Conversations with Scorsese (55 page)

RS:
I know that happens very often.

MS:
A funny thing happened on
Raging Bull.
I was on the set waiting for a shot to be ready. There were some crew members there, real Hollywood pros. Nice guys. They were sitting there talking behind me; they didn’t know I was there. One of the guys asked of the others, “What are we doing next?” Somebody answers, “Who knows, who cares? It’s all a bunch of crap anyway, Jesus.”

That guy was so nice to me on the set. He was a real pro, but he hated everything we were doing. He couldn’t care less. [
Laughs.
] They were called to go back to work, and they went at it like men on the chain gang.

RS:
Let’s talk more about cinematography. You’ve said you’re not as confident about lighting as you are about some other aspects of your work. Yet your pictures seem very well lit to me.

MS:
I don’t have it.

RS:
What do you mean, you don’t have it?

MS:
I don’t think in those terms that much. Yet, it’s true, when I look at something, I’ll think, My God, it’s far too bright, or too dark, or whatever. But then I’ll look at, let’s say,
The Informer
—the streams of light, the dust particles in the light—and I’m in awe. I’m not talking about sentimental value. You look at any Ford picture and there’s a depth to the imagery, a power to the lighting, even in the one that’s considered a failure,
The Fugitive.
It’s more than being pictorial—no matter who the cameraman was.

RS:
I actually like that film, no matter what its reputation is.

MS:
Me, too.
Gabriel Figueroa’s lighting was great. I’m talking also of Kazan’s lighting of the whorehouse hallway in
East of Eden,
or the lighting of
Boris Kaufman in
On the Waterfront
—that scene at night where you see Brando running in the back alley, the truck is about to get them, and he breaks in the window—the way the cobblestones are lit. It became an iconic image for me; I always wished I could take that image and put it up on a wall.

RS:
Are you saying that you feel you have never, or rarely, in your pictures gotten that kind of depth?

MS:
No, I think I may have. I certainly tried on
Mean Streets,
I can tell you that. I knew that the red gels had to be a certain way. There are a couple of scenes in
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
where Alice walks into bars to do auditions. Look at the light. I said to
Kent Wakefield, the cameraman, Let’s do it like
John Ford. And he said, Absolutely. But I don’t tend to think of it, unless I go to a location and I have a fairly good rapport with the director of photography. Then it becomes something I focus on. I had to be very specific on
Mean Streets
and
Alice.
And with
Michael Chapman on
Taxi Driver.
I guess it’s something I focus on when I’m doing it, rather than thinking about it beforehand. Whereas editing, I tend to think of it way beforehand—the framing, the blocking.

RS:
In other words, you sort of look ahead to the edited film; a vision of that is tentatively in your mind.

MS:
More than tentatively. Shot number one will cut to number two, and number three, and number four, and that should give you a movement based on the images. I was startled sometimes by the editing in Eisenstein’s films—
October,
and of course
Potemkin.
There was some editing in
Carol Reed films that I liked, and
Orson Welles. And I really liked the way certain things were edited in
Force of Evil.

Moments come to mind, and I think, How was that done? Then I use that insight. Remember that scene of
Howard Hughes seeing an old man sweeping up in the factory, and he says, “Who is that man? Get rid of him”?

RS:
Yes, of course.

MS:
Well, what I tried to do was to intercut moves in on Leo’s face. I do that all the time; I move in on somebody, then you cut back to what he or she is seeing. I tried to do something simple in this scene, but it didn’t quite work. I wanted to intercut it with a tilt up on the old man with the broom. A camera is focused on the broom, then you’re moving in on Leo, then back to the broom. You’re seeing a little more of the broom, you see a hand with these funny fingernails. You’re moving in on Leo tighter. You cut back, and you reveal the face of the old man. By that point you should have moved in on Leo fully. The problem was that the motion was too jagged.

I think I shot the man with the broom for about four hours one night. The crew was laughing at a certain point. And I said, I’m not sure about that tilt. I don’t know. And Thelma and I tried it different ways. Finally Thelma had the idea of intercutting Leo’s hand from the scene in the future, in the screening room, putting on the tape recorder, and then it worked. That’s an example of something that didn’t work exactly the way I wanted.

RS:
Right.

MS:
All the fight scenes in
Raging Bull
were basically filmed that way—except for the big moment when
Sugar Ray Robinson finally beats up Jake, who is hanging on the ropes.

I designed all those scenes. I was given a
black-and-white video. I broke it up into parts, like music, like for
The Last Waltz.
Two or three of the fight scenes were cut in a couple of days. We put one shot next to another; they were very easily put together.

That Sugar Ray Robinson scene I just referred to, by the way, was based on the shower sequence from
Psycho.
I had every frame of that. And I designed corresponding shots of what it would be like in the ring, based on those elements. I shot it in about ten days. And then when we edited, we moved shots around, because each one had its own energy. A glove coming into frame is different from a knife. So in the process of trying to make the glove have a similar effect to the knife, the use of undercranking and overcranking and other techniques came into play. Unpredictable things happen when you’re doing that. In this case, the glove has a certain amount of light on it, and there are sprays of water and sweat flying. It created things in the frame I just didn’t expect. One frame of light cuts better to another frame of light. That sort of thing. So basically, I feel much more comfortable designing the editing than the lighting.

There were lighting ideas in the storyboards for
Raging Bull,
but then I listened to the cameraman and sometimes that’s when I had to ask, Can we do this? What about that?

I always tell the story of Spielberg making
Empire of the Sun—
that incredible shot of the sunrise, the last kamikaze silhouetted against it. I asked him, “How did you get that? It was so beautiful.” Well, he told me he got there an hour or forty-five minutes earlier, before the crew, and he looked around the set. He saw that there was mist on the ground and knew how the sun would come up, and that was the effect he wanted. He got the assistant cameraman and shot before anybody else got there. He grew up in Phoenix, Arizona.

Michael Powell was able to tell the time of day by where the sun was. But he grew up in the English countryside. For me the elements were inhospitable. I don’t understand natural light. So I never really thought of lighting in those ways.

It changed with
Michael Ballhaus, by the way, whose lighting for the Fassbinder films interested me.

RS:
How so?

MS:
They had a kind of almost neorealistic look, though the films were framed very carefully. But the lighting was higher key. And yet it was a very dramatic film. I don’t know if I understand a lot of the Fassbinder pictures. I’m not quite that
kind of person. But
Merchant of Four Seasons
influenced me a lot—the toughness of the whole, the toughness of the frame, particularly in the scenes where his wife is making love to another man, and he comes in. Or he has a fight with her. It was done with such unflinching honesty. The lighting was so honest. Yet there are other moments where the lighting was almost like
Douglas Sirk. I wanted to work with Ballhaus. He could be amazing.

King of Comedy
is another good example of lighting that gave me a different look. Coming off the extraordinary work
Michael Chapman did in
Raging Bull,
I was rethinking how to make movies—going back to no camera movement for the most part. I mean, no reviewer shots. There are about two or three shots that have movement in them. Basically, everything is medium shot, close-up, medium close-up, wide shot. Functional tracking.

RS:
Who shot that one?

MS:
Frederick Schuler, who was the operator for Michael Chapman for years. Freddie was able to give me the look that I wanted, which was almost like a television film.

It took me a long time to come around to the film for many different reasons. Each day I had problems working on it and shooting it. The actors were all great. There were no problems with the actors. But it was very difficult for me to be there. And part of the Rupert character, I realize, I had in me. Part of Jerry [Lewis] I had in me. And I didn’t want to face it at that moment. As I mentioned earlier, I was struggling personally when I was making that film, so I designed it so the shots would be hermetically sealed frames. Rupert was in Jerry’s frame a lot of the time. He’s after Jerry, he wants Jerry. That was my thinking. And I wanted it to have kind of a flat, high-key lighting.

RS:
It’s appropriate to that film.

MS:
That was a good example of being very, very specific about lighting in a picture.

RS:
When you’re working away on your script, I would think, it’s primarily on where the camera will be placed, where the camera is going to move in the shot, that sort of thing.

MS:
In a lot of cases. Although sometimes you’re just planning on what you need to do to really cover properly.

RS:
So as you’re doing that, vaguely, even specifically, is the overall look of a film coming into your mind?

MS:
Yes, it is. I definitely have images in my mind’s eye. But you get on the set and you have to adjust—suddenly it’s brighter than you imagined, for example. That’s
always a problem for me. In the old days, before there was video, someone would give me the filter to look through. I would be told, “That’s the way it will look.” I didn’t want that many things overlit.

RS:
I always find looking through the viewfinder that it looks brighter than I thought it was going to be.

MS:
I agree with you! And I’m almost embarrassed to say at times, Is this a little too bright in the corner here? No one will see it. It’s barely going to register. But I have to ask. I go through a constant process of question and answer: Should we try this, how about that?

Kundun
was a whole other experience with
Roger Deakins, who is a master. His lighting was fantastic.

RS:
It’s a beautiful film.

MS:
I’d watch him work—meticulous. We talked about style. We talked mainly about the lighting—we always do a lot of screening of films for lighting. For example, for
Taxi Driver
I screened
The Wrong Man
and also
Salvatore Giuliano
[Francesco Rosi’s 1962 drama about mobsters in politics in 1940s
Sicily],
Gianni di Venanzo’s photography in that film. I told Chapman, I want that in color, the philosophy of it. Michael understood that. We got it for
Taxi Driver,
I think.

Anyway, for
Kundun
I remember we talked a lot about the lighting in
Zhang Yimou’s films, and
Chen Kaige’s films. We also talked about the lighting in
Fat City,
which he liked a lot.

RS:
Really? I would never have thought of that film in this context.

MS:
Those were our touchstones. I didn’t see a lot of the rushes for
Kundun.
I saw most of them when I came back. I just had total confidence in what he was doing.

RS:
At what point in your career did you start using monitors?

MS:
There was a one-inch monitor on
King of Comedy.
For
After Hours
there was a black-and-white monitor. There was definitely a monitor, black-and-white, for
The Color of Money.
I tried to use a color monitor on
The Age of Innocence
for a few shots, but I didn’t like it, so I stopped using it. For
Goodfellas,
I think the monitor was black-and-white, too. Then we started using color monitors and that’s what we’re using now.

Prior to that, you would design the shot, work it out. And then I’d physically ride the shot, frame it, say what I wanted, and then they would do it. You really had to have a lot of confidence in the camera operator, because he would eventually be the one who could tell you what you got, what the best take was.