Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (14 page)

"The two-shot, and the closeup, too, are marvelous, because ... well, you don't have them in the theater. They give you the eyes, the skin, the mouth, and that's fascinating. And when you cut it, rehearse it, edit it, two people talking, now in closeup, now brought together into the twoshot, you can work out a wonderful rhythm, a sort of breathing, and it's beautiful.

"And the most beautiful of all is that you're close to the human face, which is the most fascinating subject possible for the camera. On TV a few days ago, I saw a little of Antonioni's new picture, The Passenger. And, you know, I am an admirer of Antonioni, I've learned so much from him, but I was struck by the moment they cut from his film to a closeup of Anto- nioni himself, for the interview.

"And as he was sitting there, here was his face, so normal, so beautiful and so human-and I didn't hear a word of what he was saying, because I was looking so closely at his face, at his eyes." Bergman held out his hands as if to compose the memory for the camera. "The ten minutes he was on the screen were more fascinating than any of his, or my, work. It told you a novel about his whole life. With my actors, with their faces ... that is what we can sometimes do."

Now it was time to go back onto the soundstage and finish the day's shooting. People were waiting for him in the hallway: a secretary said he had been chosen to receive the Donatello Award of the Italian Republic; could he come to Florence if a private jet were sent? Bibi Andersson had stopped by for a visit, she was accompanying the Swedish prime minister, Olaf Palme, on a state visit to South America, and then she'd go to Warsaw in Bergman's production of Twelfth Night.

Bergman was quiet, friendly, dictating a reply to Rome and another one to his producer, Dino De Laurentiis, explaining why he could not oblige Dino's old friend, the countess in charge of the Donatello Award. He kissed Bibi and said he would come to see her in Warsaw if he could. And then he went back behind the big soundproof doors and the red light blinked on. Some tourists being taken through Film House had not recognized the ordinary-looking man of fifty-seven, with his thinning brown hair, his frayed bluejacket, his carpet slippers.

The rhythm of the seasons has been set for seven or eight years now, ever since Bergman moved to Faro, which close inspection of the map reveals as a tiny unnamed blue dot north of the island of Gotland, in the Baltic Sea. It is the last speck of Sweden, a wild bird preserve inhabited by nine hundred shepherds and fishermen, and foreigners are not allowed there because of a nineteenth-century military agreement with Russia. Bergman found his island by accident, as a ferry stop north of Gotland, while looking for a place to shoot Through the Glass Darkly.

He built a house there, sturdy and spacious, and after waiting for three years for the permit, he built an editing facility and the simple studio in which he did the interiors for A Passion of Anna and parts of Shame. He would return to Faro in a month or so, and spend the autumn editing Face to Face. This winter, he will direct something for the Royal Dramatic Theater-he thinks perhaps something by Shaw this year. When the production has opened, he'll return to Faro, finish with Face to Face, and begin work on next year's screenplay.

Copies will go out soon to Sven and Katinka and the others of the eighteen friends, and to the actors he has chosen to use this time. The female lead will probably be played by Liv, although Bibi was in The Touch and Ingrid and Harriet j oined Liv in Cries and Whispers. The male lead may be Erland, although Max von Sydow, who has been in eleven of Bergman's films, is said to be eager to return to Stockholm again after several pictures overseas. Shooting will begin in the late spring and early summer, and editing will follow in the fall.

"I think I have ten years left," Bergman had said at the close of the interview.

"There's a deal, sort of," Katinka Farago had said, speaking of Bergman's relationship with the people he makes films with. "One may get offers to work on other pictures ... but one doesn't take another picture without asking Ingmar first. He pays what the others pay; it's not a question of money. But there is no one else like him."

INTRODUCTION

artin Scorsese and Paul Schrader come from different backgrounds, Scorsese from Catholicism and Little Italy, Schrader from Grand Rapids and the Dutch Reformed church. Both have highly developed ideas of sin and guilt. "Movies were forbidden," Schrader told me. "I saw my first movie when I was seventeen years old. It was The Million Dollar Duck. I walked out and thought, I can make a better movie than that."

I was the first person to review a Scorsese film in print. That was I Call First, later retitled Who's That Knocking at My Door, at the 1967 Chicago Film Festival. He telephoned me, and when I was in New York we hung out. I mention those early meetings in the introduction to this book. I consider him one of the greatest filmmakers of his generation. He is unequaled in his fascination with film itself, which he views without ceasing, restores, and studies; he has made documentaries about the American and Italian film heritage. I mentioned Renoir's The River to him after viewing his personal print at the Virginia Film Festival. "I watch it three times a year," he said. "At least three times."

One of my great experiences, also at Virginia, was doing a shot-byshot analysis of Raging Bull with Thelma Schoonmaker, his lifelong editor (and Michael Powell's widow). You might think you could learn all about a film by viewing it shot by shot with its director, but having had that experience with Schoonmaker, and having done shot-by-shot analysis at the Hawaii festival with the cinematographers Owen Roizman, Allen Daviau, Haskell Wexler, and Hiro Narita, I know that the editors and cinematographers know where the bodies are buried.

MARCH 7, 1976

I met Martin Scorsese for the first time in 1969, when he was an editor on Woodstock. He was one of the most intense people I'd ever known-a compact, nervous kid out of New York's Little Italy who'd made one feature film and had dreams of becoming a big-time director one day. It would take him five years.

The first feature was Who's That Knocking at My Door, the major discovery of the 1967 Chicago Film Festival. It was the semiautobiographical story of an Italian American youth coming of age; it won praise and prizes for Scorsese, but didn't do any business, and he supported himself with editing, teaching, and odd jobs. The night I met him, we went to Little Italy and drank Bardolino wine and he talked about projects he was being offered.

He finally took one of them-a Roger Corman exploitation picture called Boxcar Bertha-because he needed to direct again. "Corman thinks it's an exploitation picture," Scorsese told me, "but I think it'll be something else." He was right; his talent made the film, which starred Barbara Hershey and David Carradine, better than it had to be.

The movie got him more work. In 1973, on a small budget but with total artistic freedom, he made Mean Streets, a sequel to Who's That Knocking. It was a ferocious, painful, deeply felt masterpiece. In 1974 he made his big critical and box office success, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, for which Ellen Burstyn won an Oscar. Scorsese was established, was "bankable."

His new film, which opens here Friday at the McClurg Court, Lincoln Village, and five suburban theaters, is Taxi Driver with Robert De Niro-a violent and frightening return to the New York of Mean Streets. It looks like another hit.

Scorsese and I met for lunch during his visit last week to Chicago and were joined by Paul Schrader, who wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver. They were a study in opposites: Schrader, a midwestern Protestant in pullover sweater and tie, and Scorsese, a New York Italian American, in jeans and a beard. But they'd been working together on this screenplay since 1972.

SCORSESE: Because there's a lot of violence to this picture, some of the New York reviews are calling it an exploitation film. Jesus! I went flat broke making this film. My films haven't made a lot of money. Right now, I'm living off my next film.

SCHRADER: If it's an exploitation film, I wish we had a dollar for every time we were told it would never be a success at all. This screenplay was turned down by everybody.

SCORSESE: We showed it to some New York media educators, and I thought we'd get lynched. And we showed it to some student editors ... there was one wise guy there I recognized from a screening we had of Alice. He asks whether, after all my success, I'm about ready to fall on my ass. I've hardly gotten started!

SCHRADER: We get almost no valid reactions immediately after the screenings. The immediate response is usually very visceral and angry. But if this film weren't controversial, there'd be something wrong with the country.

EBERT: What you give us is this guy, De Niro, who comes from nowhere-we get hardly any background-and drives a cab in New York and eventually we realize he's seething inside, he's got all this violence bottled up ...

ScoRSESE: And he goes back again and again to where the violence is. One of the reviewers, I think it was Andrew Sarris, said how many times can you use 42nd Street as a metaphor for hell? But that's the thing about hell-it goes on and on. And he couldn't get out of it. But you're right that we don't tell you where he comes from, or what his story is. Obviously, he comes from somewhere and he picked up these problems along the way.

SCHRADER: I wrote it that way after thinking about the way they handled in cold Blood. They tell you all about Perry Smith's background, how he developed his problems, and immediately it becomes less interesting because his problems aren't your problems, but his symptoms are your symptoms.

EBERT: Pauline Kael has said that Scorsese, Robert Altman, and Francis Ford Coppola are the three most interesting directors in the country right now-and that it might be due to their Catholicism, that after Watergate, the nation feels a sort of guilt and needs to make a form of reparation, and that Catholics understand guilt in a way that others don't, that they were brought up on it.

SCORSESE: Guilt. There's nothing you can tell me about guilt.

SCHRADER: I've got a lot of Protestant guilt.

SCORSESE: You can't make movies any more in which the whole country seems to make sense. After Vietnam, after Watergate, it's not just a temporary thing; it's a permanent thing the country's going through. All the things we held sacred-the whole Time-Life empire ... whoosh! Well, Time's still left.

EBERT: In a lot of your movies, there's this ambivalent attitude toward women. The men are fascinated by women, but they don't quite know how to relate to them ...

SCORSESE: The goddess-whore complex. You're raised to worship women, but you don't know how to approach them on a human level, on a sexual level. That's the thing with Travis, the De Niro character-the taxi driver. The girl he falls for, the Cybill Shepherd character-it's really important that she's blond, a blue-eyed goddess.

SCHRADER: He goes from a goddess to a child goddess. The twelveand-a-half-year-old prostitute he's trying to rescue-she's unapproachable, too, for him.

SCORSESE: She has the candles burning in her bedroom, she's like a saint to him. He can't imagine these pimps treating her the way they do. Before he goes to avenge her, it's almost like he cleanses himself, like in The Virgin Spring when Max von Sydow scourges himself with the branches before he goes out to avenge his daughter's death.

SCHRADER: We actually had that shot in the movie, and we took it out. Travis whips himself with a towel before he goes out with his guns. We took it out because it looked a little forced and unnatural.

ScoRSESE: But the Catholic thing? I suppose there are a lot of Catholic references in the film, even if they're only my own personal references. Like the moment when he burns the flowers before he goes out to kill. And when he's buying the guns and the dealer lays them out one at a time on the velvet, like arranging the altar during Mass.

Schrader left for another interview, and Scorsese and I continued our conversation in his hotel room, which was furnished with two reminders of home: a large box of cookies from Cafe Roma in Little Italy ("My mother sent them, she knew I'd be homesick") and a stack of the latest issues of film magazines. Scorsese got married recently to a freelance writer named Julia Cameron, from Libertyville, and he was planning to have dinner with his new in-laws that night. He thought he'd bring along the cookies.