Conversations with Scorsese (8 page)

RS:
I have a little bit of a problem with that movie. I kind of appreciate it without fully feeling gathered in by it.

MS:
Interesting. It was depicting people that we kind of knew, but in a Hollywood way. It was about the numbers game. And everybody ran the numbers. I used to take the numbers back and forth in paper bags. Somebody would say to me, Hey, take this, go over there and get that, and bring it back. So you’d do it.

I was ten years old and that was basically a way of life. Everybody talked
about the numbers they dreamed of. And the number they played. What was the Brooklyn number? What was the Manhattan number? It was easy for us to feed into it, it was like a film being made about people we knew. It didn’t have to win us over. And, of course,
John Garfield could do no wrong as far as we were concerned. [He plays a Mob lawyer trying to force his brother into playing along with a scheme to consolidate the numbers racket.]

RS:
Well, putting it that way—no wonder it appealed to you more than it did me.

MS:
I was trying to figure out the other day: Why does one remember a scene? Like the scene in
Force of Evil
where Thomas Gomez takes his friend who is ratting him out to a restaurant late at night to have coffee.

RS:
It’s been a while since I’ve seen that movie.

MS:
You have to watch that scene. Part of its power, I realized, came from
David Raksin’s music in the background. And the extraordinary power of the dialogue with Gomez, realizing that he was ratted out, and saying, “What have you done to me?” And as they pick him up, the two guys who are thugs suddenly begin to see him crumple because he has a bad heart, and they go, “No, no, take it easy, take it easy, old pal. It’s okay. We’re just taking you with us. We’re not going to harm you.” And they begin to feel sorry for him, the music building. And then the rat, the guy with the glasses, panics. He trips and he falls. And one asks, “What do you want to do with this one?” And the other says, “Shoot him, kill him, kill him. He knows me.” And the guy screams. It’s a close-up, and the gangster, the thug, fires a gun right in the camera. And it’s a series of cuts and camera moves. But most is achieved with the actors and the dialogue, and the use of music. And Gomez has a great speech in there where he says, “You know, sometimes you feel like you’re dying.” And it’s just beautifully done, because he is about to die of the heart attack and he doesn’t realize it. It was just absolutely extraordinary.

RS:
And you were what, twelve, thirteen?

MS:
I was about thirteen years old when I saw it, yeah.

RS:
Okay. So, you are already at that point committed to becoming a movie guy?

MS:
No. No. This is just something—

RS:
Well, what were you doing those drawings for if you weren’t beginning to think—

MS:
I don’t know what the hell I was doing.

RS:
But there’s clearly some instinctive thing going on here.

MS:
But you don’t make movies from where I came from; you don’t. First of all, movies weren’t made in New York in 1959, or they were made by people in the Village, maybe.

And I have to say that as a boy I did have trouble with some
genres, especially the more
romantic genres. I had trouble with
Douglas Sirk. I mean, I saw
Magnificent Obsession.
And I saw
Written on the Wind.
And I was counting the minutes. I’d walk around the theater, then come back and sit down. The only thing was the
color. The color was amazing. Now it’s one of my favorite films, of course.

But I was much more into the
western genre because the West had the outdoors, in
Technicolor, usually. And it had horses. Horses are beautiful. And my mother’s father, Martino Capa, was in the
Italian cavalry, in
Sicily. So he loved horses, too, he used to like watching them. I love any horse picture made from 1946 to 1955—you know,
Blue Grass of Kentucky, The Red Stallion.
There was the texture of the color on the horses. They were in
Cinecolor.

Shane
was a great experience, for example. I couldn’t wait to see
Winchester ’73.
But when my father took me to see it, I had trouble with it, because it was more psychologically mean-spirited. It was very disturbing, almost an ugly picture of the West.
Blood on the Moon—
my parents took me to see that. That was an experience, because of the look of the film. The way they were dressed, it had an authenticity to it, and there’s an extraordinary scene in a bar where
Robert Mitchum fights
Robert Preston. They’re wearing these heavy coats and the fight is not the traditional cowboy fight that I was used to seeing—the darkness, the low angle, these men sort of tumbling on each other, it was humiliating for the two of them. But it had a truth to it, and it was great how this
noir aspect to the movie was really effective.

What was happening was that the noir stuff—mostly set in the cities—started to sneak into these other genres. And I connected with that. In 1953,
Pickup on South Street
was on the bottom half of a double bill. And the expression in that film, the way it was shot, the way the characters were relating to each other, the extraordinary opening sequence with
Jean Peters and
Richard Widmark on the subway [where, as a pickpocket, he dips into her purse and comes up with microfilmed secret documents she’s—innocently—carrying to Communist agents], and the fight scene where he hits her—it was pretty shocking, and it stayed with me.

RS:
Okay. Let me go back to something I raised before. There must have been dozens, hundreds, of young boys like you, living in places like Elizabeth Street, in
situations comparable to yours. How come your situation affected you so powerfully, taking the form of a sort of quiet, unacknowledged rebelliousness?

MS:
I don’t know where it comes from. I don’t know whether it’s weakness, or whether it’s strength. I don’t know why that affected me that way. But I really did believe that there could be a transcendence. I hate to use words like that, but the idea is that there is a part of us that would yearn for something that is—

RS:
Some of us, not all of us. A lot of people yearn just for what they’ve always known.

MS:
Yeah, but I thought, There are some great Catholic artists. For example,
Roberto Rossellini and his film
Europa ’
51.
That for me was something that had hope. It has to do with the teachings of the
New Testament. I really bought into it, because of what I saw around me. I thought this is the right idea: feeling for the other person and giving something to the other person. Compassion, maybe that’s it.

RS:
Well, let me put it another way. Little as you were, and powerless as you were in the situation, there must’ve been some part of you that said, Oh, Christ, Dad, let him alone, referring to your brother or your uncle. Let him be what he wants, let him do what he wants.

MS:
Oh, absolutely. Let it go, yeah. But I also knew what he meant. He was afraid that certain things could happen to them. And invariably he was, you know—

RS:
Half right, at least.

MS:
He was half right. But it’s hard, how you approach the issue. You can hammer it too much, and then they’re not going to listen to anything, you know.

RS:
The only direct knowledge I have of your father is from
Italianamerican.
He’s almost cowering away from your mother. It’s like a Thurber cartoon.

MS:
I know. But he wasn’t really that way.

RS:
But he’s very reserved. And she’s kind of pushing him.

MS:
That was the balance, that was the duo. That was part of a routine they had. She was much more open. He would be more reserved. But once he felt comfortable—if you notice, halfway through the picture, they’re both narrating the same story, and contradicting each other and arguing.

But in the beginning, it was hard for him to be on film, there was no such thing for him as being on film. You never show your personality on film. You’re not
going to show people who you are. Imagine when they saw
Mean Streets.
They were stunned.

RS:
Tell me.

MS:
Well, that opening night at the
New York Film Festival, they were shocked. They didn’t know if it was good or not, but they knew where it came from. They were surprised that that kind of stuff would be on the screen. And my mother went out into the lobby and people ran up to her and they said—I always tell the story—“Mrs. Scorsese, what do you think of your son’s film?” She goes, “I just want you to know, we never used that word in the house.”

And she was right. She was right. The four-letter word [fuck] was never used in the house. In the most heated discussions I never heard that word used by my uncles, by my brother, or by my father. But it was her first response. She just wanted people to know how my parents raised me. We didn’t raise him to be that. But on the other hand, people seemed to like the film. There seemed to be a good reaction to it. And they didn’t quite understand this.

Marty as cowboy.

RS:
Obviously, there was a disconnect between the little Marty they had lovingly tended as a child and young Marty, the explosive filmmaker.

MS:
Those formative years between six or seven and until about fourteen were really, really tough years for me. Because I didn’t fit in that neighborhood. I mean, I couldn’t really be the young person I was trying to be. I wasn’t able to take [my studies] seriously enough to go to
Regis High School, let’s say, and take Greek and Latin. I couldn’t do it. Or wouldn’t do it.

Even so, my first impulse was to go to the priesthood. It was overwhelming. Especially if you were a kid who couldn’t become a member of organized crime. I mean, you had to have a stone heart. You have to be a stone killer.

RS:
Which, of course, your father had no intention of your being.

MS:
But he was quite intense, quite intense. He made you realize that everything had a meaning and everything had to be done a certain way. Meaning that there was a reason why people lived a certain way and behaved a certain way. Even though you’re kids, this is the world you’re in.

RS:
Whereas your mother was more live-and-let-live?

MS:
Yeah, absolutely. If there was a little too much nudity in a new film, my mother would say, “Oh, come on, that’s life.” And my father had to say, “Well, okay.” But he made you aware that there was a code, a morality, that was different from what I was hearing in the church.

RS:
How different?

MS:
It was more guarded.

RS:
Less black-and-white, maybe?

MS:
Yeah, less black-and-white. First of all, the family owes loyalty to itself, to each other. It all stems from how you treat each other in this room.

RS:
So, if that room is small enough, it’s going to increase the intensity?

MS:
It’s the table scene in
East of Eden.
I don’t mean he was pompous or in any way like the character played by
Raymond Massey. But for an eight-year-old or a seven-year-old kid, you hear things that are just pretty scary.

RS:
And your parents are thinking, I don’t know what to do with him?

MS:
Exactly. My father was very concerned: The boy says he wants to be a priest. What if he’s not a real boy? Maybe there’s something different about him, you know.

I wasn’t tough. In a way, you have to not believe in the soul. Certain people in those “mobs” had almost no choice. Some basically good people ended up doing bad things, because they had no choice. Then you have the monsters like the one that Jack becomes.

But there are others who are doomed. My friend
Raffaele Donato used to talk about good people forced into doing bad things because they’re uneducated, because they’re stuck, because they have problems with their families. And on the feast days or the festivals of the saints or whatever, they’d be the ones carrying the saint, and putting the weight on their shoulders to take the suffering. So that’s where a lot of my work comes from. It doesn’t come from a desire to always show the
Italian Americans in this dark way.