Cameron Diaz and Leonardo DiCaprio mix it up in Gangs of New York.

Tim Rhys (MM): So thanks for meeting with us.

Martin Scorsese (MS): Yes. I’m sorry it’s taken so long.

MM: I have a lot of questions and I’m going to dive right in. I know it’s hard to be introspective this early in the morning.

MS: It’s okay. I’ll try my best.

MM: First, this is for our annual New York issue, so I wanted to start by asking you about New York filmmaking and—

MS: —“New York filmmaking” is already a problem. There’s regional filmmaking in America, but it’s American cinema, you see?
This business of creating a cinema of different regions—San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles—it separates and puts barriers between filmmakers. It’s a problem. There’s been this talk of “New York filmmaking” mainly from the early ’70s. Prior to that, you had some films made here in the ’60s, but really very few were made in New York until after World War II. There was Neorealism, Jules Dassin’s Naked City, the 20th Century Fox films—Kiss of Death
and that sort of thing. But it’s interesting.
It expanded as the cameras got lighter and easier to move around, so— .

MM: What I wanted to ask was—

MS:—by the late ’50s, early ’60s you had the American underground movement—John Cassavetes, Shirley Clarke. They happened to be based in New York at that time. Shirley Clarke still is. Cassavetes then moved to LA, where he continued making American independent cinema. Whether you consider Cassavetes a New York filmmaker or not, he came from New York. He made Shadows in New York. I have a problem with everybody who for the past 25 years has been pushing LA further from New York. Granted, there’s two different ways of seeing the world, I guess. But it’s all American cinema. We’re all Americans.
I know George Lucas feels good about regional cinema. I just think it’s getting to a dangerous point, because it’s compartmentalizing younger filmmakers for money. They [distributors] will say “Oh, that’s a New York independent feature. We’ll pay two cents for that. If it was LA we’d give you 20 cents.”

MM: Money’s always the issue, isn’t it. I was surprised to find out that at first you couldn’t even get the money to make Taxi Driver in New York,
so you were considering San Francisco and—

Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel in Mean Streets (1973)

MS: —We wanted to make the film, the story, so badly. We thought about San Francisco, but the nature of the city isn’t the same, where a person hails a cab and gets in. As Paul Schrader put it, the passenger has control of your life for the next 10 minutes, an hour. In a way, anything can happen. It’s a very strange feeling.

MM: So what do you think about the vibrancy of independent film in New York in this economy, right now? Do you have a feel for that?

MS: Yeah, it’s very exciting. But still I think it’s dangerous for the philosophy of filmmaking to separate the different “movements” of independent film. What are the characteristics of a “New York” film, anyway? It’s shot in the New York streets, that’s all. So I think that mindset keeps some independent film out of the mainstream. I’m worried about that, because that automatically means less money. I came out of a period in the ’70s where directors dealt with themes which independent filmmakers today still deal with. The more dangerous themes. The more personal themes. But we were able to do it within the context of Hollywood cinema and with Hollywood studio money.

But that [financing] is almost gone now. These themes are not “commercial” enough. Yet the same people who say that look back on the ’70s as the “Golden Age” of cinema. It’s certainly debatable. But it’s dangerous if these bigger budgets only go to pictures which have a certain kind of philosophy. Then it becomes a consumer product only, which these days is devoured and absorbed usually on one weekend and maybe on DVD before it’s sent to the rest of the world. It’s one philosophy represented in most of these films—90 percent of them. That may not be the best thing, to give people around the world just one impression of what America is in this day and age.
I just think it’s dangerous. And it’s not healthy for American filmmakers. Anyway, that’s my thought about New York filmmaking. [laughs]

“I wish I could compose music; I wish I could play music. And I think I get as close as possible with the editing of the films. Over the years music has been an even more important influence than—or as important as—film. There’s no doubt about it. Painting, movement, dance, sculpture— it’s all cinema.”

MM: You know what, I don’t think
I’m going to get through my seven pages of questions…

MS: And another thing! [laughs]

MM: As a follow-up to that, you just made Gangs of New York, a period piece about some violent occurrences in New York City. As we talk today, just a few days after—

De Niro in Raging Bull (1980)

MS: —Yeah, but it really wasn’t. It was New York City, but it was still a formation of a city. Which country was it? Was it Confederacy or Union? Who were you aligned with? And basically the gangs of the underworld and the poor people had their own kind of society, which was not fitting in with the power structure.

MM: So with the Sept. 11th anniversary just passing, have you worried that the terrorist attacks desensitized the country and diminished the impact of what you’re trying to say with a movie like Gangs?

MS: Oh, no. The film isn’t about violence.
It’s about a number of things—one of which is ‘what is this country?’ And ‘are immigrants Americans?’ And ‘must we, as Americans, accept and embrace each wave of immigrants?’ Look at what’s going on right now. I’m not defending, supporting or trying to bolster up this movie in any way. I’m saying that this film just happens to be dealing with subject matter which is vital to all Americans at this point.

But the other thing about the picture is it has a historical background that shows New York in a sense representing the country. Because it was this seaport, people who were coming to America would usually disembark here. And what did they do when they disembarked? They had to go get jobs, become part of the workforce or somehow assimilate into American society. They were not welcomed. So what we have is a movie about a period of time in which this quintessential American city was trying to define itself through struggle.

MM: I know you had some struggles of your own as you edited the film, especially toward the end, depicting the violence of the draft riots—

MS:—It ends with the backdrop of the draft riots. The foreground is the playing out of the conflict between Bill the Butcher and Amsterdam. Amsterdam is played by Leo DiCaprio and Bill the Butcher by Daniel Day-Lewis. And basically the story in the foreground is Amsterdam having to dispatch, or confront, his own demons in the guise of a man who in a sense has become his father, emotionally.
The villain gets dispatched by the hero, because that’s the tradition of the American epic genre. But my villain is a bad bad guy and my hero is a good bad guy. [laughs] So he dispatches him, but in so doing he represents what’s happening to the country. The old wave is going out and the new wave is coming in. After 1865 it’s a different country. It’s a real country. It’s really the end of the Revolution. The Revolution started in 1776, went to 1783 or ’84. The country never really galvanized until after the Civil War.

MM: So in all those well-publicized bouts to trim the end, you don’t feel at all as if your vision was ever compromised?

MS: No, I don’t feel like the vision was compromised. I just basically keep tweaking to make things clearer. Clearer, or just more in line with my way of pacing. Sometimes I look at it again and say this is too fast or this is too slow. I’m still doing that now. And I’m doing sound effects and music now. But the thing about it is a balance between the historical backdrop and the personal story in the foreground. Because what I’d like to try to do is have a climactic sequence in the film that encompasses both—the climax of the conflict that’s going on in the city and the climax of the conflict between hero and villain. In a sense, ultimately, the history overwhelms everything.

Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Age of Innocence (1993)

The change in the city is represented by Amsterdam. He’s the younger person representing the new society in America. I’m not talking about the movers and the shakers, the George Templeton Strongs who wrote those diaries at the time. Those were the upper classes. I’m talking about what Bono meant when he wrote the song about the hands that built America. My grandfathers came here. One was a ditch digger for Con Edison, the other built scaffolding for construction.
So their hands literally “made” the country… the Italians, Jewish, Irish. The Irish were the first major wave—they caught it all. So it’s an interesting backdrop to have this story about fathers and sons worked out. But the father and son story is an ancient one in which the son has to kill the father. Just as we all pretty much have to do in our own lives.

MM: You’ve always said that you see film as a means of self-expression. Are you ever frustrated that after all these years, all the movies, all the acclaim—many of course believe you’re the greatest living American director—

MS: —Some do.

MM: Does it ever frustrate you that you can’t simply make movies the way you want to make them? That there are still people who have to ultimately “approve” your art? And part two—how do you feel about the stripping down of the moviemaking process with the advent of digital video? Moviemaking without all the apparatus?

MS: Well, there are two questions there. The answer to the first one is that I’m not a person who could write a script on my own every year or two which wouldn’t demand too much of a budget. The stories I’m attracted to are just not that way. They have bigger canvases; they’re more complex. As with Casino or Goodfellas, let’s say, or The Age of Innocence, to a certain extent, or Kundun, even, and this picture. So that’s what I’m drawn to, and it would be great to be able to say “Okay, my films have made the most money in the history of cinema. (Most of them, not all of them.) And although I don’t want to open a studio, I am now entitled to get the bank loans, whatever, to write checks for as much as
I need.” But that’s just not the reality. And one has to work within the reality. When you have something you’re burning to make, you have to consider the pros and cons of independent money. With a budget of $96 million or something you have to be responsible for that money. So you have to try to combine what interests you with some elements of box office and some responsibility to the studio.

MM: So you always have to consider the box office before you’ll develop a project.

MS: You really, really do. I mean, with some films more than others. In the case of Kundun, the best we could do is make it as honestly as possible. We had an excellent budget for a film that might be termed more of an “art film” than a commercial picture. No one can complain about that [budget]. But in a case like this [Gangs], when you want to make a picture that’s “sprawling,” and you want to give the impression on the big screen—on a wide, anamorphic screen—that the story and the people are just falling off the edges; that you can hardly contain them… That means you need a good budget. First you have to create the city, because nothing like it still exists. So when you’ve been wanting to do something like Gangs of New York for 20-some-odd years, the main thing that kept it from happening was the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan.

MM: And you were finally able to do that at Cinecittá in Rome.

MS: Yeah, because of the artistry they have. And also because it was a good deal, from what I understand. You can ask [producer Harvey] Weinstein about that. But I think the main thing was that I’m dealing with the tradition of the American epic here. Which means you need the negative, the positive, the love story—you need all of it in order to have something that’s attractive to the box office. And hopefully also to work out a personal story that means something to me. But the key thing is the more money you get, the more responsible you are for it. I think that’s the main thing that’s changed from the ’70s.

Kundun (1997)

MM: I want to ask you a couple of “process” questions before we run out of time. After watching Who’s That Knocking at My Door again the other night it occurred to me that many of your signature visual elements—the MOS shot with music over it, the tableau, the voiceover, certain camera moves—these elements of your style were there right from the beginning. Do you believe one can ever actually “develop” a visual style as a director? Or is one’s style simply refined as his career progresses?

MS: It’s a tough question because that’s over 30 years ago for me. If you’re still doing the same thing year after year, maybe that’s not such a good thing. Maybe I’m looking
for some sort of development. Maybe I’m searching for something that can make me grow. On the one hand, it’s a good thing if you can make only one picture in your life. On the other, you can make the case that if your style doesn’t evolve you haven’t grown as a person.

MM: But then you wouldn’t be an “auteur” either, right? Not that it probably matters from where you sit right now, but isn’t a signature style the essence of what that word means?

MS: Well, the thing about it is “auteur” really just means that I don’t “go to work.” I do what I want to do. That’s all it really is, I think. And if what you want to do has some appeal to the studios and some appeal to the popular audience, that’s pretty good. But what’s interesting is I don’t have the humility of a good, strong, old-fashioned Hollywood director who could say “I’m doing a musical next week. After that I’m doing a pirate picture. After that I’m doing three gangster films.” Or even be content with being saddled with one style of filmmaking. Not saddled, but at the studios they thought certain directors were only good for, say, Joan Crawford type films. Tearjerkers, romances. Others were really happy with westerns or action pictures—worlds that were mainly about men. For example, the types of films Douglas Sirk or Howard Hawks or John Ford made. I admired them. They gave me a lot of inspiration. But at the same time I got inspiration from Italian Neorealist films.

I was about five, six or seven years old when they started leaving a very strong impression on me. So I’m sort of in between the two and I kind of bounce back and forth. Sometimes I wish I could’ve been a real Hollywood director of the old school. At the same time I feel totally satisfied with a combination of that, and in telling stories or touching a chord in people that stylistically is inspired by Italian filmmaking of the ’40s and ’50s. Some French, Japanese, Polish and English, too. Given a choice, that’s what I tend to gravitate toward. As much as I’m tempted to say ‘Ah, I’d love to do a musical, I’d love to do this or that….’

MM: But you’ve done that. You’ve “genre-jumped” with the best of them.

MS: Yes, I genre-jumped with New York, New York. But
what I tried to do is revise
the genre. Which apparently
I wasn’t able to. A lot of people felt that wasn’t such
an interesting revision. As opposed to what you have with the brilliance of a Baz Luhrmann, who really has revised the musical genre.

MM: Will you do your great western someday?

Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)

MS: I think this is it. Gangs of New York.
I don’t know if it’s great, but it’s a western. An eastern western. It’s a cross between a western and a gangster film, in a way.

MM: An eastern western. I like that.

MS: [laughs] Yeah, and by the way, I only came to that realization a few weeks ago. I was looking through the scenes and I thought—this is literally it! [laughs] I mean, it has all the elements of the traditional western—the difference is wide open spaces. This is New York, this movie, and the people are all pushed together, living on top of each other. Here, if people weren’t getting along, they still had to live closer than you and I are sitting right now. Down the Five Points [the neighborhood where Gangs takes place, named for the points created by the intersection of Park, Worth and Baxter Streets—ed.] particularly, where 40,000 people of different religions and races lived together.

MM: You had a huge cast in Gangs. I have a couple of question about acting and directing actors.

MS: Go ahead, go ahead.

MM: First—no one directs character actors like you do. How do you consistently pull brilliant performances from the secondary players in your films?

MS: I don’t know. In some cases they’re non-actors. Like my mother, and some of the people in Goodfellas… I mean, on the street you have to be a good actor.

MM: Is it too simplistic to say you first choose people who are completely at ease with other people?

MS: No, that’s it. Very much so. And also, in a case like Goodfellas or Casino, you pick people who understand that world. So if something happens, they can go with it. They intrinsically know their position in that world. They know that if they’re in a room with someone of higher status in their group and
I want them to go with what happens in the improv, they don’t suddenly cross a line and lose who they’re supposed to be. Because they are that person, in a way. In other cases, like with Cape Fear or Age of Innocence, you simply have wonderful actors you can depend on.

MM: We were watching Taxi Driver again the other night and my friend said about your performance “God, he’s really good.” You were very natural. Your parents were always very natural, too.

MS: Yes, yes they were!

MM: You never had any formal training as an actor, did you? How did you get your parents to be so at ease on camera?

MS: They never took me seriously, in that sense. They thought ‘It’s just Marty. If our son wants us to go there, we’d better do it.’ And they treated Bob De Niro that way, too. You can see it in King of Comedy. My mother’s voice is off-camera. She’s De Niro’s mother.

MM: And of course in Goodfellas, too.

MS: Yes, in Goodfellas, you could really see it! We just put two cameras down… I also learned to tell stories the way my mother told stories. The way my father told stories was slightly different. He had a darker, more dramatic aspect. My mother had the sense of humor. He had a sense of humor, too, but it was more ironic. Hers was just about the futility of being human, in a way. His was darker, more Sicilian, more medieval. He had an extreme moral code. There was right and there was wrong and that was it. You could negotiate with him, but once something was done it was done. And this made a great impression on me when I was young, because we lived in an apartment about the size of this room. So my storytelling ability came from the two of them, and the connection they had with movies. My father would take me to movies a lot. And a lot of what I couldn’t say to him was expressed in the emotion we both felt watching a certain movie. And as we got older, thankfully, I was able to talk with him.

There are so many people who regret never really being able to speak to their father and mother before they die. Well, luckily,
I was able to express some feelings... But I do know that my mother and her side of the family had a very interesting sense of humor. A great way of telling stories.

Ray Liotta, De Niro, Paul Sorvino and Joe Pesci in Goodfellas (1990)

MM: So you were very natural… naturally.

MS: [laughs] But I could only do me. And also, I didn’t really intend to do that part in Taxi Driver. My friend was supposed to play it, George Memmoli, who is now dead. You know him, he was the very heavy guy in Mean Streets. He was supposed to be the guy in the back seat, but he had suffered a terrible accident on a low-budget film and it eventually killed him. That’s why these kids shooting these low-budget movies have to watch out. They try to do tricks and stunts and don’t have the right people. They think nothing will happen because they’re young. Don’t do it!

So anyway, I jumped in to do that part because it was the last two weeks of shooting, we’d gone through a very extreme casting process and we’d used everyone.
I did the best I could. I got an acting lesson from De Niro. He was helping me with it. When I said ‘put the flag down,’ he turned around and said “make me.” So I gave him all the reasons why he had to put the flag down. ‘Because I’m the passenger, etc.’ He rarely looked at me, and he wasn’t reacting, so I had to keep going. I had to push him, and that was great.

MM: Other moviemakers talk about what a poet you are when it comes to combining music and imagery. What’s your process for choosing the right music? There are so many examples. In Goodfellas, when Billy Batts is beaten in the Suite Night Bar, the event that “sinks” our three goodfellas, you chose Donovan’s Atlantis.

MS: [laughs] Yeah, yeah. “Way down below the ocean...”

MM: And in Alice you used a favorite of mine, the Dolly Parton song, “I Will Always Love You.”

“It would be great to be able to say ‘Okay, my films have made the most money in the history of cinema. I am now entitled to write checks for as much as I need.’ But that’s just not the reality. And one has to work within the reality. You have to combine what interests you with some elements of box office.”

MS: Oh, yeah. I love that, too. I heard it and just loved the way Dolly Parton sang… that was the month that song came out. And Paul Schrader was a big admirer, still is, of country-western music. I liked country music because my mother liked it. She listened to it on Saturdays. That’s the odd thing. We were Sicilian-Americans, but being in New York, we were exposed to different kinds of music.
You could see opera, all different kinds of things. And on the radio, Saturday mornings, she would put country-western music on.
I’d hear Hank Williams, all those guys.

MM: So you watch a scene you’ve shot and come up with these great musical choices. How do you do it?

MS: The thing is, in most cases the songs, or the pieces of music, like “Intermezzo,” the Cavalleria Rusticana music in Raging Bull, are in my head for years.

MM: You’re always looking for a place to put them?

MS: In a way. But the songs, either the lyrics or the instrumental aspects of the song or the tones of the voices, like Hank Williams’ voice (I still haven’t been able to use a Hank Williams song in a picture), they create a feeling in me, a mood, a tone. And sometimes camera movement and issues/48/images, too, that may be of a time and place. They won’t be right for every film. But if ever there was a film, let’s say, that had a bar scene, and it took place in 1950, and it needed a certain kind of music, I might say here’s my chance to use this song I’ve always wanted to use… But is it right for the scene? That becomes a whole other thing, see—is it right for the scene? Now in some cases, some of the scenes are done and once the music is put into the film, as with Goodfellas and Casino, it’s exactly in the places I imagined those songs to be. Then there are holes in the picture. So I start to fill those gaps in a very simple way. I go to the period of time that that scene is taking place—1962 or ’63, let’s say. I’ll check all the popular music from ’63 back to ’55 and figure anything like that can be heard. Then I narrow it down to a few songs I like. And within that I make further choices, particularly based on the lyrics at that point. I don’t want the lyrics to hit too literally on the nature of the picture.

MM: Do you feel like you’re still learning?

MS: Oh yeah, even more so now.

MM: How do you mean, more so? Is directing a “the more you know, the more you know you don’t know” kind of thing?

MS: Exactly, yeah. Cinema has a way of humbling you. I was just looking at a film by a British director, Thorold Dickinson. He did a movie called Queen of Spades, based on the Alexander Pushkin short story. He said when you get down to trimming a half-foot here and there from a film—when you trim milliseconds—that’s when you get to know the true nature of cinema. And it’s true. It’s frame-by-frame, perf-by-perf. And by the way, that’s some of the roughest cutting you’ll ever do, because there’s always a little more.

MM: And you’ve been doing exactly that for the past few weeks on Gangs, right?

De Niro as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976): At one point Scorsese considered shooting in San Francisco.

MS: Yeah, because I’m always seeing other things—it’s like a giant sculpture. You keep chipping away and chipping away. Kundun was that way, but that was more like a painting than a sculpture. And it had to be a whole different mood, tone and style, or should I say “pace.” You had to give yourself to the movie and give yourself to a trance state. I wanted to put the audience in a trance and experience something of a religious nature, even if you’re not a religious person. But the trick there—which I realized as I was editing—was the juxtaposition of issues/48/images and scenes dealing with non-action being the action. Therefore it was emotional, but not emotion, that was heavily expressed. It had to do with texture and color and mood. It was like a piece of music.

MM: But these are things you always think about, are they not?

MS: Not necessarily. Each film is different. Kundun was interesting because that really made itself evident. I’d say ‘Oh, we’re going with a different color here.’ But no, we had to juxtapose a lot of different scenes. Because there were three different Dalai Lamas. The story line was very simple. Basically, at some point the Chinese come in…

We ended up shifting scenes around in the editing and I pulled two weeks of shooting at night. We dropped it all. And maybe some people don’t think the film was successful, or whatever. But it’s a certain kind of film. As I say, you’ve gotta give yourself to it. In a case like that, where I become satisfied with the film is ultimately in what the film dictates. You don’t know that until you get into each picture.

MM: Hearing you talk about the editing reminds me to ask about crew. You’ve been working with Thelma Schoonmaker forever, but how do you choose other key crew? You’ve worked with several different cinematographers, for instance.

MS: To an extent it’s personality. Or else I’ll find someone I think is right. With the screenwriters—in the case of Jay Cocks, for instance, we’ve been the closest of friends for 30 years. So you work with a writer on a particular thing. In many cases it starts from an idea I had and it’s developed over a period of years.

Or, in a case like Taxi Driver, it was written by Paul Schrader and was totally his creation. In a case like that, a writer like that, he does what he does. You don’t go in and say… The script was suggested to me by Brian De Palma, and I finally did the picture. But only after Mean Streets was I able to get it. Having De Niro in it, too, helped get us the money.

In some cases [Schrader] and I would get together over the years when we’ve had projects together. He’d write something, it may get made, may not get made, with me as director. And on the other hand, when I read Bringing Out the Dead, I thought the only person who could write the screenplay would be Paul. So I gave it to him, he loved it and he wrote it. So I do try to combine—

The door opens and Lois Smith cuts us off. I’m barely warmed up and it’s over? I feel like singing “Atlantis.” Six pages of questions remain unanswered. I plead for another five minutes. She says “Well, you wanted to get that photograph of Marty standing by the window. We can’t do that, then.” ‘I’d rather you give me the five minutes,’ I say. She hesitates, then nods her stay of execution...

MS: So anyway, that’s a serendipity thing. And Jay Cocks with The Age of Innocence—he gave me the book originally. Even Gangs of New York. When we say we’ve been wanting to make this for 25 years, it’s really a film of this time, this setting, this period of American history, that we wanted to make for the past 25 years. It’s not necessarily [this film]—you know what I’m saying? It has evolved over time. So I find that there are certain writers that are more to my sensibility. Nick Pileggi is another one. It’s the person who’s best for the project.

MM: What’s the most enjoyable part of the process for you? Three words or less.

MS: [laughs] Well, the editing is where it really comes alive in another way for me.

MM: The least?

MS: The shooting.

MM: Really?

MS: Yeah, because there are too many questions. And sometimes questions distract. I mean, the nature of directing is questions. But the person asking the questions doesn’t know if they’re going to distract me or not. Only I’ll know that when I get the question. And so there’s that state of anxiety. I’m comfortable being in a state of anxiety that way. I don’t like to have anxiety about other things. Like will the actors do this? Will that happen? Will it rain? We can’t match, you know…

MM: Are there any moviemakers working today who inspire you as Cassavetes did early on?

MS: In the past I would’ve said, ‘Oh, I don’t catch up with modern filmmaking.’ But that’s not true anymore. I’ve actually been seeing a lot of modern films in the past few years. There’s a lot of Iranian films I like. And the younger American directors—Wes Anderson’s films, I really like. Chris Nolan, Paul Thomas Anderson, Linklater. When I see films by these guys, and I’m not mentioning all the names I want to mention, I feel like I’m not wasting my time. This film means something to me. I’m also learning how to tell a story with pictures. In some cases, I can never do what they do because they’re of this modern world, I’m not. I’m from the past.

MM: They might differ with you on that… What are the three films every film student should know backwards and forwards?

MS: The problem now is all these “10 best” lists. When they did the “10 best” in 1956, they only had 50 years of film to draw from. Now you’ve got 100 years. I think you should do the 10 best from like 1900 to 1960, and then make another list from 1960 to 2010. I’m always going to be talking about films that affected me when I first saw them. Films like Citizen Kane, obviously. What I learned there was the nature of directorial expression, as opposed to the seamless films of John Ford and William Wyler, let’s say.

That doesn’t mean I wasn’t just as moved and shocked by some John Ford pictures. I was shocked at Midway. But it was a seamless way of directing. It was a classical style. Welles came in and showed you where the camera was.
He showed what you could do with the camera. And not just camera tricks, but how it expresses personality. And how it expresses power.
It’s really about expressionism, I guess, in the cinema. Welles and Gregg Toland came in and turned everything upside down. So that’s when I became aware of what a director could do for the first time. Up to that point it was just classical style for me, and I didn’t know if I could ever do something like that. But when I saw Welles, mixed with Shadows by Cassavetes, where the characters are way up front and it’s about relationships, it’s about improvisation.
It’s about a certain reality between people that is so honest, so truthful, that it’s very difficult to watch. Now combine those and that’s what I was thinking. And then the lush cinema of John Ford with The Searchers, or… and when I say lush I saw it originally in Vista Vision. Big difference. And then there was Pressburger and The Red Shoes, the use of color expressionism, the madness of being devoted to art and film and the outrageousness of his take on visual storytelling in that film.

MM: As we finish out the second year of the new millennium, are you at all optimistic about the progress of film preservation?

MS: I’m a little more optimistic. The studios have been doing a pretty good job over the past 10 years. Pretty good. The problem is more films have been saved over the past decade, but if we’re lucky we might save from 10 to 20 percent of what’s been made since 1980. I mean, more than half of all American films before 1950 are gone already. More than 70 percent of silent films are gone. So more people are aware of it, but I think what we still have to do is instill in the younger generation the same kind of awareness. Once you make the film and it’s out there, what happens to it?

The Tight-lipped Pro: Martin Scorsese photographed in his Park Ave. office on Sept. 14, 2002

MM: You’ve said something very interesting on that topic. You see the studios as the—

MS: —custodians. Yes, like the stewardship of the old robber barons. Andrew Carnegie still built Carnegie Hall, but in America now the money stays with them. They don’t give back to the public anymore, and it’s just greed. [The studios] have a responsibility with these films. Whether it’s from what I understand is a very interesting new film like Blue Crush, to Soderbergh’s films to Oliver Stone’s films to Anderson’s films… the studios have a public trust. We put that trust in their hands and they fumbled. And they’ll do it again. Why? Because when a studio head comes in, he isn’t hired for film preservation. He has to make money. At each studio there should be an ongoing process of preservation.

MM: You write in your companion volume to your Journey through American Movies [doc] that movies “answer an ancient quest for a common unconscious. They fulfill a spiritual need people have to share a common memory.” Since cinema is now by far our most popular art form, what else do you think sets it apart?

MS: It’s an art form coming out of technology, and the technology has created a medium in which you can use elements of all the other art forms. When I talk about cutting Kundun I say it’s like painting, but it’s also like music. I wish I could compose music; I wish I could play music. But I think I get as close as possible with the editing of a film. Over the years music has actually become as important an influence on me as film. There’s no doubt about it. Painting, movement, dance, sculpture—it’s all cinema.

MM: You take the composition of many film issues/48/images from painting, don’t you?

MS: Oh, yes. This whole picture, Gangs of New York, is influenced by Rembrandt and Dutch painting. And the still lifes of Frans Hals. And Bruegel, too.

MM: I wish we had time to explore that. But more importantly, I have to ask you about one of the most erotic issues/48/images in cinema: your shot of Rosanna Arquette’s foot in Life Lessons.

MS: [laughing] Oh yeah! With the iris, we were like Freud. That comes right out of Dostoevsky’s mistress’ diary. He says “I want to kiss your foot,” and she pulls her foot away.

MM: So how do you construct your erotic issues/48/images? What place does eroticism have in your films?

MS: It has to be what’s inside me. I’ve been criticized before for not making more films that deal with male-female relationships. I just deal with worlds I know, and often they’re worlds controlled by men. When I have had the opportunity to do that, I’ve found it rather difficult to express, erotically, what I think is attractive. In Casino there’s a lot of eroticism, but
it’s really about power. Sex is nothing—they can have sex any time they want. And it’s brutal. The eroticism is all about power and greed. Which means it’s not a story about Vegas, it’s about what we are. It’s a story about America and capitalist thinking. How much is enough? How much must we have before we’re satiated?

MM: That brings us back to the role women play…

Lois comes back in. “This is really it, the final final,” she says. ‘Okay, okay,’ I say.

MS: I’ve dealt with worlds where usually the action is with men. Like Goodfellas, or Gangs of New York. We were able to get a female character in Gangs, Cameron Diaz’s character.

MM: From Alice to Casino, though, you’ve always chosen strong women characters.

MS: Yes, the women are strong, active characters.

Lois (LS) interrupts. “We gotta go NOW.”

MM: Are my photographers still here?

LS: I think they’re hovering.

MM: One shot?

LS: No. Absolutely not. We’re already late.

MS: I’m so sorry. My editor’s here, and…

MM: Too bad. It would really look great to have a shot of you with the street in the background.

LS: No, there’s just no time.

MM: We can literally get this shot in 30 seconds…

LS: I’m sorry.

MS: Well, what time is it? Let me go see Thelma, and your guys can do it in one second.

LS: Aaaaaaall right. Alright.

MM: Thanks, Lois.

The women are strong and active, yes. But in Martin Scorsese’s world, the men have the final say. MM