Conversations with Scorsese (5 page)

And, finally, at a certain hour, about seven o’clock, he would go over to his mother and father down the street. And they’d convene about the family. His older brother would come over, sometimes the other brothers, and everybody would talk—this shouldn’t be, that isn’t right, going back and forth. My father’s
mother was extremely matriarchal. And she didn’t speak English. She was loving, but she was scary.

My grandfather was very quiet. But apparently in his day he was pretty tough with his kids. There was no such thing with them—with all those children living in two and a half rooms or three rooms—as an independent character of any kind. You know: We just had another baby, you take care of it. You’re the eldest daughter, the eldest son—move. You come and dig ditches for me at Con Edison. That’s it. You can’t be a CPA. And so with that kind of harshness—the conflict with the New World, the conflict with America—they didn’t know how to take advantage of opportunity. They didn’t know.

But with me they kind of saw a little something. But they didn’t know what the hell to do with me. The problem there in the house was something I’ve been dealing with ever since. It’s very hard for me to talk about, but I put it on film in different ways. It’s in
Raging Bull,
it’s in
Mean Streets.
The whole picture of
Mean Streets,
it’s really him, my father, not me. I mean there’s a part of me in there, but …

RS:
Which part?

MS:
Well, Harvey Keitel signing the notes for Johnny Boy. [Robert De Niro’s character is a wild, oddly lovable kid who needs protection by his more responsible peers.] I didn’t sign any notes, but I had a close friend who, every now and then, vouched for a friend of ours whom we loved, and he got into a lot of trouble. But he was a nice kid, and he survived. He’s still around, but not in this state. In my world, if you borrowed money from somebody, you had to pay it back. Now if you borrowed it from a bank, there was some leeway. But when you’re borrowing it from a fellow on the street corner and he’s a friend of so-and-so’s, and there’s a crime family down the block, you have to pay it back, or at least you have to make an attempt to pay it back. And you have to be well-connected so that powerful people—Mob guys—could talk for you. I’ve heard stories my father told me, I’ve seen things happen. It’s what happens in
Mean Streets.

It’s about the respect issue. It’s a point of honor, dealing with this sort of thing. And even if you have nothing, there’s still got to be the honor of your name. So you can walk in the street. Because there are no other streets. You can’t get on a plane and go to Paris. You’ve only got the streets. There’s about eight blocks, that’s it. And you’re not going to go to the
West Side, where you had actors, you had mimes, you had writers, you had intellectuals. There’s no such thing on the East Side. What you had on the East Side was the
Bowery, the bums who were dying in the street.

But we’re getting off the subject. Besides my brother, my father’s youngest
brother, unfortunately, was getting in trouble all the time. To the end of his days he would go and deal with everything you could imagine in the criminal world. And the rest of the family sort of threw their hands up, so my father had to go and finesse the issues with different parties and different groups of men. And it was very serious, very serious.

RS:
In other words, your uncle was constantly in danger.

MS:
All the time. But I loved him. He was on the second floor, we were on the third floor. And he had a great sense of humor, he was very funny. But he was also a very dangerous man. Every time there was a crisis, my father would run it with my mother and discuss it and the reasons why my uncle had to behave a certain way, and the reasons why my uncle had to find the money to pay this or that person. And my mother would say, Don’t do it. How many times do I have to tell you? Don’t lend him money. He was in and out of jail. I couldn’t say anything because it was none of my business. You’re the son, you keep quiet. It wasn’t until after my father died in 1993 that I realized
Mean Streets
was really about him and his brother.

RS:
Obviously, now that you mention it.

MS:
If you borrowed money from certain people and didn’t pay it back, they were dangerous. They weren’t banks. It would be a matter of serious leg-smashing, head-smashing, or whatever.

But in any event, my father was dealing with my uncle until he was in the hospital and he was getting his second heart operation; he had to sign a check for my uncle for $200—with my mother and my brother telling him not to do it. He goes, It’s my brother, what am I going to do? And my father dies, is laid out in the church, and my uncle is there the night of the funeral; the mass was in
St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral. He gets a heart attack. They take him to the hospital and about a month later he dies.

RS:
My God.

MS:
Yeah. Yeah. But that’s the nature of the bond. I’m sorry. I was impressed, and it hasn’t gone away.

RS:
And yet you loved your father unconditionally, at least as you talk about him now.

MS:
Absolutely. I don’t belong in any other place. I don’t belong in a world of writers or whatever. I’ve found that over the years I don’t want to think of myself as anything other than what I am.

But things were so overwhelming when I was a kid, a little kid growing up
down in that place, in those times. The only place I could burst out, I thought, was with stories, drama, ideas.

RS:
So you did a lot of that?

MS:
Constantly.

RS:
As a little kid?

MS:
As a little kid. I would fantasize a lot about that. And I would draw my own movies.

Marty’s childhood “film,” one of the many epics he drew in what amounts to storyboard form. He pulled the images, one by one, through a little theater he had constructed. His audience was a single boyhood pal.

RS:
Really? Little storyboard-like things?

MS:
Yeah, they were storyboards. They started out in 1.33 aspect ratio in black-and-white, standard movie size. When I was quite a little kid I liked
The Little King
comic strips. And I would draw my own comic strip.

RS:
Otto Soglow was the cartoonist. That was a cute strip. Yet it was very visually pure, almost austere.

MS:
I remember doing them when we lived in Corona. That was like a movie for me. I must’ve been five or six. And then, when I was in Manhattan, in 1950, when I was about eight or nine, I would watch other shows on TV and try to do my version on film, in drawings. And I’d make drawings, and I’d paint them with watercolors. I had a whole bunch of them. And I actually finished them. But then my father saw me one day playing with them and I hid them. He didn’t like the idea. He didn’t know what I was doing, you know. He thought it was too secretive. And so I guess I got embarrassed and threw them away.

RS:
There are none of those left?

MS:
No. As I said, everybody was on top of each other in those three rooms, you know, and I felt ashamed of it, I guess. And I threw them away. And then, a year or two later, I said to myself, You know what? The hell with them, I’m going to do them again.

I never finished them, though. By that time I was turning into a teenager, and things were changing. And by that time, too, I was going wide-screen. They were like big Roman epics, one of which I called “The Eternal City.” I got into gladiatorial combats. And then they got kind of decadent, I guess—my drawn frames expanded to 75 millimeters, wide-screen; 70 wasn’t enough. Roman epics, you know. The Roman epic I never finished. But a few of the others I finished.

RS:
So you were drawing in little notebooks.

MS:
They were drawn on pads. And then the strips were cut out, and were put into a little screen. I would only show them to one friend—I didn’t show them to anybody else. I hid them in the apartment.

RS:
At what age did you start doing that?

MS:
Oh, I must’ve been about eight or nine until about twelve, or maybe thirteen. They’re in some of the books about me, some of the Roman drawings. But the other ones I don’t show. And some of the early ones I guess I threw away. But I would show them to this one friend of mine because he was a very sweet kid. He was sort of the intellectual of the group. And he would insist, “Marty, these don’t move.” I said, “They all move. See, from one frame to the other.” “Oh, yeah, but the drawings are not moving.” I said, “Why do you have to be literal about it?” But he was an avid reader and he taught me to read, too. Read books. We’d go to the library together.

RS:
At what age did you start doing that?

MS:
Oh, I guess ten or eleven.

RS:
What kind of books would you take out? Kids’ books?

MS:
I remember taking out
When Knighthood Was in Flower.
That was enjoy-able. Then some other books written for young high school students, I think, about the Revolutionary War and that sort of thing. I don’t remember getting through them that well. I found it was very hard, I didn’t know how to read a book, I didn’t know how to live with a book, or read fast. I still can’t read fast. The biggest revelation was when I forced my father to take me to see
Julius Caesar.
He didn’t want to see it, but he would take me to see anything I wanted to see. And it was the Mankiewicz version. It was Brando,
James Mason,
John Gielgud. Mason is fantastic.

RS:
It was a little stodgy as I recall.

MS:
Very stodgy.

RS:
And a little underpopulated. There are not enough people in the crowd scenes.

MS:
Yeah, yeah. You can see it now, when the camera pulls back. But as a kid I was fascinated by Ancient Rome because of the church. And I liked
Quo Vadis
when I first saw it. But
Julius Caesar
was black-and-white and it was Shakespeare. I went with it. It was fun. And I was so taken by the story that I found the book in the library, illustrated by
Rockwell Kent. I took it to class. And that particular year the nun who was teaching the class had to leave, so they had a lay teacher in, a woman. And I said, “I saw this film, and I’d like to put the play on right now.” And so I assigned the different roles to different friends of mine in the class that day. I think I got halfway through act one before my friends started walking off. They’d had enough. But I would hand the book to the next person for his part, and the next and the next and so on. I thought it was so amazing.

And then there was
Orson Welles’s
Macbeth
on TV, which I saw repeatedly on
Million Dollar Movie
[a local TV series that ran old movies every night]. And Olivier’s
Hamlet,
which I saw when I was six years old. My brother took me; basically, he said, it’s got ghosts and sword fighting. We sat through the whole picture.

RS:
It must’ve been around that time that I went to
Henry V—
a school assignment.

MS:
Oh, I got to see that one later. We got to see it at the
New Yorker theater. I think it was the first film shown at the New Yorker. But the library was so important, because it, too, was quiet.

RS:
You keep coming back to that.

MS:
It was pretty quiet—not quite like the movies, which sort of induced a pure dream state.

RS:
Except, I guess, if the movie was lousy, and all the kids started hooting and hollering.

MS:
Making noise on a Saturday afternoon—yeah. But this was a refuge. Along with the church, the only place where there was some hope.