Conversations with Scorsese (33 page)

She ultimately comes to the realization that it’s a question of one step at a time, and that literally the person next to you may be the one in need. That’s what she’s there for. That’s what we must do. I thought we could discuss that. I thought we could do that without making it the center of a media circus. Yet some people said that I was just aiming for box office because of the controversial nature of the picture.

RS:
If I ever saw a movie that had no box office written on it …

MS:
I thought it would get enough people interested to break even. That was it. I was in debt for years after that. I only came out of debt by doing
Cape Fear.
I put everything into it we had. The same thing happened with
Gangs of New York.
I overcame those debts after making
The Departed.
It took that long. But that’s the gamble I take—everything goes!

RS:
Did you really think you were going to get your money back on either of those?

MS:
Of course not.
Paul Schrader [who wrote the screenplay] knew we would have trouble. He was much more prescient that way. I’m always very much of the moment. He said people would be upset. I didn’t think so.

RS:
I suspect it had something to do with the fact that everybody knew you were raised Catholic. So for you to poke your head up and say, You know, let’s consider this whole matter in a nontheological, or, rather, a nonideological way—I think they were lying in wait for you. The church has a keen eye for apostates. Surely you had some hint that you were going to get a reaction.

MS:
I was hoping to get some ideological reaction, but I didn’t make the film for money. I was just burning to make it.

RS:
I know that.

MS:
I expected
some
controversy. But I expected it to be intelligent. I expected discussion and dialogue.

RS:
Not in America, pal.

MS:
It was amazing.

RS:
You were at the beginning of the period we’re in now. The fundamentalists, both Catholic and Protestant, were already feeling their oats at that moment.

MS:
It was, of course, condemned by the church from the pulpit, and they sent out their army, so to speak.

RS:
But I certainly saw some very cretinous people picketing it outside the theaters.

MS:
I know.

RS:
So, all that came as a considerable shock to you?

MS:
Very much so. By the time I appeared on
Nightline
on TV, where I was supposed to confront our critics, I had thrown the towel in. I couldn’t fight them anymore. I was just satisfied that the picture had been made.

RS:
It’s quite a good picture; I was almost surprised that I felt that way.

MS:
I hope so. I think it could have been cut more. We didn’t have enough time, Thelma and I, because we had to release it pretty early. But I was satisfied. We had gone through an experimental process successfully. And it became a religious experience for all of us. I really mean that.

It was the worst shoot; you can’t imagine.
Joe Reidy, the assistant director, could tell you. Harvey Keitel could tell you,
Willem Dafoe,
Barbara Hershey,
Michael Ballhaus, all the actors. We had a very low budget, so we were stuck all the time. There were weather problems, too.

By the time I finished editing the film, I didn’t know quite what they expected to make of the experience. Was it, as I told
Barry Diller, that I want to get to know Jesus better? But after
The King of Comedy,
I wanted to go back to my own interests. I wanted to look into the development of the Gospels. The reality was that they chose which books were going to stay and which weren’t. Why were those books written? How did some books go into the
New Testament, and others not? The Gospel of Judas has only recently been found—but it was mentioned in other Gnostic gospels. A lot of these books were written eighty, ninety, a hundred years after the events they describe.

RS:
That has always bothered me, too.

MS:
With God, yes, you’re talking about revelation and that’s what we have to deal with. But we wanted to talk about those other things—about Jesus, Judas, Mary, too. At the end of
The South Bank Show,
when
Melvyn Bragg asked, “What did you think they’d be most concerned about?”
Paul Schrader said, “The dirty parts.” Funny.

RS:
What dirty parts?

MS:
Well, the concept that Jesus would have sexual feelings.

RS:
Oh, that.

MS:
This was the big issue. That’s what the critics claim it was.

RS:
But this character is, for better or worse, half man and half God.

MS:
Oh, no, he’s full man and full God. You have to be careful, Christologically speaking.

RS:
Whatever.

MS:
That’s the beauty of it. Let’s accept him as completely God and completely man, and therefore he’s going to feel everything a man feels.

RS:
Of course.

MS:
As I said earlier, some people would say, “Well, he’s God, therefore he’s on the cross and he’ll get through death all right.” But the point is he’s going to be afraid of death because he’s a man.

RS:
And if he’s a man, that particular death is going to hurt.

MS:
Of course. That’s why I directed as I did the scene when he raises Lazarus, and Lazarus takes his hand and pulls him into the tomb, and he’s afraid to go in. Lazarus has said, This is where you’re going. You’re coming with me. Do you want to go through this? Jesus doesn’t know what his role is until it’s revealed to him slowly.

I think the key to it, as I also said earlier, was the relationship of Jesus and Judas. Why did he do what he did? For thirty pieces of silver? Thirty pieces of silver is nothing. It’s not for the money. Something else had to have gone down, was going on. And then it goes back to this issue of loyalty and friendship.

One of the first films my father took me to see was [Sam Fuller’s]
I Shot Jesse James,
in which Jesse’s best friend kills him. My father was always talking about loyalty.

RS:
I didn’t see that film till fairly recently, but I liked it a lot—belatedly.

MS:
Me, too. And this betrayal led me eventually to
The Departed.

RS:
Would your father have thought
Jesse James
was a
western you might enjoy, or do you think he knew what was going to happen in that movie?

MS:
He just thought it was a western. I wanted to see it. It had a great title. I was about six years old.

RS:
So, were you satisfied when
Last Temptation
came out? I mean, forget the controversy—did it in some way do what you wanted it to do? Or did the controversy spoil it all?

MS:
Something odd happened. The physical process of making the film, editing it—putting the man on the cross, the crowds coming in—was so intense I feel I just missed grasping it all. It got out of my hands. The process itself removed me from what I thought I would experience.

But it led to
Kundun,
which led to
Bringing Out the Dead,
which is leading to
Silence
[a film about Jesuit missionaries in feudal
Japan—a film Scorsese has been struggling to get made for many years]. As I said, there are certain things I would have liked to have done better. The night I was on
Nightline
I realized there’s something very special about faith, for everyone. Yet I wasn’t intending to shake anybody’s faith.

RS:
I know that.

MS:
Apparently people felt threatened. To them, there was an issue that was obviously much more important than whether it was a good movie or not. I finally realized that with all this clamor, it would be very difficult for anybody to engage
in what I hoped the picture would create.
Andrew Greeley tried in
The
New York Times,
and a few other people wrote interesting things about it. But in most cases it was just dismissed. And that was that.

RS:
Still, we shouldn’t forget that in the movie Jesus is an interesting character, and he’s nicely played by
Willem Dafoe.

MS:
Willem did a great job.

RS:
Coming to it with my total lack of regard for religiosity—he engaged my sympathy, as does Harvey as Judas in his way.

MS:
Yes.

RS:
And I think there is, if you will, a kind of wonderful screenwriter’s logic to that business. It’s a neat twist and makes perfect narrative sense.

MS:
Yes, and he said, “Oh, by the way, if I represent salvation, you’ll have to represent the antithesis of that for eternity.”

RS:
For all eternity.

MS:
All eternity. You’ll be the one that they claimed hanged himself. And Dante will put you in hell in a certain place. It’s fascinating. You know, I’ve seen parts of it on TV a couple of times. Maybe one day I’ll screen it again. It’s not a film I have bad memories of in any way. It’s just when it opened, when all the controversy developed, that it was a nightmare. There was nothing I could say or do. I also couldn’t be shaken, because I believed in what I did. In the end, I think
Last Temptation
was out of my grasp because I naïvely thought I was supposed to have taken some sort of a spiritual journey with it. But it may have been the wrong material to deal with in that way—dealing with Jesus as a man, the carnality, the physicality.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
Let’s talk about your contribution to
New York Stories
[“Life Lessons,” an episode in an
anthology film in which
Nick Nolte plays a womanizing painter, both exploitative and needy of his protégée-lover-assistant (Rosanna Arquette)]. There’s a sort of weird charm to that movie, but it also works out pretty brutally.

MARTIN SCORSESE:
It does. It is funny, because he takes himself so seriously. Let’s assume that he’s a great artist—that’s what the story tells us—which means he has to take himself seriously. Yet I think he’s amused by having to do so.

RS:
Oh, really?

MS:
I think the one scene where he looks up to the floor above him, when she’s up there with another young man, and the opera is playing, I mean he’s just enjoying that, I think.

RS:
What’s he enjoying?

MS:
He’s enjoying the emotional turmoil, maybe the pain of the whole situation, which he has induced.

And ultimately it feeds into his work, you know. At the end, when he looks at that beautiful young woman behind the bar and we sense that he has to make a play for her,
Nick Nolte turned to me before we shot it and he said, “Why don’t we give this guy a break?” I said, “No, he’s going to have to go with her.”

RS:
And what was the break he would have imagined giving him?

MS:
To pass that one up and not get into a situation where he gets into a relationship with someone not on his level. It’s simply not going to work. They’re young. The women have a whole life to get through before there’s a chance at an equal relationship.

RS:
You’re talking about his mentoring relationship with Arquette’s character.

MS:
Yes, exactly. I think he’s done it repeatedly. And I think he’s in a cycle in which he’s doing that and which ultimately feeds his work. I think he feels he has to suffer to work.

Marty’s contribution to
New York Stories
(1988), an anthology film, was “Life Lessons,” about an egomaniacal, sexually avaricious action painter (Nick Nolte) and his protégée-lover (Rosanna Arquette). The piece was funny and, at times, quite savage. The other directors involved in the project were
Woody Allen and
Francis Ford Coppola.