Conversations with Scorsese (7 page)

Catherine and Charles Scorsese on set. Both of Marty’s parents appeared in small roles in many of his films.

RS:
So you lived in a world where everybody smells a rat. Is that what you’re saying?

MS:
Well, I lived in a world where if you did the wrong thing or said the wrong thing, you didn’t know what would happen. I mean, I saw things happen. I saw
people be censured. Not censored: censured. I saw people being slapped, which is worse than being hit.

RS:
There’s a lot of contempt in a slap.

MS:
And it’s done in front of a lot of people. And that’s the worst. And then I saw people lose their minds. I saw people, good men, turn into complete human wrecks by the end of their lives, because they couldn’t make it in the street. People’s lives just imploded.

I don’t want this ever to be about this me as some sickly kid observing from the sidelines. I’m just saying this is where I come from. It’s the reality. I saw some tragedies. At least, I thought they were tragedies.

RS:
You mean, like, a boyhood chum who—

MS:
No. Older, older—my father’s friends, people for whom the last twenty-five years of their lives was one bad day after another. The humiliation of it …

I saw a couple of cases where over the years they just came apart. Because before I was born, something happened. They aspired to a kind of street life. They were in the rackets, they were in with the wiseguys. But they didn’t have it in them to hurt somebody. Didn’t have it in them to use their heads a certain way. When the time came for them to do what they had to, they couldn’t do it, and they were humiliated, constantly.

And yet, my father, out of loyalty, stayed with them and took them in as respected people. And so there was that constant discussion: How could you embrace this person, how could you still take this person seriously if no one else took him seriously? My mother didn’t say it, but I heard other people say it. And my father would say, So-and-so, he’s related to so-and-so, he was an old friend of mine, he was loyal to me, I’m going to be loyal to him. And that was it. Until the end. I was fascinated by that.

It’s just the nature of the world I knew. And, as I said, I get excited again to even tell you the story about that scene in
The Departed
that deals with those issues, a man coming apart who has a lot of power.

But I think who I turned out to be has a lot to do with Irish Catholicism. When I first started bringing books home, one of the first ones I got my hands on was
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
James Joyce. The sensibility of that novel—I was right into it. It was fine with me [
laughs
].

RS:
I probably read it at the same age you did.

MS:
I was about fifteen.

RS:
Me, too. It reinforced for me my growing atheism—although that sermon about the length of eternity is a great piece of writing.

MS:
Oh, it’s wonderful. In
Mean Streets,
we put Harvey Keitel’s hand on the flame of eternity—that probably comes from Joyce. But we did hear sermons like that—the sermons about sex, for instance. That’s what we heard in some cases. Other priests, not. There were some priests at Cardinal Hayes that were not that way.

RS:
It’s interesting to me that your parents were not particularly religious.

MS:
They didn’t buy into it. It’s maybe partly a reaction to the peak of the American Catholic church of the fifties. I mean, you’re coming off of
Going My Way, Bells of St. Mary’s.

RS:
But they’re Irish versions of Catholicism. Isn’t that a conflict?

MS:
Yes. In fact, the nuns who were teaching us had Irish brogues. And that caused some tension.

Marty’s second-grade class photo. He is second from the left in the back row, against the wall.

RS:
There is a difference between Irish Catholicism and Italian, isn’t there?

MS:
I’m glad you asked that. Because last time
Father Principe came to my house he started talking about the difference between Irish and Italian Catholics. I didn’t
see any of this at the time, but I think that’s one of the reasons I was so attracted to
The Departed.
There’s something about [screenwriter]
Bill Monahan’s Irish Catholicism, the fatalism of it. And the humor. The nature of how people feel about themselves. I think I was more exposed to the Irish Catholicism because of the elementary school and also Cardinal Hayes.

Father Principe was the one who finally, when he saw
Taxi Driver,
actually summed up my career. He said, “I’ve always told you, ‘Too much Good Friday and not enough Easter Sunday.’ ” That’s it.

RS:
That’s pretty good.

MS:
That sums it up. And I think it has a lot to do with Irish Catholicism.

RS:
I suppose, just as your spiritual and intellectual life in this period was changing, so was your taste in movies.

MS:
When I started to go to high school, I realized my interest in movies was in more than just American films, because having been exposed at the age of five to the Italian
neorealist films I also was very, very closely tied to the European sensibility. Obviously, I’m not European, I’m American. But I had Europeans around me all the time, and so I was always pulled in that direction.

Sometimes I would see these
films on television when I’d come home from school
—Diary of a Country Priest,
Jean Renoir’s
Diary of a Chambermaid,
which was in English, of course, and
The River
by Renoir. But
Beauty and the Beast—

RS:
I just think it’s wonderful.

MS:
It’s something.

RS:
I don’t like fantasies much in movies. But it’s one of the rare fantasies I love.

MS:
Boy, that works. So what happened was that when I was going to high school, I would get
Cue
magazine and I would see these movies that were mentioned. There was
Alexander Nevsky,
and I would go to this theater called the Thalia.

RS:
You didn’t know what you were going to get.

MS:
No, I didn’t know what I was going to get. In a way I was aware of the Bergman pictures;
The Seventh Seal
was the one that was a revelation. I wanted to see it, and I was mesmerized by it; I kept going back to see that. There was
Smiles of a Summer Night,
and it was condemned. And so I had to ask the priest in confession if it was okay. And he said, “Oh, you’re studying film, it’s all right.” It didn’t do any good because I didn’t understand it. I was too young, much too unsophisticated.
And then I saw some of the other ones, but of course I was not able to understand them, either.

And then there was a rerelease of Renoir’s
Grand Illusion.
Around 1958 or ’59, an intact copy of the film that the Nazis hadn’t burned was discovered. Renoir’s name was very important to me. I knew it had something to do with a painter—his father. When I was a child I saw some of [Pierre-Auguste] Renoir’s paintings in the museum. I’d go to the museum a lot. But I’ve never forgotten
The River
[Jean Renoir’s coming-of-age tale, set in India, about three girls falling in love with a former soldier] on that big screen. I was eight years old, nine years old. It was an astounding movie to me, and it still is. In fact, I showed it to
Wes Anderson about four or five years ago. And I just spoke to Wes two days ago, and he said, That’s when it began, his film
The Darjeeling Limited.

RS:
Really?

MS:
Yeah. He said, while he was watching it, he said to himself, I think there might be something here. And then it opened him up to
Satyajit Ray films, and the Merchant-Ivory films they made in India. And so it’s there.

RS:
And neorealism? I think of
Mean Streets
or a picture that I discovered more recently and like quite a bit,
Who’s That Knocking at My Door.
They’re both in the
neorealistic manner. [The latter is about a young man who falls in love with a woman who has been raped and cannot handle the notion that she has been “ruined.”]

MS:
Uh-oh.

RS:
No, it’s good, Marty.

MS:
Well, it’s a rough sketch for
Mean Streets,
really. If you see them both, you have an idea of what my life was like in those days. Those Italian neorealist films were shown on TV, in 1949, or 1948.

RS:
Imagine that.

MS:
Yeah, every Friday night they had an Italian film with subtitles:
Shoeshine, Rome 11:00, Anna, Bitter Rice.
My grandparents were sitting around crying, but it was not nostalgia. It was a hard, bitter truth for them. And the solemnity with which these films were viewed, the solemnity with which they were discussed, by the different generations, made me realize that that was the real world. What I was seeing in those pictures is real. The human condition is that.

But something else was happening in those pictures. I didn’t understand the war. I didn’t know from partisans and fascists. I had no idea. But I did understand
the extraordinary communal experience around that little TV screen, watching those scratchy black-and-white images. We had compassion for the people in those pictures.

RS:
So that was in your bones when you started to make your
first features?

MS:
Yes, but what was also in my bones was
Singin’ in the Rain.
A great experience. My brother and I went to see that in 1952. And at nine or ten years old, we were picking up on all the satire. It’s just so well done, so deftly put together—[Gene] Kelly, and
Donald O’Connor and
Debbie Reynolds, that was extraordinary. My favorite scene—it’s really about what a director does—is when the director is trying to explain to the actress to speak into the microphone: It goes through the wire and comes through here, and we put it on a disk. But you have to speak into the microphone. It’s also about that extraordinary quiet that you have to have as a director—knowing when to speak and when not to—which goes back to when I was a kid.

Because of being the youngest, whatever conflict was going on, I couldn’t say anything. And I find that in directing: I have to keep my feelings hidden from key crew members or, in particular, from the actors. Because my feelings are uncontrollable. Or can be. So I have to pull back. And it’s an excruciating experience for me.

But there’s the humor in it, too, the humor of being in this situation. Maybe that’s why I loved
Sunset Boulevard,
because nothing is held back in it. There was nothing like seeing that picture in 1952, when I was ten. To me it was a horror film. An extraordinarily, madly funny horror film. Burying the chimpanzee, and the poor woman in that room with no locks on the doors.
William Holden in the pool.

RS:
How does that get into something like
Mean Streets
?

MS:
It probably doesn’t—not directly. But by the time I was maybe twelve, thirteen, fourteen, I was asking myself why some film was affecting me, like
Force of Evil,
which I saw on
Million Dollar Movie.
Why did certain scenes in that film affect me so strongly? And because it was on
Million Dollar Movie,
I could revisit it every night for a week.
Force of Evil
was the big film.