Conversations with Scorsese (50 page)

MS:
But what could I do? The only thing we could do was put the cameras on the stage and try to work it out in rehearsal. Unfortunately, we didn’t have much rehearsal: a lot of their rehearsals were private.

Ultimately, I did find out what songs he was going to play that night. I won’t say how.

But for me the energy was great, like a dance, and the editing was fun. I love watching music films. It could be classical music, it could be
opera. I would love to have done an opera on film. But I think I probably would have done too many angles, too many cuts, too many special shots.

RS:
Maybe you should become another
Billy Friedkin, go around and stage operas in opera houses.

MS:
I don’t know. People have asked me to do operas, but I don’t even know if I know opera that well. I don’t have the imagination to take advantage of the proscenium. It all seems like a wide shot to me. I would have to be very careful.

Mick and I had been talking for years about another project. That’s how I got to know him a little bit. He came to me about a project about the music business, which we’re still involved in. The main thing, though, is that when he was on tour I would go and see the show. At a couple of the shows, when I got real close, I thought, I’ve got to get this on film. And I did.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
How did
Shutter Island
come up? Somebody says, “Hey, here’s a Scorsese film”?

MARTIN SCORSESE:
We were going to do
The Wolf of Wall Street.
It’s an extraordinary true story. Leo DiCaprio as this young man who created this empire on Wall Street with junk bonds and wound up in jail. And it’s a story of excess again. I was hesitant about it, but the script was written by
Terry Winter, and I agreed to work on it and in a sense what happened was it wasted about five months of my life.

RS:
On what?

MS:
Waiting for them [
Warner Bros.] to agree. I pointed out that although everybody was well-meaning in the situation, it’s just that tastes are very different. And so I said, “You know, there could be a problem,” because we had some problems on
Departed.
That worked out well, but it was a process. And I said, “I don’t know if I can handle that process again. I’m getting maybe too old for it. I don’t know if I can handle it, if it’s worth it.” But I did try. And they tried.

But ultimately five months went by. I turned around, nothing had happened. And at that point I had to work. And right around that time, there was talk of
this story. [Ostensibly it is about a pair of federal marshals (Leonardo DiCaprio and
Mark Ruffalo) who appear on the eponymous island, which houses an insane asylum, to search for a patient who has gone missing. Though shot realistically, this turns out to be pure fantasy, the mad imaginings of DiCaprio’s psychopathic character.] This story of these two men who are going to an island. And I said, “Hmm, yes, I want to do two men going to an island, but in
Japan.” [He’s referring again to the long-delayed project
Silence.
] So, in any event, they sent the script to me and said, “Well, just read it and see what you think.” But, you know, a lot was invested in it.

RS:
It’s not a hugely expensive picture, is it?

MS:
It’s up there.

RS:
Really?

MS:
I was very aware each day of money. And when the weather went against us, halfway through the shoot, it was a very difficult process because every decision we made—based on the best meteorological advice, logistics, everything you could think of—we lost, every choice we made. It’s a miracle it ever got finished. But I read the thing and it was late at night and I was very moved by the ending, the last scene.

RS:
What was so moving in that for you?

MS:
The impact of his decision to go to the lighthouse. He makes a choice to wipe out his false memory, in a way.

RS:
I found myself very lost in this movie. And not in a good way.

MS:
I don’t even want to talk about it because it’s like I can’t handle any more criticism of it. Sorry.

RS:
I don’t mean it as criticism.

MS:
You either go with it or you don’t.

RS:
There was some reality I couldn’t embrace in that movie. I don’t know how to explain it in any other way.

Shutter Island
(2010) is a vision conjured up in the mind of its mentally disturbed protagonist.

MS:
Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s no good. I don’t know.

RS:
I’m not saying it’s no good, Marty.

MS:
No, maybe it isn’t. I really don’t know. All I know is that we’re in his mind, we have to see the world through his mind. And the world in his mind is post–World War II/early fifties paranoia, which is real. Yet it all seems like some scenario from some old story. There is a storm, it is a dark night, there are suspicious doctors. Anyway, I could go on for hours about it or not at all, because it depends on how it hits you. Some people were really stunned by it. Others can’t get into it at all—can’t feel, as you say, the reality.

RS:
Well, he’s not crazy for a long, long time in the movie as far as we can perceive.

MS:
Right. It’s about how you perceive the reality around you.

RS:
It’s a funny movie, though, because it’s not a typical
Dennis Lehane novel—compared, let’s say, to
Mystic River …

MS:
But from what I understand he did it based on his anger at the time of the
Iraq war.

RS:
Really?

MS:
Yes, basically he said, What was the worst period for paranoia? He looked back and everything seemed to converge in
McCarthyism. The Communist Party in America, what that meant about our relationship with Russia, and, psychiatrically, the use of these
drugs as opposed to lobotomies.

RS:
And they’re back, lobotomies.

MS:
Yes, I know they are, because you can map the brain perfectly. It’s amazing what they do—whether that’s right or wrong. I’m just talking about the ability to do it now. And also the use of drugs and the use of talking therapy. Drugs, lithium—very important, very important. Thorazine—very important. And the talking therapy. And these converged, especially the paranoia, during the
Cold War. I took it at the face value of a man who’s going on an island to find this woman who is lost, who has left, escaped. And then it’s not about that. And then it’s about something else. Then it’s not about that, either.

RS:
In reality, if there is a reality in this movie, he’s a federal marshal. And that portion of the movie where he comes to the island, is that real?

MS:
No, that doesn’t ever happen.

RS:
But it seems so real …

MS:
Well, if you were him, it would be real. If you were mad, it would be real. I grew up amidst homeless people on the
Bowery, just a few blocks away. They hear voices, and the voices tell them to do something. They go and kill children because the voices tell them to. They really hear that. So the guy is looking. He’s thinking about all these scenarios, and the scenarios are like films in a way. This is his reality.

RS:
So is it fair to say that this entire movie is only that character’s reality? There is no island reality at all.

MS:
I think ultimately in the top room it’s real. When they explain it all to him.

RS:
Oh, really?

MS:
A lot of people choose not to see it that way. They become so invested in the way DiCaprio played it that they don’t believe he’s crazy even at the very end, when he says, “My name is Andrew Laeddis and I killed my wife in the spring of ’52.” They just don’t believe him. And that’s what the beauty of it for me was, that he takes responsibility for his violence, for his violence in the war, too.

How do we expect men to live like this, when they come back from war? How many men have come back from Iraq and killed their wives?

RS:
Probably quite a large number.

MS:
We don’t even know the damage that’s been done. Now whether the war is right, wrong, whatever, that’s a whole other issue. But what do we expect from people who are put into a war situation when they come back and try to fit into normal society? Quote, “normal society,” unquote. But the other thing that really surprised me in the script was that the story kept changing. It started as a mystery, then it became a detective story. Then it became
Cold War conspiracy theory. Then it became something else. And the next thing you know, they’re in a graveyard. Why are they in a graveyard? We were trying to explain it at one point. We tried in the cut and said, You know, nobody is listening to the exposition. Drop it.

RS:
I suppose, for me, when they’re in the graveyard is when you start thinking, Wait a minute.

MS:
Exactly. You see where this is going. You realize that there’s a doctor with him. He’s getting out of hand in the graveyard. They shouldn’t be there in the storm. Then he disappears. But in any event, what really held me was when he meets
Patricia Clarkson in the cave. I really believed it when I read it.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo experience the dark dream that is
Shutter Island.

RS:
As a reality?

MS:
As a reality. And I said to myself, Well, it’s okay, this is seriously a conspiracy issue. I was young, but the
Cold War made a great impression on me—the sense of being taken over, like in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
it was worse than being killed in a way because they took your soul. They took your mind away. This is what we were told as children about Communists, because they were “godless.”

RS:
Well, an enormous amount—I hate to say it—of what we call
McCarthyism certainly had a fair amount to do with Catholicism. I don’t mean in any narrow religious sense—

MS:
Well, yes, because—

RS:
—but in the sense of their position in society.

MS:
Yes, because if the Communists deny God, well, who’s going to be annihilated? The church. Any religion basically, but primarily the church. I remember that feeling of the soul being taken away, the idea of soldiers coming back from Korea who had been “brainwashed.” It’s best presented in
The Manchurian Candidate.
And, there was Cardinal Mindszenty, the way they broke him down, the story told in
The Prisoner
with
Alec Guinness and
Jack Hawkins, all of these things contributed
to living that experience. And I thought, Well, all right. I’ll go with that. So I shot that scene totally real, three angles with a wide shot, that’s it. I thought, So what is our reality in cinema, too? Who do we believe in a film?

RS:
It seems from what you’ve said that the essential trick, if you will, of that movie is that there is no actual reality in it.