Conversations with Scorsese (53 page)

In some cases, a big action scene like the one in
Cape Fear,
the boat scene, I did all the drawings—little drawings, some bigger drawings—and made notes, and then an artist came in and did real storyboards based on my drawings. In the case of the action scenes in
Aviator,
I did the storyboards, which became these wonderful new visual storyboards on a computer. I forget what they’re called …

As Travis Bickle sees it: a storyboard from
Taxi Driver.

RS:
Previsualizations?

MS:
Yes, that’s it.

RS:
How does that work? I’ve never actually seen one of those. I gather it’s a crude little animation that helps you to imagine the shots you’re eventually going to make.

MS:
Well, I drew a little note, or I drew a little drawing. And
Rob Legato, the second unit director, came in with
Joe Reidy and we had a model of the plane. He had a little camera on a cable. We moved it on the plane for an angle. I could see
that in life size we would need to move the camera a little more to the left, perhaps, or lower. Maybe we could see that the plane didn’t have the right kind of seat to film from behind the actor’s head. That kind of thing. He took a black-and-white picture of what we agreed on. Then Rob previsualized based on that. I’d see maybe five or six or seven other cuts together on previz, and I’d say, “No, that first shot is not low enough, a low enough angle. Make that lower.” Then he added a guy coming in from the right. I said, “Okay, keep that, but the next shot should be more to the left.” It’s very, very specific. We literally had a little movie of the storyboards of the action scenes.

That was broken up into four different sections, sections that I would do with Leo in real time and a real place—against the sky in a parking lot in a mock-up of the plane. Then shots with a double. Then shots that were going to be done by Rob Legato that were digital. So maybe a couple of hundred shots were shot over a period of four or five months as we were shooting the rest of the film, and then we ended with him on a green screen. It was all based on the previz, which were based on my notes and drawings.

RS:
So on all your films you’ll draw notes on your script?

MS:
Yes. On
Goodfellas,
for example, I pretty much designed the film on the script as
Nick Pileggi and I wrote it, even designed the freeze frames in those sequences in the beginning. It was all there. I always say that the film was like an afterthought. But the actors contributed so much. And the paragraph about the
Copacabana was just the way Nick had written it. I said, “It’s going to be one shot.” I just wanted to leave it the way it was in the script. There was nothing to draw. We had to go to the place and actually lay out the shot. Which is what Joe Reidy and
Michael Ballhaus and I did at the Copa. We got that shot in three-quarters of a day. We got another shot that day, too.

They worked it out. They designed with me. I said, Now we’re here, now over here this happens, that happens. And they would suggest something happening, and I would say, Right, let’s put that in moving this way. All culminating with the camera ending up on
Henny Youngman. That wasn’t drawn. That was worked out in my head, then on the set.

RS:
But something as rough, as seemingly improvisational, as
Mean Streets
wasn’t drawn, or was it?

MS:
That was mainly drawn, because I couldn’t take a chance. If I had six shots and we didn’t have enough time to get two or three of them, I had to be able to say, Okay, do these two. We can redo this in another location if we just take the wall
out here or whatever. We had to move so fast. I had to, literally, visually, see what I needed to get from the beginning.

RS:
And you always carry the drawings, the notes, in the script?

MS:
On the pages of the script. I often have drawings on a separate piece of paper for a scene. I have an assistant who gives me that in the morning, or the night before. And basically I work with that. Then there is improvising on the set. Like, for example, in
The Departed,
I said, “I want glass walls. But they have to have the blinds”—you know, rather than shooting against blank walls. The blinds had to be a little bit open. I knew that when they report to Marty Sheen behind the desk in the beginning of the film, it had to be a wide shot, I knew it had to be head to toe. I knew the cadets had to be on the left, the other actors on the right. We did the same kind of thing on the rest of the shots.

RS:
Does this, among other things, free you to work a little more emotionally with the actors, because you know where you’re at?

MS:
It definitely gives you more time with the actors. There are other benefits. For instance, that long sequence that cuts back and forth in
The Departed,
when
Mark Wahlberg keeps attacking Leo DiCaprio, is composed of specific camera moves, all of which were designed in my notes. So I knew that the lines of dialogue would be good for a certain kind of camera movement. And the actor would act knowing that. We didn’t have to overlap, shooting twenty-five different angles or whatever.

RS:
This can be a more efficient way of shooting, then?

MS:
Yes, it is very precise in the camera moves and cuts. Leo had to be in the frame in a certain way. His eyes had to be seen a certain way. It gets that specific. You can see it in Kubrick films; I like watching how he cuts, and when he decides to cut, and what the size of the framing is. It specifically influenced the way I did the scene in
Goodfellas,
where De Niro tells
Ray Liotta in the luncheonette near the end of the film, “I want you to go down south, and take care of this guy for me.” Then it freeze-frames. And Liotta says, “That’s when I knew I was going to be whacked.” That was very specifically influenced by shots from
A Clockwork Orange,
where the actor was almost looking in the lens. That is very difficult for the actor because another actor he is working with can’t be where the camera is, so the actor has to put his face against the lens. I’ve worked with some people who have said, “Look, I can’t do that. I’m not going to do it.” We have to get them comfortable. But De Niro and Liotta went with it. It has an immediacy that I think draws the audience in, without the audience understanding why. You see it a lot in Kubrick.

RS:
Yes, you do.

MS:
And you see it in Hitchcock. I like watching the angles and the way he cut
The Birds
—just watching the sequences without any birds in them. It’s interesting to watch how the camera moves and how Tippi Hedren approaches when she drops off the love birds as a gift. If you watch her coming up the deck, the camera is pulling back with her, and then it intercuts with tracking shots of her point of view of the barn. Nobody’s there, but it has a little bit of creepiness to it, even though it’s before that part of the movie that takes off.

RS:
He was good with those creepy little moves—the almost subliminal hint of menace in them.

MS:
The Wrong Man
was another film where he did that so well.

RS:
I love that movie.

MS:
Watch the camera moves in there. I screened that when we were making
Taxi Driver.
I designed a lot of
Taxi Driver
based on that.

RS:
Based on what aspect of it?

MS:
The paranoia of the people. The way the camera reflected the paranoia. It was making Travis feel guilty about something he didn’t do.

RS:
Right, it did.

MS:
Which was perfect for my themes. I like to deal with characters who have that sense of guilt about them.

RS:
The Wrong Man,
which is about a man wrongly accused of a crime, is a canonical film for me, and to most people it’s not. I think it’s a great movie.

MS:
I think it is, too.

RS:
Because Hitchcock rarely went to that realistic working-class place in other films.

MS:
I screened it for
Aviator,
too, for Leo and all his friends. I pointed out to watch when Henry Fonda sits in that jail cell after he’s finally booked, when he sits on that cot and looks up at the corner of the ceiling. Then when he looks at the sink. Then when he looks over at the bars. Look at the inserts. It’s not just a shot of the ceiling. You have to figure out exactly how he looks at it, which corner of the ceiling.

The inserts tell you things. For instance, the inserts in
The Aviator,
when the
man who has polio is in the bathroom and asks Hughes to pass him a towel, and Hughes refuses. It’s the way the towels are looking at him.

RS:
The towels are looking at him?

MS:
If you look at the insert, the towels are saying, Touch me. Come on, touch me. You can’t do it. The angle of that shot was important. Bob Richardson and I fooled around with the angles; we shot the full day. I think we shot more than forty angles—of everything. Forty-two setups. Even the toilet paper, the soiled towels, the towel in the basket. Hughes realizes that all the towels are gone, and he looks in the basket, and the basket is almost beckoning him: Touch me, touch me. And he couldn’t do that.

As I said, the angles on the inserts are very important. They are all designed and worked on.

RS:
It’s possible, isn’t it, that Hitchcock was the most meticulous storyboarder?

MS:
Oh, yeah. I loved his stuff. I remember doing my comic strips when we were living in
Queens. I did them in 1.33 aspect ratio. It was square. That was like a movie for me. I must’ve been five or six years old. Then, when I was in Manhattan, in 1950, about eight or nine years old, I would watch
Suspense Theater,
or something like that, on TV and try to do my version of it in drawings. I’d paint them with watercolors. I had a whole bunch of them. Then one day my father saw me playing with them and I hid them, threw them away, as I told you before.

RS:
There are really none of those left?

MS:
No. I guess I felt ashamed of them. A year or two later, I said to myself, You know what? The hell with them, I’m going to do them again. Those I have.

By that time I was a teenager, seeing things on the wide screen. As I said earlier, I saw Roman epics, one of which was called
The Eternal City.
I drew gladiatorial combats. I was already thinking in terms of how to do a scene.

Watching
Million Dollar Movie
on TV, I could revisit a film every night for a week. I was determined to figure out the camera angles, though I didn’t know that terminology. I thought about how the camera was closer or further away from an actor, whether the camera seemed to move in or out. I still have the same problems framing close-ups.

But I was dealing with that when I was doing these little drawings. There would be one panel with three images on it—the beginning, the middle, and the end of the shot. For example, in the opening credits of one of these Roman stories, I drew the soldiers outside on the Appian Way beginning a triumphal march, soldiers coming in and the camera up in the sky. Then I had the camera coming down,
the army getting closer. Then I showed the wall on the right, the army on the left. As I came to my name as director, I had the camera boom over the backs of the soldiers, going through the gates with them. I would say to myself, We start here, but we’ve got to wind up there.

RS:
In animation, those shots are left to the in-betweeners, and you’re not an in-betweener.

MS:
No, I’m not.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
We haven’t yet discussed color. Is there a typical Martin Scorsese palette? I mean, some of the films strike me as pretty saturated. But you can’t say that of
Age of Innocence.
I don’t think you can say it about
King of Comedy,
which has a nice glow.

MARTIN SCORSESE:
King of Comedy
was a big departure. As I’ve said, it was a very difficult film for me to make for many different reasons, and that was one of them. I had to try not to do too much camera work that drew attention to itself.