Conversations with Scorsese (54 page)

RS:
Is there a relationship between that reluctance and the film’s palette?

MS:
Mean Streets
is very saturated.
Alice,
too.
Taxi Driver
not so much.
New York, New York,
definitely.
Kundun,
definitely. I tried somewhat in
Age of Innocence.

RS:
Kundun
seems to me very Asian—soft and even misty at times.

MS:
The colors are strong, I think, but it might not be as saturated as some of the others. There’s no doubt that three-strip
Technicolor had a big influence on me. As a young person, seeing a film that employed it was the most magical experience—seeing
Duel in the Sun
in color or seeing the rerelease of
Robin Hood
in color, and
those old
westerns in
Cinecolor. It was hyper-real. It’s the antithesis of
On the Waterfront,
which kind of wiped the board clean for me.

RS:
Hyper-real?

MS:
It was good for stories that weren’t on a naturalistic level. And so I associated color with that type of picture. But by the late sixties,
Andrew Sarris was writing that the norm for every film would be color. It was hard to believe at the time, but he was right. That’s why, when we started working in color and designing in color, the color fading issue came up. When you design a film in color, the color has to remain stable, the way you originally imagined it.

“Happy Ending”:
Liza Minnelli enjoys her stardom in
New York, New York.

RS:
Hence your passion for film preservation.

MS:
We had so much trouble getting the money for
Taxi Driver
that
Michael and Julia Phillips and I were talking about doing it in
black-and-white video. We were that keen to tell the story. Of course, eventually we shot in color, but the palette in it was really muted compared to
Mean Streets,
which is almost operatic, almost like a musical at times.

I tried to adapt the color palette from
The Red Shoes.
I was trying for a three-strip printed
Technicolor look. I couldn’t do that, of course;
Godfather II
was the last film made in Technicolor. After that the processing machines were gone. For
Taxi Driver
and
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
I preferred a warmer look.
Taxi Driver,
though, was the key. That was a film that ordinarily would have been made in black-and-white, there’s no doubt about it, but you had to use color, and the colors had to be muted. And so that became a big issue.

RS:
I’m trying to imagine
Taxi Driver
in black-and-white. I like it in color.

MS:
Don’t forget the last sequence, when we took the color down for the ratings board [in order to de-emphasize the bloodiness of the violence]. That was my suggestion, to desaturate the color. I guess I was obsessed with what
Oswald Morris and
John Huston did on
Moby Dick,
and with
Reflections in a Golden Eye.

RS:
That’s quite a beautiful film.

MS:
I wanted to do something like that with the whole picture. But I couldn’t. Oswald Morris and John Huston had access to a three-strip negative. So it was a little different. I couldn’t desaturate ours like that. So each shot I had had a basic color—green, brown, or blue. I chose brown. And then the color was fused in, 20 percent color, 80 percent brown. The next shot might be 60 percent full color, 40 percent brown. I wanted to do the whole movie that way. That would have been great.

RS:
It would have taken a long time to do that.

MS:
We did it fast—in a week or two. The opticals were going real fast. We did some trims that satisfied the ratings board, and I liked the way it looked. I remember when we screened it in full color, the blood looked fake to me.
Paul Schrader had imagined more of a Japanese film, where the walls would have been drenched in blood. Sort of a samurai look. Paul was very much into those films. He had just written
The Yakuza.

That’s when I began to have a real problem with the color palette. In
New York, New York,
I embraced the full saturation again.
And in
Raging Bull,
I decided no color, because I just couldn’t continue with color anymore. That also helped the period look of the film.

Battered
Bull:
Jake LaMotta after a long day at the office.

RS:
Absolutely.

MS:
When I did
King of Comedy,
the art director,
Boris Leven, and I decided to keep it really muted, really down. An uptown New York, Seagram’s Building sort of quality.

RS:
That’s what it looked like.

MS:
You know, it has a nice, early sixties kind of feel. Boris put a dash of red in, here and there. I love looking at those buildings. That’s New York.

We shot right in the building where the iconic restaurant La Brasserie is; it’s supposed to be where Jerry’s character lived. That was enjoyable to do. After that,
After Hours
was full, straight color. We didn’t have much of a problem with the color in
The Last Temptation.
There was a whole ancient world of dust in the desert. In
Goodfellas
we went garish; you just had to go full blast.

RS:
Those guys weren’t going to wear a lot of Brooks Brothers suits.

MS:
No way. They made me a suit from the picture, the one that Bob wears when he walks in the first time. Kind of a French blue silk suit. It’s hysterical; I can’t wear it, of course. But it was really wonderful, and I thought the colors were just eye-popping. That was the nature of the beast, the nature of that world.

RS:
Yes, it was.

MS:
Then I got up to speed, so to speak. Except in
The Departed.
I wanted all the color out of that.

I got very upset. Everybody was wearing black anyway, for God’s sake. In the modern world, the use of black is ubiquitous. There’s no more style the way I like it. I sound like an old man, but the way I like style on screen is with suits and ties and that sort of thing. Conservative, conventional.

RS:
If you look at older pictures, the actors going in and out of a nightclub are always incredibly elegant.

MS:
Elegance is a very different idea now. I decided to drain the color out of the damn thing. I thought, It’s so ugly. That matched the way everybody was behaving in the film.

RS:
Yes, I can see that.

MS:
Anyway, I scouted locations in the winter. I had never been in Boston, but the snow there was beautiful, trees with no leaves on them, black. I thought that would be great for
The Departed.
I don’t really know the modern world in color. I just don’t get it.

But then
Matt Damon had agreed to do De Niro’s film,
The Good Shepherd.
There was a question as to when he would be available, and I thought, You know what?
The Departed
really doesn’t depend on seasons. Bob’s film did. So I moved my picture from the fall to April. When I got to Boston, I was shocked by the green leaves in the trees. Then I realized, these guys get cut up, they get shot, they betray each other under green trees just as well as under bare trees. So with
Departed
I became at peace with the color process. I accept now that a color film is made the way they used to routinely make black-and-white films—that is to say, I try not to think about color at all.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
When you’re on the set—particularly when you’re isolated on a location, with everyone away from their normal lives—don’t you feel that the company often becomes a little surrogate family?

MARTIN SCORSESE:
Coming from a very tribal place, the real bond for me was one of blood, of family. Very Mediterranean. When I made the crossover to New York University I brought that expectation with me. I expected that the people around me, the new people I met from all different parts of the world, would become family. I don’t think they saw it that way. I expected from them things they could not provide.

RS:
But still, don’t you feel that any movie company, or most movie companies, while they are up and running, are little families?

MS:
Absolutely. Like
Ealing Studios in the old days, or the way
Raoul Walsh worked at
Warner Bros., or
William Wellman, and
Frank Capra and
Harry Cohn at Columbia.

RS:
They had the same crew, the same cameramen. Very often the same actors. There
was
a familial feeling.

MS:
You know, some of the best times are on the location scouting; everybody has lunch together, you all talk, everyone gets to know each other. There’s Fellini wanting to make a series of films on the actor, the producer, and so on. One of the lines in his treatment was that the location scout is very important. It was always important, he said, to scout a location near the best restaurant. It was just an excuse to get to those restaurants. Very Italian.

But a familial feeling is a very important thing. Henry Fonda and
John Ford, or
Anthony Mann and
James Stewart—these were extraordinarily complex, important relationships. When there’s a rift, the fallout is very upsetting. For example,
Irwin Winkler told me in 1994 that
Michael Chapman didn’t like
Raging Bull
[which came out in 1980].

Lining up a shot in
Raging Bull.

RS:
Didn’t like the story?

MS:
Didn’t like the way it turned out. Just that. I don’t think he ever told me that. Now everything is fine.
Paul Schrader doesn’t like it, either. I was surprised, because we worked so closely on it. But Michael—the film didn’t hit him. He didn’t get it. He didn’t like it. [In later years, Chapman came to regard the film much more highly.]

RS:
He did a beautiful job on it.

MS:
Absolutely. It’s one of my best-photographed films. But not everybody has to like what you’re doing. Very often it’s hard to know what goes on around you. In many cases people are being polite and just not telling you what they don’t like.