Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (15 page)

EBERT: You talked about living off your next film.

SCORSESE: It'll be called New York, New York. it takes place in the 1940s and 1950s, it's about the big bands. Liza Minnelli plays a singer and De Niro will be her husband. It's not a musical; it's a film with music. I got that definition from Billy Wilder, who said you can't call it a musical unless the people sing in situations where you don't expect them to. It'll be about their marriage breaking up, about their problems in relating to one another ...

EBERT: Will it take a feminist position? A lot of people embraced Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore as feminist.

ScoRSESE: Well, it'll be about the problems of a career marriage. I don't know if it's feminist. Actually, not Alice, but Taxi Driver-this is my feminist film. Who says a feminist movie has to be about women? Alice was never intended as a feminist tract. At the end, she's making the same mistakes. The first shot of her in Kris Kristofferson's house shows her washing the dishes. A big close-up.

EBERT: And Taxi Driver, where the hero can't relate to women at all, is ...

ScoRSESE: Feminist. Because it takes macho to its logical conclusion. The better man is the man who can kill you. This one shows that kind of thinking, shows the kinds of problems some men have, bouncing back and forth between the goddesses and whores. The whole movie is based, visually, on one shot where the guy is being turned down on the telephone by the girl, and the camera actually pans away from him. It's too painful to see that rejection.

EBERT: The film is dedicated to Bernard Herrmann, the great movie composer. He died just after he finished the score.

ScoRSESE: God, that was terrible. Immediately after. He was so happy, he was back in Hollywood, he had a full orchestra, people were getting down on their knees to him. He was doing some jazz passages, and he insisted on finishing that day. I told him we should do it next week, because he looked tired, "No," he said, "let's do it now." That was on December 23. The next morning, the day of Christmas Eve, he was found dead. That Sunday, Julia and I flew to Chicago to get married ...

EBERT: I wanted to ask about the violent scenes, the scenes where Travis freaks out and starts shooting.

SCORSESE: We shot those in slow motion. In forty-eight frames to the second, which is twice the ordinary twenty-four frames-and, of course, if you shoot it twice as fast and project it at the regular speed, it comes out half as fast ...

EBERT: Which is what everyone gets backwards about slow motion.

SCORSESE: Right. And in the scenes of the killing, the slow motion and De Niro's arms ... we wanted him to look almost like a monster, a robot, King Kong coming to save Fay Wray. Another thing: All of the closeups of De Niro where he isn't talking were shot forty-eight frames to the second-to draw out and exaggerate his reactions. What an actor, to look so great up against a technique like that! I shot all those shots myself, to see for myself what kind of reaction we were getting.

EBERT: The whole movie's very stylized, expressionistic ... you fragment scenes into very striking details, you control your colors to get a certain feel, there's the garish lighting ...

ScoRSESE: And then I read that I'm a realist, a naturalist! Somebody compared the picture to Shoeshine! Really! I'm not interested in a realistic look-not at all, not ever. Every film should look the way I feel.

EBERT: I read that De Niro really drove a cab to prepare for this role.

ScoRSESE: Yeah. I drove with him several nights. He got a strange feeling when he was hacking. He was totally anonymous. People would say anything, do anything in the backseat-it was like he didn't exist. Finally a guy gets in, a former actor, who recognizes his name on the license. "Jesus," he says, "last year you won the Oscar and now you're driving a cab again." De Niro said he was only doing research. "Yeah, Bobby," says the actor. "I know. I been there, too."

After Mean Streets was released, I wrote a review saying that Scorsese had a chance to become the American Fellini in ten years or so. The next time we met after the review appeared, Marty looked serious and concerned: "Do you really think it's going to take ten years?"

INTRODUCTION

think I've interviewed Robert Altman more often than anybody else in the movie business. That has something to do with his method of making a movie, which is to assemble large groups of people and set them all in motion at once. There are always visitors on the set. Altman presides as an impresario or host. He likes to introduce people. I wonder if he dislikes being alone. Kathryn, his wife of forty years, is always somewhere nearby, a coconspirator.

Once we both found ourselves at a film festival in Iowa City that was held only once. We both thought Pauline Kael was going to be there, which was why we'd agreed to come. Pauline later said she'd never been invited. Bob and I sat on a desk in a classroom and discussed the delicately moody Thieves Like Us, one of his most neglected films. Other times, I visited the sets of Health, A Wedding, and Gosford Park, and watched him rehearse the Lyric Opera adaptation of A Wedding years later.

He marched to his own drummer. After the Sundance premiere of his Gingerbread Man, he sat at a reception for a thousand people in Salt Lake City, contentedly smoking a joint. In his screening room at his original Lions Gate in Westwood, he screened rough cuts for just about anyone who wanted to come. Twice Chaz and I joined the Altmans for dinner in Chicago with mayor Richard M. and Maggie Daley; the mayor likes movies and can talk about them, and the two men had an easy rapport. Entering the restaurant on a winter night after he'd wrapped The Company, Robert swept in with him the snowy air and the aroma of marijuana. Daley looked at me and lifted an eyebrow not more than an eighth of an inch, and smiled so slyly you had to be looking for it.

Altman told me once he didn't mind a bad review, "because without them, what does a good review mean?" He added that in my case all of my negative reviews of his work had been mistaken.

JUNE 12, 1977

(CANNES, IFIRAN(CIE-Yes, it was very pleasant. We sat on the stern of Robert Altman's rented yacht in the Cannes harbor, and looked across at the city and the flags and the hills. There was a scotch and soda with lots of ice, and an efficient young man dressed all in white who came on quiet shoes to fill the glasses when it was necessary.

Altman wore a knit sport shirt with the legend of the Chicago Bears over the left pocket: a souvenir, no doubt, from his trips to Chicago to scout locations for A Wedding. He was in a benign mood, and it was a day to savor. The night before, his film 3 Women had played as an official entry in the Cannes festival, and had received a genuinely warm standing ovation, the most enthusiastic of the festival.

Because his M*A*S*H had won the Palme d'Or in 1970, Altman could have shown this film out of competition. But he wasn't having any: "If you don't want to be in competition," he was saying, "that means you're either too arrogant, or too scared. So you might lose? I've lost before; there's nothing wrong with losing."

He was, as it turned out, only being halfway prophetic: three days later the jury would award the Palme d'Or to an Italian film, giving 3 Women the best actress award for Shelley Duvall's performance. But on this afternoon it was still possible to speculate about the grand prize, with the boat rocking gently and nothing on the immediate horizon except, of course, the necessity to be in Chicago in June to begin a $4 million movie with fortyeight actors, most of whom would be on the set every day for two months.

"I'd be back supervising the preparation," Altman said, "except I'm lazy. Also, my staff knows what I want better than I do. If I'm there, they feel like they have to check with me, and that only slows them down."

Lauren Hutton drifted down from the upper deck. She'll play a wedding photographer making a sixteen-millimeter documentary film-withina-film in A Wedding, and Altman's counting on her character to help keep the other characters straight. "With forty-eight people at the wedding party, we have to be sure the audience can tell them apart. The bridesmaids will all be dressed the same, for example. So Lauren will be armed with a book of Polaroids of everybody, as a guide for herself, and we can fall back on her confusion when we think the audience might be confused."

Fresh drinks arrived. Altman sipped his and found it good. His wife, Kathryn, returning from a tour of the yacht harbor, walked up the gangplank and said she had some calls to make. Altman sipped again.

"It's lovely sitting on this yacht," he said after a moment. "Beats any hotel in town."

The boat is called Pakcha? I asked.

"Yeah," said Altman. "Outta South Hampton. It's been around the world twice. Got its name in one of those South Sea Islands. Pakcha is a Pacific dialect word for `traveling white businessman."'

He shrugged, as if to say, how can I deny it? He sipped his drink again, and I asked if that story was really true about how he got the idea for A Wedding.

"Yeah, that's how it came about, all right. We were shooting 3 Women out in the desert, and it was a really hot day and we were in a hotel room that was like a furnace, and I wasn't feeling too well on account of having felt too well the night before, and this girl was down from L.A. to do some in-depth gossip and asked me what my next movie was going to be. At that moment, I didn't even feel like doing this movie, so I told her I was gonna shoot a wedding next. A wedding? Yeah, a wedding.

"So a few moments later my production assistant comes up and she says, `Bob, did you hear yourself just then?' Yeah, I say, I did. `That's not a bad idea, is it?' She says. Not a bad idea at all, I say; and that night we started on the outline."

3 Women itself had an equally unlikely genesis, Altman recalled: "I dreamed it. I dreamed of the desert, and these three women, and I remember every once in a while I'd dream that I was waking up and sending out people to scout locations and cast the thing. And when I woke up in the morning, it was like I'd done the picture. What's more, I liked it. So, what the hell, I decided to do it."

The movie is about ... well, it's about whatever you think it's about. Two of the women, the main characters, seem to undergo a mysterious personality transfer in the film's center, and then they fuse with the third woman to form a new personality altogether. Some viewers have found it to be an Altman statement on women's liberation, but he doesn't see it that way:

"For women's lib or against? Don't ask me. If I sat here and said the film was about X, Y, and Z, that restricts the audience to finding the film within my boundaries. I want them to go outside to bring themselves to the film. What they find there will be at least as interesting as what I did ...

"And I kept on discovering things in the film right up to the final edit. The film begins, for example, with Sissy Spacek wandering in out of the desert and meeting Shelley Duvall and getting the job in the rehabilitation center. And when I was looking at the end of the film during the editing process, it occurred to me that when you see that final exterior shot of the house, and the dialogue asks the Sissy Spacek character to get the sewing basket-well, she could just walk right out of the house and go to California and walk in at the beginning of the movie, and it would be perfectly circular and even make sense that way. But that's only one way to read it."

Altman said he's constantly amazed by the things he reads about his films in reviews. "Sometimes," he said, "I think the critics take their lead from the statements directors themselves make about their films. There was an astonishing review in Newsweek by Jack Kroll, for example, of Fellini's Casanova. It made no sense at all, in terms of the film itself. But then I read something Fellini had said about the film, and I think Kroll was simply finding in the film what Fellini said he put there.

"With 3 Women, now, a lot of the reviews go on and on about the supposed Jungian implications of the relationships. If you ask me to give a child's simplified difference between Jung and Freud, I couldn't. It's just a field I know nothing about. But the name of Jung turns up in the production notes that were written for the press kit, and there you are."