Conversations with Scorsese (18 page)

MS:
No, I know that. I realized that after doing
Raging Bull,
and after doing
King of Comedy.
And when I tried to get
Last Temptation
made and I couldn’t. And when I did
After Hours.
But in any event, I found that certain things that I saw
[George] Cukor do, or other directors did so seemingly effortlessly, I was laboring over.

RS:
But did you think, Well, look, I grew up in this neighborhood, I went to an urban university, I’m a New York kid through and through. So really there’s some part of me that will always make urban films.

MS:
Oh, no, no, I never thought that.

RS:
You never thought, This is my world, this is where I belong?

MS:
Not at all. In fact, I lived in California twelve years, thirteen years, yet people always considered me a total New Yorker. I moved back in 1984. My mother and father were still alive. My kids were here. So I moved back and accepted the fact that I’d be on the East Coast. But I always thought I could handle different types of pictures.

RS:
I’m not talking
genres. It’s more about settings. I mean,
King of Comedy—
it’s a very urban picture.

MS:
I know you’re right. But I tried—

RS:
It’s—city kid. I don’t know how else to put it.

MS:
Anyway, right around this time I met
Roger Corman. He asked me to do
Boxcar Bertha.
You know, 1930s,
Bonnie and Clyde
genre.

RS:
What do you think of that movie now?

MS:
It’s an exploitation picture. Not good. But
Barbara Hershey and
David Carradine were wonderful to work with. And
Bernie Casey. I got to meet
Barry Primus, because he was Bob De Niro’s closest friend, so it was a good experience. And Corman was great. And all the people who did it.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
I guess every young guy in Hollywood somehow met Roger Corman, right?

MARTIN SCORSESE:
Well, my agent set up a meeting with Roger when I went out to edit
Medicine Ball Caravan.
Who’s That Knocking
had opened at the
Vagabond Theater, under a different title—everybody kept changing the title—and he said, Would you like to do a sort of sequel to
Bloody Mama,
which Bob De Niro had been in, and I said, “Yeah. Absolutely.” And then he went away for six months. I went back to editing. And I just thought nothing was going to happen.

RS:
The usual.

MS:
But he had gotten married to
Julie Corman. And when they came back from their honeymoon, I had finished
Medicine Ball Caravan,
which didn’t turn out well, and I needed work and I needed to be around L.A. So
John Cassavetes put me on as assistant sound editor on
Minnie and Moskowitz,
and I started to hang around with John. And one day out at Universal around my twenty-ninth birthday, Elaine Gorman, who later married [director]
Jeremy Paul Kagan and later played the mother in
Goodfellas,
got a call from William Morris for me; they were looking
for me because they had a film for me to direct. And she said, “Oh, don’t be silly,” and she hung up. Thought it was a joke. And so a few days go by, and finally my agent,
Irv Schechter, contacted me. And it was this film that
Roger Corman had for me—six months after we’d met.

RS:
He had a script?

MS:
By
Joyce and John Corrington. It was a very complex, very dense script. It was just a matter of the budget, of getting all the stuff on screen; it eventually got pared down. But the script ended that way it does on screen, with a crucifixion. I had nothing to do with that.

Barbara Hershey helplessly witnesses union organizer
David Carradine’s tragic ending in
Boxcar Bertha
(1972), Scorsese’s first Hollywood film, made for Roger Corman, mentor to a generation of soon-to-be-great filmmakers.

RS:
Really? I think people probably think, Oh, there goes Marty.

MS:
I know. I had nothing to do with it.

RS:
One of the things that I flashed on when I saw it again recently was that notion you had of doing the Christ story in Manhattan.

MS:
That’s right.

RS:
Somebody ending up crucified in some unlikely place.

MS:
Well, on the docks, where the West Side Highway was, with the cobblestones. It was so beautiful, the old New York.

But the thing was,
Boxcar
was very important for me. It came in the period of the doors being closed
—
the
Honeymoon Killers—
where I didn’t bring the right spirit to the material. Whereas, with
Boxcar,
I was able to take something that was abstract and design it on the page in drawings. I was doing what was required of the material, and I was not taken off the picture after twenty-four days. That was a big, big achievement.

RS:
You finished it!

MS:
We finished it on schedule. A lot of troubles. Three operators. But the director of photography was very, very good. The rest of it was having met [the actors]. I had a good time with them. They were really nice. And a lot of it was Corman.

RS:
You were shooting down south, right?

MS:
We were shooting in Camden, Arkansas. There was more to it than not getting fired. It was also a learning experience which gave me the crew for
Mean Streets.
Without that, without having made
Boxcar,
there was no way I could’ve made
Mean Streets.
No studio was going to make it. So I had to find the
independent element in L.A. New York independents were not going to make it. We tried that. The independent cinema was out there, and it was doing all the kinds of movies that nowadays you can actually see on TCM [Turner Classic Movies], underground movies, that sort of thing. That was the group I had to be with. And that’s why out of twenty-six days of shooting
Mean Streets,
only about seven were shot in New York. The rest was in L.A.

RS:
Using people you had met.

MS:
Literally.
Paul Rapp, the production manager, who was the associate producer on
Boxcar,
and the cameraman he introduced me to,
Kent Wakefield.

RS:
Does the movie mean anything to you except as a learning experience? Did it have any, how shall I say, Scorsesean values to it?

MS:
I did a rewrite of the script. Not a lot. Not a great deal. But I tried to add some elements.

RS:
Well, it’s a movie with violence in it. And people always equate violence and you.

MS:
Yes, it’s violent. I mean, that was the exploitation element at the time, you know. Also there had to be nudity or the suggestion of nudity every fifteen minutes. Read the script. [It’s a story about a union organizer and his lover trying to take revenge on the exploitative management of a railroad.] And the
Depression, which is the time it’s set in.
The Grapes of Wrath
was something I liked a great deal. And of course
Tobacco Road
and other Ford films.

A rare tender moment between David Carradine and Barbara Hershey, who plays
Boxcar Bertha
’s title character. It was on this shoot that the actress gave Scorsese the novel that became the basis for
The Last Temptation of Christ.

RS:
Boxcar
was more like
Tobacco Road,
I’d say.

MS:
I really like it. I think it’s an underrated Ford picture.

RS:
It’s one of his best movies. It’s very funny.

MS:
And it’s sad.

RS:
[
Imitates accent:
] “Get out the way, you dang fool!” [
Laughs.
]

MS:
Remember that? [
Laughs.
] Yeah, right. The son with his car he doesn’t know
how to drive, and banging on the horn—a lot of that spirit wound up in the picture, there’s no doubt about it. The challenge to me was: Can I create that world convincingly?

RS:
Did it give you a little more security? You know: Okay, I can, if need be, efficiently do a commercial,
exploitation movie.

MS:
Yeah, that’s what I mean about having finished it. The security is what it was about. And also the security of how I was doing it—directing scenes, camera movements, designing them, even taking extra angles for cutting later that I wasn’t normally doing before. All sorts of things. Balancing the traditional way of doing as opposed to a newer way. For example, using
handheld a certain way when it’s not supposed to be used. At that time they used handheld a great deal for action scenes or fight scenes. But I was using it for scenes that had more emotional turmoil, dialogue scenes.

RS:
Well, sure, that makes sense.

MS:
There was a lot that we put into the movie, thinking back now. Every location was very specifically chosen. The idea of places where parties had been held which they’d missed. Churches that they missed. Everything that they keep missing in life. They’re the outsiders.

And the huckster, the urban guy played by
Barry Primus, I loved a lot because it was sort of like
Night and the City—
Richard Widmark trying to talk his way out of things or into things. And just getting outsmarted, and getting killed. All this is something that I really liked. And then, of course, the last sequences: I liked when she came back and found David older, and then he gets taken and he gets killed on the train, and she follows him on the train as he’s crucified and the train takes off. Every shot was very, very specifically designed, every one of them. And we got them all, pretty much every one.

RS:
Is it true of Corman, as I’ve heard, that once he decided on a director he’d be hands-off?

MS:
He did come to Camden with Julie. I was in this motel room and was working on these shots. I still have them. And I drew three to four hundred pictures. And he said, “Do you have your preparation? How do you prepare?” And I said, “Well, I’ll show you.” And I started showing him these pictures. And then explaining, “This cuts to this, and this goes this way, and this is just normal coverage, but then there’s a move this way.” He said, “Wait a minute. Do you have this for the whole picture?” I said, “Yes.” He goes, “I don’t have to see any more.” That was it!

And all he did was push
Paul Rapp to make sure we stayed on schedule. These
were very long days sometimes. But he had the kind of people who worked on low-budget U.A. [United Artists] films in the fifties, even some who had worked on some
Ed Wood films. They’d been put through a lot. But we were in the middle of nowhere. Nobody could check on us. These people were on the fringes. They needed the work. So you know—

RS:
Well, that’s the way Roger operated—he used people so young they had nothing to lose, or people so old they no longer had anything at stake. But everyone I’ve talked to who knew him back then, they all kind of loved Roger.