Conversations with Scorsese Hardcover - 2011

Excerpt

Raging Bull
 
RICHARD SCHICKEL: You spoke earlier about the limits of friendship and loyalty. Yet around this time a friend did come through for you. I’m talking about Robert De Niro and his determination that you make Raging Bull. This was coming at a time when you were very ill and were, if we’re to believe Peter Biskind’s book, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, part of a fairly heavy drug scene.
 
MARTIN SCORSESE: The only good thing about the drug use is that it was very obvious in my case. And I just had to go to that brick wall. Nobody was going to tell me otherwise, whether it was a rock ’n’ roller, or a studio executive, or an actor. People can try to guide me, but I always have to go my own way.
 
RS: The only reason I bring it up is because it’s part of the public record of your life.
 
MS: Right. After New York, New York I was exhausted to the point where a number of people were worried about my health. I said, “Don’t worry, I’m fine.” And then after the Labor Day weekend in Telluride, at the film festival, I got back to New York and suffered a total collapse. That’s when I finally went to the hospital, and that’s when De Niro came to visit and asked if I wanted to do the film. Really, we had been working on it since Taxi Driver. I realized I had nothing else to do. I had exhausted all the possibilities. Even my friends were all going off on their own. I was alone. And it was time to go back to work. And what I discovered—it’s in Raging Bull and it’s in the other pictures later on—is that I had to come to terms with something.
 
RS: What did you come to terms with?
 
MS: The fighting with myself. You get to the point where you just get used to yourself: that’s who you are, just get on with it.
 
RS: Stop there. What were you fighting in yourself? I mean, you were a talented kid. You had done pretty well for a young guy.
 
MS: I have no idea. Really.
 
RS: Were you fighting the past in some sense?
 
MS: Probably the past, I guess. I didn’t trust myself. I’m not talking about art; I’m talking about myself as a person. I’ve surprised myself too many times in the wrong way.
 
It’s how you treat people around you, how you treat yourself. And then you say, If you make a little bit of peace with yourself, you might be better with the people around you, too. That’s all it is. Maybe it’s maturing to a certain extent, but I don’t think I did. You just get older; you’re a little more tired.
 
RS: Was this tied in to people firing you, or saying you were too damned ambitious?
Was it pushing yourself to succeed when people thought you already had, given your age, your experience? Or was it that you were pressing against their low expectations for you while you had high expectations?
MS: I don’t really know. I mean, I just wasn’t comfortable with myself, who I was, what I was trying to be. Was I trying to be a movie director, or a filmmaker? A director in the style of Hollywood, or a filmmaker in the style of Europe? I mean, I didn’t fit either place. I still don’t. It’s about how you’re trying to express yourself. You’ve got this need to do something, and sometimes it’s crazy. People say, Oh, you’re taking yourself too seriously. But I can’t help it. Out of the seriousness comes the humor, too.
 
RS: It’s perhaps not so apparent to the people around you as it is to you.
 
MS: Maybe, but it is absolutely hilarious at times to me. The gambles I make— I seem to have this need. I try to do other things. I wish I could do many things— like write music. But making movies is the only thing that there seems to be a need for on my part.
 
RS: Raging Bull seems to be your common- consent masterpiece.
 
MS: I don’t know.
 
RS: You don’t think so?
 
MS: I don’t know. I really have no idea.
 
RS: Set aside its masterly qualities for a minute. There’s no doubt you were coming back with it, so to speak, even though most of us didn’t know you’d been away.
 
MS: I was coming back. But I collapsed on that movie, too, during postproduction. And that wasn’t from drugs. That was just from exhaustion—walking pneumonia, apparently. Later, on King of Comedy, Jerry Lewis would make me laugh, which made me cough, and then the bronchial asthma would start. Then he would say, “Would somebody get a goddamn ambulance over here,” and make me laugh more.
 
I was dragging myself through each day on King of Comedy. But I kept pushing, pushing the envelope, seeing what would happen in terms of the work.
 
RS: Did it do your work any good?
 
MS: No, I don’t think it did. And I don’t look at it as heroic. I just woke up one day and I had survived. That’s it. It’s nothing to be proud of.
 
RS: It obviously didn’t do your health any good.
 
MS: No. But, as you know, my whole life I had been reliant on asthma medication. My whole speech pattern is based on that. It’s very fast, and there’s no breathing, the breathing isn’t right.
 
RS: Does the asthma medicine juice you up?
 
MS: Not really.
 
RS: You’re saying medicine, doctors, were second nature to you, just part of your life.
MS: I have friends who say, I’m not going to a doctor, I don’t care what a doctor says. Me, I went to doctors all the time. I felt doctors were interesting.
 
RS: Let’s look at the specifics of Raging Bull. What I love about that movie is its utter refusal to explain Jake LaMotta. I mean, with your first glimpse of the film, you think it’s a genre movie, that it’s going to be like Somebody Up There Likes Me.
 
MS: I didn’t know anything about boxing. On TV, or in the movie theaters, where they’d show the fight on the weekend, the fights all looked the same. All from one camera angle. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I didn’t understand it. It was sports, which took me out of the picture.
 
RS: What I mean to say is that it’s a modernist film, even though it looks like it might be part of a classic Hollywood genre.
 
MS: I never thought it was genre.
 
RS: There never is one of those explanatory scenes—where we learn his father beat him or his mother didn’t like him.
 
MS: I saw too many of those films that came out in the fifties, or late forties, when Freudian psychology was coming in, and every movie explained everything. Knock on Any Door [a tragic 1949 history of a juvenile delinquent], and there’s Nick Romano.
 
You can’t explain a human being with one Freudian term. On Raging Bull, I said let’s take all that out. I don’t want to do any of that. As you know, I was totally resistant to that picture. But Bob seemed to know that it was a picture that was very appropriate for me to do. My old friend Mardik Martin, a very sweet guy, was working on the script, but I gave him no supervision. It was a very traditional script. We went about it in a very conventional way. Jake starts out as a young man, goes through his whole life to the end. And I wasn’t satisfied. I had no intention of making that picture, none. And I was having my own problems at the time, too; I was finishing The Last Waltz.
 
Yet De Niro was very, very persistent about Raging Bull, despite my misgivings.
I had had a lot of problems with myself on New York, New York, and I wasn’t even sure I should work with him again at that point. It wasn’t a matter of what he did, it’s a matter of how I was feeling about the whole actor- director process. I had wanted to do Mean Streets, New York, New York, Taxi Driver. And the next picture I felt strongly about was making The Last Temptation of Christ. And so I felt, Can I do this? Can I go through this process? But I tried to do another version of the script, and it still wasn’t right. Eventually, we agreed that if anything could come of this, Paul Schrader was the one who could write a script for us. Paul, to his credit, accepted the challenge one night over dinner. He said, “I will give you six weeks. I will give it to you in six weeks.”
 
Paul, of course, had his own career. He was about to go shoot a big movie; I think it was American Gigolo. He had come off Blue Collar, all these really good films. And Taxi Driver won the Golden Palm in Cannes, a Scorsese–De Niro picture with Paul’s name scarcely mentioned. These things get a little touchy at times. He didn’t have to do this for us.
 
RS: I understand.
 
MS: But it was just what we needed in terms of structure. He started the picture in the middle. He had the scene at the end in the jail which was very interesting, he did a whole thing with masturbation in there. I thought that was interesting. But I still was not determined to make the movie. There was a meeting with Irwin Winkler and me and Paul and Bob. They got into an argument, because Paul was going away. He said, “Look, I did this as a favor. I’ve got my own things to do.” Rightly so. “I’m not doing the second draft.” By that point I was sort of watching from the side. Irwin somehow worked it out. There were a lot of things in the script that I still was not focused on, though; I was still having my own emotional and physical problems. So I wasn’t at the top of my game. And, quite honestly, I wasn’t that enamored of the script, though there were two or three scenes I really liked. Bob had his own feelings about the script.
 
It wasn’t like Taxi Driver, which Paul delivered finished, complete. You hardly had to do anything with it. Amazing. This was something different, something he was doing for us as a favor. So we had one more meeting with him, and he said, Look. Go ahead, do it your way. Rewrite it yourselves. You should try this, you should try that. Or he would say, I would suggest doing this, combining two characters, making them one. But do whatever you want. And so, basically, that’s what we did. The whole sequence of events is very different from the original script that Paul gave us. But the structure is there. What Paul did was blast through that logjam.
 
Then Bob came to say, “Look, we got the script. Let’s work on it.” He took me to Saint Martin for, like, two and a half weeks—and we wrote ten pages a day, improvised together. I wrote it all in longhand on yellow pads that I still have. Since then, he’s said, You know, there is no script. But there is a script, and it was used by the studio. It’s referred to in the book Final Cut by Steven Bach. Everything in that picture was worked out between me and Bob on a little audio tape recorder on the island. We even had an assistant with us, and she would type out the pages at the end of the day. We would work it out in the morning. I’d write pages in the afternoon. She would type them. And we’d go have dinner. There were no phones. It was total concentration. Everything was done at that little table with that silly cabana umbrella, and we’re looking out at the ocean.
 
We had a little golf cart, and we drove into town to have dinners at these small places, and we just talked and talked and talked and talked and talked. And we were totally alone. We saw only two people that we knew while we were on this island. One night we’re having dinner and [New York Times fi lm critic] Vincent
Canby is sitting over there.
 
RS: No kidding?
 
MS: [Laughs.] I said hello. We were just waving. Another day, who’s walking on the beach but Marco Ferrari. I said hello to him, and that was it. For me it was sort of like a spa, like 81/2, where I completely cleaned out. I was in good shape, given a clean bill of health by the doctors, finally. And I thought, Okay. You know what? Maybe Bob’s right. Maybe this is the right picture to make. Let’s go.
 
RS: Now let’s talk about the film you made.
 
MS: As I said, when Schrader came into it, he started the film right in the middle, with a man who wanted the title, and couldn’t get it because he wouldn’t play ball with the wiseguys—not necessarily because of any moral indignation, but because he didn’t want to share his money with them. He’s going to get hit in the ring and these bastards are coming in and taking the money. They do it with everybody, the character thinks, but why should they do it with me? I’m tougher than they are. What can you say about a guy like that? You’re not giving the audience any reason to like him. He’s not being magnanimous, he’s not being enlightened about it.
 
RS: It extends everywhere else. He doesn’t see the world clearly. It extends to the woman he apparently loves. It extends to his brother, where he makes these horrendous accusations that he’s slept with his wife. Does that come not out of this particular familial situation but out of the fact that life is so tough that no explanation of it can possibly
suffice?
 
MS: That anger and that rage was at the level of my grandparents. They didn’t know how to take advantage of the American way. All they could do was try to have some dignity and respect within the neighborhood. And that was the struggle of my father, too. My father always wore glasses. He finally told me why. He said his eye was bad because his father slapped him in the head when he was about five or six. I asked why. He said: “I said something that lacked respect.”
 
So they were just lucky to get where they were. And that’s the nature of poor people. It has to do with simply trying to hold on to those old values. But Jake’s a character who can’t hang on to those values because of how he feels about himself. He’s in the dressing room and he says something like “I did some bad things in my life.” It’s this extraordinary guilt that he has, and this anger he has, that he acts out of. We did it as honestly as possible. And it had aspects of my family in there, yes, even though I couldn’t fully explain it.
 
Raging Bull also represented something new to me: an acceptance of where I came from. Having made New York, New York, a film that was not received well, I went through a rough period in my life. I came out the other side, and I said to myself, Wait a minute, I can’t deny who I am or where I came from. So I embraced my parents again, and they became a part of my life in the films, too. My father’s in Raging Bull. My mother acted in a lot of the films. They were on the set to help me remember who I am and where I’m from. So I’d been harboring a lot of anger and rage, and I think it just explodes in Raging Bull.

Media reviews

"Blend one great film critic with one great director. Lace with a mutual love of film history and heaping portions of insight, empathy, and fellowship. Richard Schickel’s Conversations with Scorsese is a richly textured and totally engaging triumph."
-Leo Braudy, author of The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon
 
“I loved it.  It offers all the pleasures of eavesdropping on a riveting and wonderfully entertaining private conversation.”
            -Ron Howard
 
“Conversations with Scorsese is the My Dinner with Andre of movie books . . . only much better. Schickel’s relaxed, but astute questioning has bought out the very best in Scorsese, and generated thoughts and memories from him that have never been published before. The two men are not only having a real conversation but also having fun doing it. This book is a treasure, and anyone who loves Scorsese’s work should own it.”
            -Jeanine Basinger, The Star Machine
 
“What a high for film lovers, this conversation between one of America’s greatest directors and a similarly eminent critic. The two cinephiles bring together Scorsese’s life and career from various perspectives, encompassing the trauma and betrayals of a mean-street childhood, the genesis and on-the-set details of each movie, the films and people that have shaped his directorial personality. Schickel offers insights and criticisms along with empathy and the intimate film knowledge to spark fresh and interesting insights from the king of mavericks in a retrospective mood. Wide-ranging and astute, it’s film school on steroids.”
-Molly Haskell, author of Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited
 
“Conversations-with-directors books can go one of two ways: Either the directors want to analyze their work, or they don’t. Those who do either obscure the films with trivial esoterica or—as is the case with Martin Scorsese, in Richard Schickel’s Conversations with Scorsese—illuminate their choices with a pragmatic instinct verging on the intimate, as though they were discussing not shots and lenses but their own biography.”
            -Sam Wasson, LA Weekly
 
 “Putting [Martin Scorsese and Richard Schickel] together is a perfect pairing for an epic discourse about the movies . . . Conversations with Scorsese is likely to stand as the definitive source for Scorsese’s views because he is so engaged—and because Schickel knows just the questions to ask . . . Schickel makes no secret that he is a fan and a friend. Still, he challenges the director, presses a point and states outright whether a particular film works for him. He also manages to keep Scorsese on topic without missing an opportunity to explore an interesting tangent. And there are plenty of tangents—just what you would expect in a spirited back-and-forth between two cinephiles at the top of their game.”
            -Douglass K. Daniel, Associated Press
 
“A veritable library of criticism and collected interviews has been published on Martin Scorsese in the last ten years, but none remotely as valuable as this entry . . . The combination of [Schickel’s] insightful questions and Scorsese’s rapid-fire patter and stream-of-consciousness style makes this an educational and entertaining read . . . Both men’s excitement and admiration for the art and history of filmmaking fills every page. This is no shallow series of how and why questions but a true conversation about art and how one individual has endeavored to create it  . . . Readers will be left simply wanting more. Perhaps the definitive piece of self-commentary that will ever be produced about the work of Scorsese.”
            -Starred review, Library Journal
 
“Schickel almost always strikes the right interrogatory note . . . Along the way, Scorsese and Schickel, who are both steeped in film history, share views about dozens of old pictures—their opinionated enthusiasm should lengthen many Netflix queues. Offering a deep look into the aesthetic, technical and commercial realities of filmmaking, Scorsese provides intimate details about the making of his acknowledged masterpieces . . . Scorsese emerges as a fascinating, obsessive, complex guy. He has always seemed the most companionable of film artists, and, except for his own expansive, autobiographically driven documentaries on American and Italian movies, this is the most probing and enjoyable explication of his accomplished career. A feast for cineastes.”
            -Kirkus
 
“A cross between a film master class and after-hours jam session . . . Scorsese and Schickel’s long friendship and their encyclopedic film knowledge bring a comfort and complexity to their interaction. Scorsese has always been a fluid raconteur, and Schickel brings out the best in him . . . Anyone with even a passing interest in Scorsese’s career or in film history will find a gem on every page.”
            -Publishers Weekly
 
“An illuminating autobiography-cum-film-studies-course from one of the nation’s foremost directors . . . The in-depth treatment provides fascinating insights into Scorsese’s films; even his most obsessed fans will discover new revelations, and hearing him discuss his entire body of work in a single lengthy narrative ties such outliers as The Age of Innocence and Kundun to more-characteristic masterworks like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Both Schickel and Scorsese are utterly movie-obsessed, so a significant chunk of the conversation is inevitably devoted to the classic films they both love; for cinephiles, these passages, where two passionate and supremely informed fans articulately chat about the subjects of their fixation, might be the most rewarding part of this fascinating document.”
            -Booklist