Conversations with Scorsese (65 page)

Marty directs Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon on a Boston rooftop on
The Departed.

RS:
Hitch and I talked about that one time. He really didn’t like him.

MS:
In
Rear Window
Raymond Burr [who played the murderer] is made up to look like him.

RS:
I wasn’t aware of that.

MS:
Somehow Hitchcock came out of it stronger. Some people don’t come out.

RS:
It wasn’t just that he became stronger. It was that Selznick became weaker, addicted to uppers and downers, that sort of thing.

MS:
Yes. And then he made
A Farewell to Arms,
unfortunately. Oh, my God.

RS:
Let’s go back to you, Marty. Do you have a favorite or two among your films?

MS:
No.

RS:
Really?

MS:
Mean Streets
was very hard to make, but everybody was working well together and it was a good time in my life. I liked that.
Italianamerican,
the one on my parents, I learned a lot from that. I liked
The Last Waltz.
Goodfellas
was like a rebirth. I was having a hard time. I sort of found myself again with it.
Kundun
is also a picture I like.

RS:
I know that. But why, particularly?

MS:
The mood, the tone of it.

RS:
The spiritual quest?

MS:
The quest of a person who is raised from a child to lead the spiritual life. That makes it a very interesting movie to me. I can’t quite grasp it yet, though.

RS:
Is it something in the selection of the child that’s moving to you?

MS:
No, it’s the nature of loss, and the acceptance of it. The loss of a whole culture, a way of life. The loss of life, loss of friends, loss of relatives, the very transitory nature of our existence—accepting that, and moving on. That is where the texture and the color of the film come from.

RS:
Silence—
perhaps it has spiritual dimensions not unlike those of
Kundun.

MS:
Correct.

RS:
When you were coming off an enormous success with
The Departed,
at some cynical, practical level, you could get on a crime story more easily than you could get on a Japanese movie. What I’m saying is that then you went to a studio and you said, I’d like to do the Japanese movie, they said, Yes, Marty, but we really love the one about the criminally insane set near Boston.

MS:
Right.

RS:
So, you know, that’s the practical side of things.

MS:
And you can’t go on a set and say, I don’t want to be here, even if you want to be on another set.

RS:
But you have on your mind all those personal matters we’ve discussed.

MS:
Yes, I’m getting older. As I said, there are certain responsibilities with the family at this point.

RS:
That’s the point I’m trying to make here.

MS:
Shutter Island
is about truth and illusion, too, you know. And guilt, a lot of guilt [
laughs
].

Marty,
Elias Koteas, and Leonardo DiCaprio lost in the shadows of
Shutter Island.

RS:
A lot of guilt, as usual. I know.

MS:
But my aim, finally, is to make
Silence,
the way my aim was to make
Gangs of New York,
and my aim was to make
The Last Temptation of Christ.
Or
Bringing Out the Dead.

RS:
Is the last temptation of Marty Scorsese to make something like
Charlie Wilson’s War,
a political film?

MS:
I’d like to make something that has some body—something that one would not only be able to enjoy as entertainment, but also to think about. That means being moved by it or repulsed by it at times. To leave the theater saying, You know what, that’s a very interesting point of view. I guess that desire goes back to the impulse of a young boy looking at those American films in the theater, and then seeing the Italian films. And later being affected by seeing
Children of Paradise
for the first time. And then seeing
Ingmar Bergman’s
Seventh Seal
and
The Virgin Spring
and practically every Bergman film that came out every six months or ten months, whatever it was.

RS:
They sure did come out in those days.

MS:
If you ever look at what was playing back in 1960 in New York—I mean, it was amazing.

RS:
I was at the movies three, four nights a week. You know, you’d go to 8th Street in the Village. You’d go to the Waverly, which played old American movies. I probably saw
Sidney Lumet’s
Twelve Angry Men
eight times.

MS:
I saw
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
there for the first time. There’s a part of me that loves European art. And there’s a part of me that loves Hollywood film. Those are two very different traditions.

But always I want to communicate to an audience. I want them to enjoy the story, to go with it, to enjoy it.

I guess it goes back to that idea of good men doing bad things, and our not always judging them harshly. Creating a story around that. I believe I grew up in a world like that. A lot of my friends experienced it differently. But that’s what I perceived. That’s what I saw.

There’s a
Jacques Tourneur film,
Canyon Passage.
Did you ever see it?

RS:
Yes.

MS:
It’s a beautiful film.

RS:
It is.

MS:
There’s a wonderful moment where
Brian Donlevy is in the back room— I think
Hoagy Carmichael sees him—and he’s weighing some gold out of a pouch. It’s not his. He’s just measuring it and marking the weight down. Then he looks at it again. He takes some for himself. That’s where the problem begins. He’s a decent guy, but he’s got some business problems.

That kind of dilemma fascinates me. But I like entertainment in movies, too. I enjoy making an audience care about people, or laugh. I watch films from Africa, from South Korea. I see them as expressions from different cultures. I wonder about the value of a lot of the stuff that is being made here. I’m trying to look at other places for their personal expression—even the very, very long takes of
Béla Tarr; at times it’s a major investment, to sit down and watch
Satantango
for seven hours.

RS:
No kidding.

MS:
As I get older, I find I go back to early
Carl Dreyer. I’ll screen
Passion of Joan of Arc
and
Day of Wrath
[about witchcraft].
Ordet
[a meditation on religious and profane love] is a masterpiece. What I guess I’m getting at is that I am still part of the American culture.

RS:
You can’t escape that.

MS:
I’ve been looking at
It’s a Wonderful Life
again.

RS:
Frank Capra
had
a wonderful life. And he was a wonderful director.

MS:
He saw America from the point of view of the immigrant coming over from a decaying European society. He flourished in the worst time, the 1930s.

RS:
As long as you honestly put your experience into the work, it doesn’t make any difference what your experience is, even if it’s an unfashionably happy one.

MS:
That’s the key. Honestly putting your experience in. Crafting it in such a way that it has that honesty and the love from your heart.

RS:
I agree.

MS:
And you have to like the people you work with. That’s why Capra was so great with actors—you could see he loved them.

RS:
He was a very empathetic man, Frank.

MS:
I never met him.

RS:
I did, and I liked him a lot.

MS:
Meet John Doe
was on the other day. Thelma and I were looking at just a couple of cuts. The sound was down; I said, “Look at this,” the scene where they choose Gary Cooper to be the American Everyman, when all those different men come in, looking to be cast as John Doe. I said, “Watch the cutting here.” Barbara Stanwyck’s face—it was great.

RS:
Frank Capra was, technically speaking, one of the greatest directors who ever lived. The cutting—

MS:
The frames.

RS:
The way the shots are set up.

MS:
That sequence in
Meet John Doe,
the rally at the ballpark in the rain, and the police. Do you know how hard it would be to set that up?

RS:
It’s one of the most complicated, brilliant pieces of filmmaking I’ve ever seen.

MS:
What he was doing there was amazing. They shot eighteen months, they shot different endings.

RS:
Yes, I know. And it’s still not a movie that ends quite right. But up to that point there’s so much fabulous shooting. And that rally in the rain sequence, if I were teaching film, that’s one of the ones I would take and say, Look, guys. This is a gigantic sequence with thousands of people in it. Just look at it and die a little bit.

MS:
I hadn’t seen
Meet John Doe
in years when, one night, when I was shooting
The Departed,
I was in the trailer waiting. TCM is on with the sound off, and I watched
Meet John Doe.
I hadn’t looked at that sequence in such good quality in years. That’s when I realized what an amazing piece of filmmaking it is.

RS:
Another great scene is the wedding at the end of
It Happened One Night.
It’s breathtaking how he does that. You know, he has matching swish pans, cameras going, the girl going—

MS:
People tend to overlook it because they only remember the characters.

RS:
Well, you remember the funny, the sweet—

MS:
But when you look at the film closely, the characters have a glow to them that’s quite extraordinary. The lighting is brilliant. The editing is great.

RS:
I had done the Frank Capra film for the series on TV,
The Men Who Made the Movies,
and they hired me to write another Capra show. Somebody else was going to direct it. I said, Sure, I can do that. The producer was a good guy, a former film editor,
Carl Pingatore. We put the film together, and we took it to somebody
at NBC, and he said, “But it’s not funny.” And I said, “Yeah, well, that’s right, because, you know, Frank Capra isn’t funny.”

MS:
I know.

RS:
He’s warm, but he’s not funny. It’s
Depression America. I mean, what’s funny in
American Madness
?

MS:
Nothing.

RS:
And look at the run on the bank sequence. It’s beautiful, though.

MS:
Fantastic, yeah. My wife heard his voice the other night on TV. She said, “Who’s that?” I told her and she said, “He sounds like a nice man.”

RS:
He probably wasn’t, entirely, you know, like all of us. But he wasn’t the monster Joe McBride portrayed in that biography he wrote.

MS:
You could feel the love of the actors, for characters they played; it’s like a Jean Renoir picture.

RS:
Frank was, at his height, when his was “the name above the title,” a driven man, and a huge egotist, but he was also, I always thought, a fundamentally good person.

MS:
A work of art comes out of something, and it’s got to be criticized, it’s got to go in front of an audience. It has to be dealt with. This is its nature, its fate. Coming from a Catholic background, a Christian background, with its sense of order in the world, I still have to deal with the lack of order in the world.