Martin Scorsese: Interviews

283 Pages·2017·3.1 MB·English

by  Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese: Interviews
Revised and Updated
Conversations with Filmmakers Series
Gerald Peary, General Editor
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Martin Scorsese
I N T E R V I E W S
Revised and Updated
Edited by Robert Ribera
University Press of Mississippi / Jackson
www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the
Association of American University Presses.
Copyright © 2017 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2017
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Scorsese, Martin author. | Ribera, Robert editor.
Title: Martin Scorsese : interviews / edited by Robert Ribera.
Description: Revised and updated [edition]. | Jackson : University Press of
Mississippi, 2017. | Series: Conversations with filmmakers series |
Includes filmography and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016039514 (print) | LCCN 2016051720 (ebook) | ISBN
9781496809230 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781496809476 (pbk. : alk.
paper) | ISBN 9781496809247 (epub single) | ISBN 9781496809254 (epub
institutional) | ISBN 9781496809261 ( pdf single) | ISBN 9781496809278
(pdf institutional)
Subjects: LCSH: Scorsese, Martin—Interviews. | Motion picture producers and
directors—United States—Interviews.
Classification: LCC n-us— (print) | LCC PN1998.3.S39 (ebook) | DDC
791.4302/33092 [B] —dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039514
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
Contents
Introduction vii
Chronology xii
Filmography xv
Martin Scorsese and the American Underground 3
Doris Freedman / 1970
Dialogue on Film: Martin Scorsese 11
The American Film Institute / 1975
Taxi Dancer: Martin Scorsese Interviewed 45
Jonathan Kaplan / 1977
Raging Bull 52
Michael Henry / 1981
Taxi Driver 66
Paul Schrader / 1982
Chalk Talk 79
Peter Biskind and Susan Linfield / 1986
Martin Scorsese: In the Streets 85
Peter Occhiogrosso / 1987
. . . And Blood 98
Richard Corliss / 1988
Scorsese: A Bicoastal Story 107
Amy Taubin / 1988
vi CONTENTS
What the Streets Mean 110
Anthony DeCurtis / 1990
Martin Scorsese Interviewed 134
Gavin Smith / 1993
Martin Scorsese’s Testament 152
Ian Christie / 1996
Everything Is Form 166
Amy Taubin / 1998
Fresh Air: Director Martin Scorsese 174
Terry Gross / 2003
2006 Charles Guggenheim Symposium Honoring Martin Scorsese 186
Jim Jarmusch / 2006
Martin Scorsese on The Departed 199
Michael Goldman / 2006
Docufictions: An Interview with Martin Scorsese on Documentary Film 205
Raffaele Donato / 2007
InHugo, Scorsese Salutes a Movie Magician 217
Melissa Block / 2011
The Art of Martin Scorsese 222
Jim Leach / 2013
DP/30: Scorsese on TheWolf of Wall Street 234
David Poland / 2014
Index 246
Introduction
In the opening pages of his novel The Last Temptation of Christ, the basis of Martin
Scorsese’s 1988 film, Nikos Kazantzakis writes that the “principal anguish and the
source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant,
merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh.” It is a heartfelt description by
a man who sought a closer relationship to God while acknowledging the struggle
between faith, art, and the temptations of living in the modern world. Kazant-
zakis’s description of his conflicted life can shine a light on Martin Scorsese and
his brilliant, intense films, which, for five decades, have courageously explored
the passions that bind us together but, more often, destroy us. In Mean Streets,
GoodFellas, and The Departed, it is the lure of violence and crime. In the recent The
Wolf of Wall Street, the lure of greed.
Scorsese has frequently returned to his native New York—so vibrant, ebul-
lient, yet so depraved—as a metaphor for the world at large. The darkness is al-
ready embedded in the strictures of nineteenth century Manhattan high society
inThe Age of Innocence. In the crime-ridden landscape of New York of the 1970s,
Scorsese might relate to Travis Bickle’s wish in Taxi Driver that “some day a real
rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets.” But living in the corrosive
urban jungle only partly explains Bickle’s pathology, and Scorsese does not always
need the streets of New York to explore his themes. Much of Bickle’s depravity
is internal, and many of Scorsese’s movies delve into the darkness of the souls of
his protagonists and antagonists, reaching rock bottom with the stalker insanities
of Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, the obsessions of Howard Hughes in The
Aviator, or the sadistic violence of Max Cady in Cape Fear.
Fortunately, Scorsese also provides us (occasionally) with characters to root
for. Countess Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence and Alice Hyatt in Alice Doesn’t
Live Here Anymore struggling for their liberation. Charlie in Mean Streets strug-
gling with his faith and his ambition. In Kundun, the Dalai Lama fighting Chinese
oppression. Scorsese is most positive in his documentaries, with his affectionate
portraits of, among others, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Elia Kazan, and his own
Italian American parents.
vii
viii INTRODUCTION
Scorsese’s love of, and reliance on, cinema began early, in New York’s Little
Italy. With asthma restricting his ability to be a very active child, Marty spent a
fair amount of time in the 1950s at the movie theater or in front of a television set.
In front of those flickering screens, he fell in love with worlds that separated him
from the streets. Outside, he was confronted with the violence and crime of his
New York City neighborhood. In a telling exchange with Paul Schrader, Scorsese
talks about his impressions of cinema as a little boy. “The first image I remember
seeing in a movie theatre,” he recalls, “was a trailer in Trucolor of Roy Rogers and
his horse jumping over a log. My father said, ‘Do you know what Trigger is?’ I said,
‘That’s trigger.’ (Scorsese pulls the trigger of an imaginary gun.) I was about three
or four years old. My father said, ‘No, that’s the name of the horse.’ And there was
this beautiful horse and this guy with fringe jumping and flying in the air like an
angel. Ever since I always wanted to be a cowboy and never was.”
Scorsese was never a priest either, though he wanted to be that as well. In line
with the concerns of many characters in his films, he attributes his call to the
priesthood with a deep desire to belong. “I needed to be accepted somewhere,” he
tells Peter Occhiogrosso in a lengthy discussion of his beliefs, acknowledging that
being a good Catholic boy and living a Christian life proved difficult. “How do you
do that in this world?” he wondered, and imagined answers behind the vestments.
“I figured that maybe wearing the cloth you might be able to find a better way to
do that.” While the priesthood did not work out, he was able to translate those
passions, those questions, into a career in filmmaking. In line with other Catholic
directors such as Robert Bresson and Alfred Hitchcock, Scorsese has entered a
lifelong conversation about religion on the screen. Catholicism, if not always or-
thodox, runs deep in his life and films.
The passion of filmmaking was another form of identity for Scorsese, who at-
tended NYU as a film student in the 1960s and, while working on his first feature,
Who’s That Knocking at MyDoor, stayed on to teach. It was a time that young film-
makers were anxious to translate their experiences to film, to be political and
personal. In one of his earliest interviews, with Doris Freedman on WNYC radio
in 1967, he called filmmaking a “kind of therapy.”
After working as an editor on Woodstock and making his feature, Boxcar Bertha
with Roger Corman, who taught him “how to make a movie in twenty-one days,”
Scorsese had his breakout success. It was Mean Streets, which arrived in 1973. The
opening lines, “You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets,”
reflect Scorsese’s attempts to bridge the gap between the lives he led growing up.
“If there’s any religious theme or concept in my films,” he says later, “I guess the
main one would be the concept in Mean Streets of how to live one’s life.” It is in
many ways still his most personal work. He would worry forever after about the
INTRODUCTION ix
compromises of working within the Hollywood system, the too-expensive pro-
duction costs, and his ability to keep making personal films. This balancing act
continues today, as he continues to work within the system, making personal films
on a grand Hollywood scale. As he tells Amy Taubin, “I use myself as a measuring
rod, try to stay as honest as I can.”
It would be reductive to claim that Scorsese concerned himself exclusively with
one theme during his long career. However, he embraces the idea that there are
threads that run throughout his films. “There is an evolution. I’ve seen it,” he tells
Schrader. “However, you also have patterns—and you have to deal with them.”
With Scorsese what is ubiquitous are lives tinged with crime and violence. His
morally complicated characters—including many criminals and murderers—form
the bedrock of Scorsese’s work, and he argues that they help us understand the
“frailty of being human.” At the heart of these characters is a quest for identity;
that the journey takes them to the temptations of violence, lust, and greed, is not
an act of condoning on Scorsese’s part. Jordan Belfort’s greed in The Wolf of Wall
Street is not to be celebrated, nor is Henry Hill’s involvement in the Lufthansa
heist in GoodFellas. But these deeds are worthy, Scorsese insists, to be explored
and dramatized. Speaking with Ian Christie about Casino, he says, “Very often the
people I portray can’t help but be in that way of life. . . . Yes, they’re bad, they’re
doing bad things, and we condemn those aspects of them—but they’re also human
beings.” And further: “I want to push audiences’ emotional empathy.” Whether you
agree with the films’ perspectives on violence and morality, what cannot be said is
that Scorsese takes these issues lightly.
In his conversation with longtime associate Raffaele Donato, Scorsese speaks
about the cinema’s dual impulses toward recording and interpreting the world
around us. Over the last twenty years, nonfiction filmmaking has increasingly
occupied Scorsese’s time. Many of his best feature documentaries, in a line with
The Last Waltz in 1978, focus on music and musicians, such as No Direction Home,
The Blues, and Living in the Material World. Scorsese also mines the lives of non-
musicians: Elia Kazan, Fran Lebowitz, even the New York Review of Books; and
non-celebrities such as his parents in Italianamerican, and a charismatic young
drug addict in American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince. Yet to him, “there was never
any difference between fiction and nonfiction.” He has sought authenticity and
“documentary power” in the faces, words, and actions of the characters in his
narrative features. Mean Streets, Scorsese claims, was made with actors docu-
menting a specific time and place in New York City. He told Anthony DeCurtis, “I
just wanted to make, like, an anthropological study; it was about myself and my
friends. And I figured even if it was on a shelf, some years later people would take
it and say that’s what Italian Americans on the everyday scale—not the Godfather,