
He gave it to me in New York, the night after he saw
Last Temptation.
He said, The choices he makes are the very essence of his faith.

RS:
It sounds like a really good story to me. Are you having trouble getting a studio to commit?

MS:
I just think that in this day and age they’d rather do something more like
In the Valley of Elah
[Paul Haggis’s 2007 film about a father’s search for his missing soldier-son], which is more contained, and can’t be misinterpreted as solely a religious story. It’s about who we are as people. But, you know, it also behooves them to make pictures that make a lot of money.

RS:
I’m not sure they make a lot of money all the time.

MS:
No, they don’t. But the risks, the gambles, are so big. It’s amazing when you have meetings with the studio people and you hear their concerns and you try to make something for them and for yourself. You’ve still got two responsibilities. In this case it isn’t that the studios totally don’t want to make the picture, it’s that it’s not that attractive to them—put it that way.

RS:
It’s a tougher sell for them, when it comes to promotion and marketing.

MS:
Yes, a tougher sell. Yet I could make it for a good price. It’s very contained. It’s
not set in the shogun’s palace. It’s set in Kyushu, in southern Japan. It wouldn’t be that bad.

RS:
When you mentioned that you have a responsibility to the studio—it is, after all, their money and they’re not necessarily your enemy—I thought of your father’s lectures on responsibility.

MS:
I know! It doesn’t mean that I’m always responsible, and I certainly haven’t always been responsible in the past. I try to be, I really do, but at a certain point if I’m getting something on film that’s better than a studio ever thought it would get, then it behooves me to try to convince them to let me finish the job properly. A constant dialogue with the people who are financing the film is really important.

We worked very closely with the studio on
Gangs of New York.
The studio wanted to be kept abreast of what was going on, and I did every step of the way. They’d raise an issue, I’d discuss it with them, try to deal with it. Sometimes I couldn’t. Sometimes I tried to and still couldn’t.
The Aviator
was a very big movie, but it was on schedule, so I got a little bit of credit that way. The only difficulties we had were in the last month, over distribution. But that’s a matter of one person’s will over another. That’s not about the film. That’s something else. You just flail
your way out of it, or into it. The only exception is if you’re involved with the financiers. Sometimes you get into that kind of thing—like Selznick and Hitchcock maybe.