Conversations with Scorsese (15 page)

MS:
I guess it’s too personal or something.
Harry Ufland, who was my first agent—he was at William Morris—saw my short films, then signed me up and tried to get me some documentary work. After he saw the feature, the first part of it, he would bring it around and show it to people, and they would say, This is the late sixties, the
sexual revolution, free love, and here’s this guy who won’t make love to a woman because he’s in love with her! People were saying, Where did this picture come from? Are you mad? But I was just being truthful to the culture I knew. It was like kids from a provincial village making a movie about it.

RS:
The trouble in it is the going away from that and embracing the sexual revolution. You know, that nude sex sequence.

MS:
Yeah, yeah, it’s hilarious. Well, that’s the only way we could get it distributed. So we shot that in
Amsterdam. By that time Haig and
Joseph Brenner had come in to help finish the picture with me. Haig was like my producer. And at a certain point, Joseph, who was this distributor of
exploitation films, agreed to distribute it. He was trying to make a crossover at that time. You know, at the time,
Brian De Palma’s
Greetings
was doing well. Joe was a nice man. He had his office on 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue. It was like the worst area you could imagine. And he would release films like
White Zombie,
and even
Birth of a Nation.
He had me cut a trailer of
Birth of a Nation
for him. He did basically public domain things
—Reefer Madness,
that kind of stuff. So he was going to try to go with this new youth culture. Eventually he pointed out to Haig and everybody, “The one thing that will get this done, and I guarantee to get this
in theaters, would be to do a scene with some nudity in it, and some sex.”

RS:
I’ve been going through your stills. There’s something called the
Three Penny Cinema. There’s a little picture of the marquee and you’re top-billed above Godard, and his picture.

Marty’s film got top billing, over a film by
Jean-Luc Godard, at the
Chicago Film Festival, where it was championed by
Roger Ebert.

MS:
Band of Outsiders.

RS:
One of my favorites of his.

MS:
Me, too. That was in Chicago, and that was the first run of the film, I think. And that was on the same street as the
Biograph Theater, where
John Dillinger got shot. One of my uncles said, “That makes two things that died on that block” [
laughs
].

Who’s That Knocking at My Door
could not find a distributor—until a nude scene, largely irrelevant to the plot, was added. It was shot in Amsterdam, with Marty hating the task but Keitel obviously enjoying it.

Roger Ebert was the critic who came out for the picture when it was shown under a different title at the Chicago Film Festival. That was the year before we put the nude scene in. And he gave us a very nice review.

RS:
The stills of the nude scene are great, by the way.

MS:
Yeah, from Amsterdam.

RS:
Harvey looks so blissful in those stills. And there’s little Marty, operating the camera.

MS:
I’m doing it, and Harvey’s having a good time. And the people in Amsterdam at that time were wonderful. I was in Paris in May of ’68 when all the fighting started. I was with a friend of mine named
Richard Coll, who was the cinematographer of most of that film and my short films. He had taken me to Amsterdam and
London to do some commercials, and I was making a little money working with him. He was one of the two collaborators I gravitated toward—along with my old friend
Mardik Martin. It was a wonderful time. It was 1968, from January to June.

At that time we still couldn’t get
Who’s That Knocking
distributed. And Haig Manoogian said, “Look, there’s this one guy,
Joseph Weill. Could you come to
America?” And I said, “We can’t get out of here. There’s trouble. All of Europe is blowing up.” And he said, “Well, what if we fly Harvey over?” And I found a place in Amsterdam that looked like a loft in the Bowery. And I did a storyboard of the scene, and sent it back, and said, “This is what I want to do.” I put
The Doors music on it at the end. I had to edit it in Amsterdam, too. I had the track on one side and the picture on the other side. And I put it in my raincoat, and I got it through customs [
laughs
].

RS:
Marty the smuggler. Who knew?

MS:
I just did anything to get this stuff done. But
Who’s That Knocking
was a film that was obviously in a European mode, the French
New Wave, the Italian New Wave, and Cassavetes, mainly.

RS:
Why Cassavetes?

MS:
Well, because of the energy and the audacity to pick up a camera, a
16 millimeter camera at the time, the
Eclair, and shoot a movie right here—on the East Coast, where there were no movie studios. And the excitement of cinema itself was seductive for me. I wanted to be there. I think part of wanting to be there was to be away from where I was. So, I decided, yes, if there’s any role for me in American cinema, it would be the gangster film. It would be noir. It would be of that world.

RS:
In
Knocking,
the guy attempts to seduce the girl with these heavy film references—

MS:
That’s me. I mean, I was stuck. The asthma created a complete lack of confidence, so he doesn’t know how to talk to a girl.

RS:
That’s how you would have been?

MS:
Probably. If I’d ever found a girl. But what was happening then was interesting. I think what happened was that somehow I related to the Wayne character in
The Searchers
because of the darkness of his character—how he was exposing his
racism, exposing his own inner conflicts, and yet he was a hero.

Marty takes in the sights on his first European trip.

RS:
The darkness of Wayne’s character seems to be referenced in the strange darkness of Harvey Keitel’s character in
Knocking.
But when this guy is almost obsessively talking about
The Searchers
with the girl he’s trying to seduce, that’s you saying, at least in part, Wait a minute, American film is worthwhile.

MS:
Yes. We happened to see
The Searchers
in
VistaVision the night I graduated from elementary school, as I told you. That VistaVision screen, and Monument Valley, and Wayne, and
Jeffrey Hunter, and
Natalie Wood,
Ward Bond, all of them. It’s a film that my friends and I kept talking about and talking about. And then we’d see it on television, in black-and-white, and we’d say, Hey, interesting: Remember that line of dialogue? And the way he moves here, and the way that happens there.

RS:
In
Knocking
Harvey falls for the girl he meets on the Staten Island ferry, and chats her up about
The Searchers,
as we discussed earlier. But this poor girl has been raped. And that means that, try as he might to understand, she’s ruined for him.

MS:
Absolutely.

RS:
He seems to understand that compassion is in order, but—

MS:
But he’s bred not to understand it. He’s bred not to mature, not to move ahead. Although I try to suggest at the end that it isn’t quite the same with him as it is with his friends, that a seed has been planted in him that is going to make him change. It’s about being selfless, understanding other people—that’s what I was hearing in the church, you know.

This was the key. There are elements in Harvey’s character that I’d say line up directly with Ethan in
The Searchers.
There’s no doubt about it. And the guilt, whatever the hell Ethan is hiding in himself, whatever he did in that war—he can’t stand himself anymore.

But I couldn’t articulate what Harvey’s character is going through. Harvey understood, though.

RS:
Haig Manoogian, and his notion of “Don’t bring a gun in here; we’re not making melodramas, we’re making some other kind of picture,” was terribly influential for you. And yet in a certain way, you are beginning to challenge his austere principles, aren’t you?

RS:
Well, yes, but he came from a different world. Five blocks away from where we were editing, that’s the world I was living in.

RS:
So he could accept that you had to do this kind of material?

MS:
He accepted it, and when I gave him the script of what became
Mean Streets,
he knew the world I was in. When I was a young student in the early sixties, he didn’t know. But he got to know my parents—as I said, they were very popular around school. And I would live in Haig’s house in Suffolk, New York. And he would come to have dinner at Elizabeth Street. So everybody was happy together. And Haig, by the time
Who’s That Knocking
came out, began to understand that if it’s a film made with Harvey and made on Elizabeth Street, that world is real to Marty. And then
Mean Streets—
he said okay. And also by that point,
The Godfather
had come out. He realized that that world also exists—on a loftier level in
The Godfather,
of course.

RS:
I guess you could call it loftier. But in the pictures you’ve made about gangs and gangsters you are stressing the element of anarchy more than the
Godfather
pictures do. I mean, it’s perfectly true that in the
Godfather
pictures there will be upsets in their smooth-running world. But it’s not quite the kind of anarchy that’s going on in your pictures.

MS:
Well, I experienced that, too. I had a friend who was killed because he was too wild. He was twenty-one. And then family members of his were taken out. They were in some crime family.

RS:
Now it’s the late sixties. What else was going on in your life besides
Knocking
?

MS:
Well, there was my brief adventure—or misadventure—with
The Honeymoon Killers.

RS:
Let’s talk about that. How did that come about?

MS:
Harry Ufland brought it to me. The script was very long and I couldn’t connect with the material. I just couldn’t. And it was more than that: instead of just making the film, I was trying to make a reputation. And I twisted it and turned it in different ways stylistically. I tried to make it something that it shouldn’t have been.