Conversations with Scorsese (16 page)

There’s something about not giving oneself over to the material. I was trying to impose my own style. I didn’t have “my own style” at the time. I was trying to make, I guess, a
Carl Dreyer film. I was trying to make a simple
noir film into a Carl Dreyer picture, in a way. [Dreyer was the austere Danish director of such films as
Day of Wrath
and
The Passion of Joan of Arc.
]

It was a very low-budget film and I was shooting long takes. I wasn’t taking any coverage. I didn’t do any editing in it. I decided that it was going to be one long take. I was trying to impose myself as a master of camera and that sort of thing on this material that didn’t call for it. I really didn’t know how to handle a
genre, or somebody else’s work, and interpret it. If you’re hired to do a job as a narrative
filmmaker, you have to come to terms with the material. And I was fired from that after one week. And rightly so.

It was devastating, but I learned a lot from that. And they made a very good film from it. Truffaut said it was the best American film that he had seen in twenty years. Then around the same time, Haig Manoogian asked me to become an instructor at NYU—that course I told you about with the 16 millimeter film. In that class was Oliver Stone, and a number of other people.
Michael Wadleigh, who photographed
Who’s That Knocking,
the 16 millimeter sections, and me, and Thelma Schoonmaker, were all working on documentaries during that period. And
Woodstock
came out of that.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
Talk about the genesis of
Woodstock.

MARTIN SCORSESE:
Michael Wadleigh had this little place called
Paradigm Pictures up on West 86th Street in Manhattan and we edited our films there. Mike and I were in these three or four rooms where everybody was working—Paradigm was doing Hubert Humphrey campaign films [Hubert H. Humphrey was the
Democratic Party candidate for president in 1968], and Thelma Schoonmaker was editing documentaries, and we were editing
Who’s That Knocking
at night. They were all very small rooms on the ground floor of an apartment building off West End Avenue.

RS:
Just parenthetically, how connected to NYU was Thelma? You mentioned her briefly in that context. She became such an important collaborator with you later.

MS:
The time she went to NYU was that six-week summer workshop when I did my first film. The negative was cut wrong—a complicated A&B roll negative process—and in two days she actually reconstituted the negative for me and saved the picture. I didn’t even know her. But she understood edge coding [numbers on
the side of each frame, vital in the editing process] and all that sort of thing, and she pieced it back together. Then I didn’t see her for a while. And then she helped me put together
Who’s That Knocking.

While we were working on that, Wadleigh would work with
Bob Drew, or Pennebaker or the
Maysles brothers—cinema verité. So sometimes we were all editing documentaries to make a living, though I didn’t make much of a living and that wasn’t a good thing because I was married and had a kid. And so in the evenings we would edit my feature.
Jim McBride was there, too, editing
David Holzman’s Diary
in the next room.

RS:
Really?

MS:
And
Diary
was very successful. And then I went off to Europe and came back. Got involved with
The Honeymoon Killers,
got fired off that, and went to NYU to teach, and that gave me a steady paycheck of $55 a week.

RS:
Not bad.

MS:
At that time Wadleigh and I were going to do this rock ’n’ roll revival show and shoot it on film, stage it for film. But in the meantime, this event called Woodstock was happening, and I didn’t know what it was. He said, “Let’s go and just do a test up there.” So he went up, and then we all followed him. And it became
Woodstock.
At the same time, finally,
Who’s That Knocking
was being released. It didn’t do very well, but as I said,
Roger Ebert liked it, at the
Chicago Film Festival, before the nude scene was put in. So I got this wonderful review in Chicago, and they still couldn’t get it distributed. So then Haig really felt, everyone felt, let’s go ahead and do it.

RS:
You’ve always presented Haig to me as this very austere—

MS:
Yeah.

RS:
So what’s he doing producing this thing with a nude scene stuffed into it?

MS:
Well, the point is if I could have introduced it into the film more artfully, it would’ve been better. But I couldn’t.

RS:
It’s just as if one movie stops and another movie starts—

MS:
Or maybe I did it on purpose that way, because the reality was we had to put it in. So I just stopped in the middle of the film: Here’s your nude scene, let’s move on.

The whole film had a very loose structure anyway, and at the time I was influenced by
Before the Revolution,
I loved that. But I don’t have the cultural background
of Bertolucci; I just thought I should be able to make a film that had that kind of power.

But there were other things happening, too. This was 1968, and
Fats Domino and
Little Richard and
Jerry Lee Lewis and
Chuck Berry were kind of forgotten. They were being called fifties primitives. So we said, Mike and I, wouldn’t it be great to do something on film. And we came up with this idea of doing this rock ’n’ roll revival show in 16 millimeter—maybe six, seven cameras, whatever. Instead, he went up to Woodstock, called back and said, “This is wild. There’s a lot of people, it’s going to be a big deal. And the hair is being worn very long,” he said.

I should probably mention that in those days he literally looked like one of the Four Freshmen. I mean, his hair was cut a certain way and he had button-down shirts. And he said, “Come on up, and we’ll just see what happens.” And so I went up on the assumption that I would be co-directing or associate-directing with him. Thelma came up, other people, and we wound up on the stage.

Of course, he’s the director-cameraman. I mean, he’s actually directing as he’s shooting. I was on the side of the stage on the front. There was a lip of the stage and there was a platform for the photographers. And I was on the edge of it. So three days and nights I was assistant-directing. Because once Mike was on the
stage, you couldn’t communicate with him. He had earphones on, with five or six other cameramen coming in and out. And Thelma was also doing her thing, associate-directing with the earphones on at the lighting board with the famous lighting designer
Chip Monck, who did the best lighting for the rock ’n’ roll shows in those days. He did great shows, but one problem was we needed a lot of light at night, and he would put theatrical lighting on. For example,
Sly and the Family Stone—in an episode I was responsible for in the final cutting—are very dark people. And he put lavender light on them. And imagine at that time the speed of the film was slow. And Michael was yelling “Light!” into the earphones, “Light!,” and Thelma was pushing and fighting with Chip to get the light. It was that kind of thing.

It just went on, and we improvised. Friday night we all realized we couldn’t move.
Richie Havens in the afternoon came out and sang, and then a few other people. And then by the time it got dark, there was no end in sight. It was a free concert at that point. And we couldn’t even get food. You couldn’t move from your spot. You couldn’t go left, right, down. You were stuck. It was an extraordinary experience because everybody was, in a sense, dependent on the goodwill of the person next to him.

Woodstock
(1970). Marty was part of the team that shot the famous documentary, and he worked on it as an editor as well. But there were disagreements with director Michael Wadleigh, and he was fired.

RS:
Right.

MS:
That’s it. After that I started wearing jeans. Prior to that I wore slacks and that sort of thing. But I loved the music. It was an extraordinary, life-changing experience—mainly because of the way people behaved with each other. Anything could have gone wrong any second with five hundred thousand people crammed in like that.

You know, I was looking back out there and was thinking, What if one person goes crazy? What if some of the
drugs don’t work on these people? What if they charge the stage?

RS:
A few bad trips and an audience that size can become, putting it mildly, volatile.

MS:
In the meantime, you’re stuck and you’re helpless, and everybody else is working together around you, and you’re helping them, and they’re helping you, and the people are trying to get food to you. Finally, I think around ten o’clock at night, I forget who was on, it was Friday night,
Arthur Barron, the documentary filmmaker, got us some hamburgers. One each, but that was enough. I’ll never forget those hamburgers. By now, studio people were trying to buy the rights. And at that point,
Bob Maurice, who was the producer of the film at that time, was on the phone onstage, basically making a deal with
Warner Bros.

RS:
That squares with
John Calley’s memory. [Calley was then head of production at Warner Bros.] John said, “I figured I couldn’t get hurt. I figured the stock footage would be worth it, even if they never made a film.”

MS:
It’s true. Because we were documenting an historic event. It was becoming an historic event that Friday night.

I mean, some people were just not meant for it. I’m not a country person, I’m allergic to everything. I was complaining, a lot of us were bitching and moaning. But still, it was a transcending experience.

There’s a shot in
Life
magazine of
Max Yasgur, giving the peace sign, and right below him, answering him, is me.

I was not shooting on the stage. I was trying to figure out which angles to get, trying to figure out what songs were coming on next.

And it was wonderful, because coming from where I come from, boy, I like seeing people happy [
laughs
]. I really do. But people have said to me, “Oh, well, they were all drugged.” And I say, “I tell you, if everybody was drugged, it went along very well.”

The only moment when things could have gone bad was when
Abbie Hoffman grabbed the microphone.
The Who was on stage,
Pete Townshend. Do you know the story?

RS:
No.

MS:
Later, Michael Wadleigh edited The Who and
Jimi Hendrix himself. He had a great time because he was up there, close to the performers. Mike started shooting The Who like that. It was nighttime, and that music was loud, and they were very aggressive, as you know, breaking their instruments. But as soon as Michael got up there, he got kicked by Pete, who wanted him—all of us—off the stage, which we all did. Everybody had their lenses right on the lip of the stage, in beautiful position. It worked, because The Who moved around a lot. And so I’m watching, and everybody’s shooting, and we were mesmerized by them. It was extraordinary to be that close to see this energy.

I don’t care whether it’s Paganini or it’s Pete Townshend, I’m sorry. I mean, people did see devils directing Paganini playing his violin. They could swear that they saw them.

RS:
I’ve heard that—without entirely believing it.

MS:
So we’re standing there. And the next thing you know, they’re doing sections from
Tommy.
And all of a sudden Abbie Hoffman grabs the mike, and says, You know, you people are here enjoying yourselves, smoking grass, et cetera, while
John Sinclair is in jail for two joints. He’s in jail for ten years. And at that point Townshend took his guitar and hit Abbie in the neck. He was like a samurai and Hoffman went off the stage. And everyone froze, because he could have started something, because people started to hoot and holler. But Pete went right back into the music and sort of saved the show. It was the only moment of aggression during that whole time.

RS:
And who is
John Sinclair?

MS:
Sinclair became a major cause because he was arrested for two joints. But it may not have been the right time to bring it up [
laughs
]. It was like shouting fire in a crowded theater.

RS:
The unique kind of editing manner of that film—the split screens and all—did that evolve when you got back? Had you originally planned it to be just kind of straightforward, more or less conventional documentary?