Conversations with Scorsese

We are an odd couple, Marty and I
.
I grew up in a placid suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, cosseted by my middle-class family—loving, indulgent, always avoiding openly expressed emotions. I’m certain that I gravitated to the movies because I was looking for melodramatic excitement, a relief from the “niceness” that was the highest value of that time and place. Marty’s young years were, of course, the opposite, spent mainly in
Little Italy on New York’s
Lower East Side—working class, but also criminal class, with the Mafia providing much of the neighborhood’s half-hidden social organization and control. There was an element of danger on—well, yes, all right—the Mean Streets of his boyhood. And there was an element of anxiety in his home, which was rife with discussions of complex family issues tensely, if lovingly, argued out. He was escaping a vastly different sort of reality when he went to the movies—melodrama and fantasy, to be sure, but of a kind that was actually less threatening than the harsh realities this asthmatic little boy encountered in his daily life.

We’ve more than once laughed about this: he envies the peace of my picket-fence childhood; I would have loved the stir and occasional menace of Little Italy. But it speaks to the appeal of the medium in the 1940s and even the 1950s, when the movies were thought to be dying, that members of our youthful demographic almost
universally went to them—their sheen and shimmer were that irresistible. The difference between Marty and me and the rest of our friends is that they drifted away from the movies, except as a form of casual entertainment, while we almost helplessly professionalized our passion. That process, as Marty experienced it, is what much of this book is about. In talking with him I’ve often felt we are like immigrants from two different countries meeting on neutral ground and discovering that we can communicate in a third language: the language of film.

It helps, of course, that in addition to being a filmmaker Marty is a passionate film scholar, a man who devotes almost as much time to studying and preserving the movie past as he does to making new films. This is a matter that naturally concerns me as a critic and film historian. It may also help that I eventually, much more modestly, became a filmmaker myself, a documentarian specializing in movie history. Technically, as well as historically and aesthetically, we communicate easily, instinctively, in the shorthand of shared experiences.

That was not always the case. We met for the first time in 1973, when I was working on the first television programs I wrote and directed, a series of interviews with American movie directors of the classic age. I was running their pictures of an evening at my apartment and I casually asked Jay Cocks, at the time my reviewing colleague at
Time
magazine, if he’d like to take a look at
Howard Hawks’s
His Girl Friday
some night. This was well before the home video revolution, when you had to haul out a cumbersome 16mm projector to see movies in your living room—a bigger, rarer deal than it is now in the digital age. Anyway, Jay was, and is, one of Marty’s oldest friends, dating back to their days at the New York University film school, as well as his occasional screenwriting collaborator, and he asked if he could bring Marty along, which he did. I can’t recall anything memorable being said. We all just had a merry time rewatching one of the greatest of all romantic comedies.

No friendship arose out of that encounter—largely, I think, because I was, at the time, not particularly fond of a lot of Marty’s films. I did not, for example, greatly care for
Mean Streets
. It was Marty’s breakthrough film, and though I have since come to respect it, I still don’t quite love it. I enjoyed the lightsome
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
, but had to wrestle hard with
Taxi Driver
, before giving it the good review it deserved. I remember
Henry Grunwald,
Time
’s great managing editor, scribbling this note on the proof of my piece: “You don’t like this movie as much as you say you do.” He was right at that moment, though he would be wrong now.

A little later, Marty and I shared one of the most awkward moments of my career. This was in 1977 when the producer of Marty’s
New York, New York
,
Irwin Winkler, set up an early screening of the film for me. It was, you may recall, a drama with music about the troubled relationship between a bandleader (Robert De
Niro) and his vocalist (Liza Minnelli)—in part, a tribute to the kind of
musical comedies MGM had made in the 1940s and ’50s, in part a dark and painful romance. These two ideas never really meshed, and the production had also been attended by all sorts of troubles, personal and professional, that rather obviously afflicted the finished product. Irwin invited Marty and me to dinner after the screening—at which I found I couldn’t say a word about the film that would not have hurt Marty’s feelings. So we awkwardly talked around the only subject that was of interest to either of us. I didn’t know at the time that Marty, Irwin, and almost every one else connected with the film had the gravest doubts about it, and were perhaps hoping against hope that an objective observer might see something more promising in it than they did. Nor did I know that Marty was on the verge of a life-threatening illness, the result of exhaustion and the interaction of a wide variety of
drugs—prescription and, shall we say, nonprescription—he had been taking to keep himself going through a brutal schedule.

Somehow, Marty survived—many of his friends insist that it was quite a near thing—and when he was recuperating in the hospital De Niro visited him to insist that he at last focus his attention on a project on which the actor had invested a profound passion:
Raging Bull
. Marty had always been dubious about the film, if only because he had never had the slightest interest in boxing (or any other kind of sports). De Niro, however, thought boxing was just a pretext for the film and judged that Marty, having now touched bottom in his own life, might forge an emotional connection with this story about the boxer
Jake LaMotta reaching a similar condition. De Niro was obviously, spectacularly, right, and
Raging Bull
became in my opinion—and I was scarcely alone—Marty’s first fully realized masterpiece.

When the movie was released, most of the critical and audience response focused on the unprecedented brutality of its boxing sequences, though when you re-encounter it now you tend to see it rather differently. Its more profound brutality lies in the story of an angry, inarticulate man’s struggle to find a few grace notes in an otherwise savage existence. But however you read
Raging Bull
, it is manifestly a movie that gives, and asks, no quarter. Thereafter, no critic could fail to see Martin Scorsese as anything but a major film artist.

He’s had his flops, of course, and his misunderstandings with the critics and the audience, and even his common-consent critical successes have not always been rewarded as richly as they deserved at the box office. But the range and intensity, technical and emotional, in his work have made him, in the minds of many, the Great American Director of his age. He’s not so sure about that. And neither am I, largely because it is a critic’s duty to resist the superlative. In any case, history has yet to have its say, and we are both historians enough to want to await its judgment—not that either of us will be around to discuss it.

Not that we were discussing much of anything after
Raging Bull
, either. I sometimes saw Marty around in New York, usually in Jay’s company, and we would exchange pleasantries. But that was it. I admired a lot of his subsequent movies—
The King of Comedy, Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence—
and I thought that his documentaries about the American and Italian cinema were great works in their field. Even in his more problematical movies I saw the impatience and restlessness of a man who was easily bankable in the eyes of the studios only when he was making crime stories. Even given the admiration he has enjoyed, he has always struggled, as directors of comparable stature have not, for backing and trust from the powers that be.

This struck me, strikes me, as ludicrous, especially since his work outside what people thought was his main line
—After Hours, Kundun, Bringing Out the Dead—
was often more interesting to me than, say,
Cape Fear
or
Casino
. After 1986, when I left New York for Los Angeles, this was an opinion I had not even a wan hope of sharing with Marty. Or so I imagined. But by the 1990s I had begun writing and directing documentaries almost full-time, specializing in films about movie history, and I began turning to Marty as an interviewee on these programs. At which point some sort of sparks were beginning to leap the gap between us.