Conversations with Scorsese (42 page)

RS:
I imagine you’re drawn to
There Will Be Blood
in part because it’s another father-son drama.

MS:
In part, I suppose. But I have to emphasize again that by the last thirty years of my father’s life, we became friends. I’m dealing with it still in the Kazan
documentary
Kent Jones and I are finishing, which is really more of a memoir, almost a eulogy. And it has, again, to do with Kazan’s film
East of Eden,
which is a great exploration of the love and hatred of a son and his father.

RS:
But your father wasn’t anything like
Raymond Massey’s father in
Eden.

MS:
Not at all. But in the child’s mind, I may have conjured up images of God the Father in the Old Testament.

RS:
Well, if you see him in the documentary you made [
Italianamerican
], your dad is very silent, though kind of amiable.

MS:
At first very secretive. And then he opens up, you know. It seems to be a well that I keep drawing from. There seem to be some primal feelings that I kind of feel comfortable with, and enjoy. Maybe not enjoy, but that seduce me into certain projects.

RS:
Talking about Daniel Day-Lewis: There is the character in
Age of Innocence,
and then there’s his character in
Gangs of New York.
It seems as if he is some sort of go-to guy for you when it comes to father figures.

MS:
There’s an element of my father in
Gangs.
Because of a kind of strict way of thinking, and, as I told you, my neighborhood was like a little medieval village.

RS:
Daniel Day-Lewis is a fastidious man who’s an absolutely great father, in a certain sense, in
Age of Innocence.
I find it fascinating that you would even think of the same actor for Bill the Butcher.

MS:
Look at
My Left Foot
—the way he controls his body; the energy it takes to play that character, the energy it took for him to do a painting with his feet. He actually did one then.

RS:
Did he?

MS:
It’s hanging in
Jim Sheridan’s house, the director’s house, in Dublin. There’s a kind of determination in that work. More than that, there’s an anger that you certainly could tap into—a good, healthy kind of anger, not a self-destructive, King Lear–like anger, as there is in
There Will Be Blood.
He’s shouting at the elements by the end of the movie. There’s definitely that in him. I saw it in
My Left Foot
and I saw it in
Last of the Mohicans.
And the great sense of humor in
Room with a View.
So I said to myself, Well, the guy can do anything.

RS:
From some things you’ve said, I gather that even as late as your parents’ young years, some of the
Gangs
architecture and atmosphere still lingered in your neighborhood.

MS:
When my mother was a girl, the horrible tenements still existed. You looked out at nothing. The first man who did a film there was
Raoul Walsh. He shot some of
Regeneration
there.

RS:
I’ve never seen that movie.

MS:
It’s magnificent, incredible. It’s unrelenting, a tough movie, because he knew the people at
Five Points, what was left of the Five Points. He put some of them in that film.

RS:
Raoul was born in New York.

MS:
His
The Bowery
is like my
Goodfellas
in a way. You know what I’m saying?

RS:
Not exactly.

MS:
Because he knew those people, knew their folklore. He knew how they went in a bar and how they ordered a beer, how they moved, the kind of clothes they wore. He understood
Chuck Connors, the famous racketeer, who coined the phrase “rackets.” He threw big dances the police would come to. There’s something
about all that that was second nature to Raoul—similar to the way I grew up around that area of Italian Americans. He was Irish. He really had the line on post–Civil War to turn-of-the-century New York—of the New York Tenderloin (up in the Chelsea area), the New York underworld. I think he had it down cold.

There’s something about the way my parents described their lives—I have that script that
Nick Pileggi and I are working on, “Neighborhood” it’s called now, and it’s about them and that period of time. It’s partly the way they described their lives and the way they lived and the way they dealt with just the basics of living—how everybody would take care of each other in the tenements, where the toilets were, where they had to wash, a sink, one faucet, if they had any at all. The way people lived, and the way they had grocery stores, the kind of food you would get, that really had ties to the way people lived in early New York. It’s the same as Orchard Street, the same with the Jewish area. I felt—

RS:
Some living connection there—

MS:
Yes, absolutely. You could feel it in the walls of the tenements. There were ghosts. It had a history and it had character. We knew so much of what had happened in that area.

RS:
It’s as if that history didn’t exist when the official history of those times was written.

MS:
Well, I guess it’s like picking up
The New York Times,
the Metro section, where you see small articles that are front-page news in the tabloids. I remember back at NYU, people used to say, Read the tabloids, because they talk about real life. Because poor people don’t have educations, that doesn’t mean they don’t struggle and suffer.

One guy I knew made page one in the
Daily News.
He was a nice kid across the way, maybe sixteen or seventeen. He was the son of the lady who ran a soda fountain at 240 or 238 Elizabeth. She was really nice, let us hang out there. And he was always very quiet. In 1950, ’51 maybe, he took part in a robbery, had guns, and got shot. It was on the front page of the
Daily News.
And, you know, his mother was in that luncheonette for another thirty, forty years—next to the butcher. It’s just you get into situations.

RS:
Why?

MS:
No education. That kid probably needed money. Probably there was peer pressure. He was very quiet. He wasn’t an aggressive kid. The next thing you know, they were going in with guns. They come out, the cops are there. They see a kid with a gun, they start shooting.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Marty on the
Gangs
set.

RS:
It’s obvious that that kid—or the modern mobsters in your other films—are in some way the inheritors of the world you portray in
Gangs.

MS:
I was always drawn to a world that seems so strange, almost like the ancient world, yet still filled with the same kind of people. We haven’t changed.

The
Bowery was the last dregs of the
Five Points. You lived with people dying in the streets. It was what the Five Points must have been like.

RS:
But how different was the
Gangs
underworld from the underworld you saw glimpses of?

MS:
Very different. There was anarchy, more tribalism in the past. My grandparents were tribal, but not like what we showed in
Gangs,
where somebody would turn on you and betray you.

RS:
You’ve said you feel
Gangs of New York
isn’t as violent as some of your other movies.

MS:
Nowhere near the violence of my other pictures. It does go on and on, a continual cycle of violence, though. It’s as
Daniel Day-Lewis’s character says: A man
robs me, I cut off his hand. He talks against me, I cut his tongue out. He tries to harm me, I cut his head off and put it on a pike so everybody can see it.

Maybe if I’d made the film earlier, it would have been horrendous in terms of graphic violence, but I don’t really want to do it anymore—after doing the killing of
Joe Pesci and his brother in
Casino,
in the cornfield. If you look at it, it isn’t shot in any special way. It doesn’t have any choreography to it. It doesn’t have any style to it, it’s just flat. It’s not pretty. There was nothing more to do than to show what that way of life leads to. Not only what it leads to, but that it leads to this being done to you by your closest friends. It’s brutal, it’s nasty, it’s humiliating, to say the least.

It speaks to some people. Joe Pesci was playing golf, and a couple of older men were on the same course. Afterwards, they were all in the locker room, and when they changed into their street clothes, it turns out that the two gentlemen are monsignors. They went over to Joe and said, We admire your work. Joe figures they are going to compliment him on
Home Alone.
But they said they really liked him in
Casino.
They said they really felt bad about how he died in the film. They really felt for him in that sequence.

And Joe said to me later, That’s exactly what you wanted to do, right? I said, Yes—as mean and nasty as he gets throughout the whole picture, he deserves his fate.

RS:
It’s pathetic.

MS:
It really is pathetic and sick and terrible. I remember I showed a rough cut to John Kennedy Jr., and it upset him very much. When he got out of the screening room, he was walking in the hall. I said, What’s the problem? He said, I just got a little nauseous.

But
Gangs of New York
is stylized, like choreography, I think, so the violence seems held back to a certain extent.

RS:
It was more mass violence. The violence in
Casino
was pretty much one-on-one.

MS:
It’s happening right now as we speak, all around the world. In Iraq, in Afghanistan—the breakdown of society, the breakdown of civilization. We’ll be reduced to chaos again.

We bombed Afghanistan into rubble, where, you know, warlords have taken over. Kids today don’t know what happened in
China in the 1920s. Just look at the beginning of
Lost Horizon.
The Chinese warlords. They cut off heads just for the equivalent of speeding. Read
Edgar Snow’s books.

RS:
What you’re saying is that we’re witnessing a kind of fraudulent nationalism that’s masking sheer chaos.

MS:
You give a seventeen-year-old kid a gun and put him in a firefight, it’s going to be rough. Kids often don’t think they can die. Kids can easily become like animals, you know.

RS:
By which I guess you mean a reversion to primitive tribalism?

MS:
Yes. Definitely. The old genie is out of the bottle. We’re in for hundreds of years of it.

I read ancient history to learn how the empires fell. The barbarians at the gates. Take
Gangs of New York
—their gods are Celtic war gods. It’s not Jesus suffering on the cross. They’re tough bastards. They’re going to kill and maim. The reality is that the war gods are the ancient gods. The history of God, the development of
monotheism, is warlike.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
How did
The Aviator
get off the ground, so to speak?

MARTIN SCORSESE:
At the time, I really wanted to do
Silence
[his script about Jesuit missionaries in
Japan]. I tried writing the script with Jay Cocks in 1991 and it didn’t turn out right. There were also problems with the rights. The other picture I really wanted to do was
Gangs of New York,
which eventually, obviously, got made. Meantime, I had to work, I had to find something.

When this script came to me, they didn’t tell me what it was about. It just said “The Aviator.” I don’t really like flying very much. I’m fascinated by it, but I just don’t like it. But there’s also a kind of beauty to films about flying—like
Hell’s Angels,
which is still the best work with planes in a picture [it was released in 1930, though begun some years earlier],
Howard Hughes directing. Even
William Cameron Menzies’s design of the plane in
Foreign Correspondent
was terrific. So I’ve always had some fascination.

But I’d always stayed away from a work on Hughes because I knew there were many people, a number of excellent filmmakers, who had been trying to make pictures about him over the years: it was sort of their territory.
Warren Beatty wanted to make a Hughes picture for years. He talked to me about it—he talked
to
everybody
about it. Spielberg also wanted to make it. The legend of the strange-looking old man who lived in one room.