Conversations with Scorsese (25 page)

RS:
If you had gone more for the artifice and less for the improv in
New York, New York,
I would’ve preferred it, if you had stylized the hell out of every single shot in it. That would have given it a coherence that I think it lacks.

MS:
Yes, it might have. But it’s interesting that younger people don’t see that in
New York, New York.
They don’t deal with that at all. They accept it for what it is. I still think about it as an experiment. But when you look at a musical like
The Glenn Miller Story,
directed by
Anthony Mann, it has an authenticity to it that’s quite extraordinary. It’s beautiful to watch even on television. But he came from that period. So did
James Stewart. Also, he shot it in the real places. I could have. I could’ve shot in Roseland. I didn’t because I chose to go with the whole idea of a film called
New York, New York
made completely in Hollywood. Which was the New York in our heads when we saw it as young people. I don’t think I could have directed the actors in the stylized way of classic Hollywood cinema, because I wouldn’t know how to direct that.

RS:
You mean, getting an actorly stylization that would match the visual stylization.

MS:
Exactly, exactly—see how we could force the issue somehow.

RS:
The things that worked best for me in the movie were when they were on the bandstand; all those mannerisms are so beautifully done. I mean, I remember those
not from movies but from seeing those bands live onstage at the Riverside Theater in downtown Milwaukee: You know,
Tommy Dorsey holding his trombone and waving his fingers as if he’s directing the band.

MS:
Exactly.

RS:
I loved that stuff.

MS:
Me, too.

RS:
And yet it is a truly conventionalized romantic story. I mean, we saw that story lots in those days, you know.

MS:
The Man I Love
is more like a
noir.

RS:
Right.

MS:
And yet there were films in Techni
color, like
My Dream Is Yours,
which had implied noirish elements in the relationship [between a cruel singing star,
Lee Bowman, and the young woman,
Doris Day, who is hired to replace him]. That’s the film I wanted to make, trying to imply what was darker in the relationship.

RS:
Oh, very dark. It’s really a bummer of a movie.

MS:
I know. So I wondered why they put some sort of happy ending on it. I mean, if you’re going to do it, go all the way—

RS:
Here’s how desperate they were: It’s one of the very few movies where
Jack Carson gets the girl. He usually did simple comic relief.

The musical that is really like your film, in that it’s more a drama with some music, yet, I think, does fulfill its implicit darkness, is the one with
Ida Lupino, Jack Carson, and
Dennis Morgan.

MS:
The Hard Way
[a dark show business romance of 1943, and something of a lost treasure].

RS:
That’s it.

MS:
It’s like
The Breaking Point
[a fairly faithful 1950 adaptation of Hemingway’s
To Have and Have Not
]. These two are really standouts. They did lack
Technicolor, though. Technicolor made such an impression on me when I saw
Duel in the Sun.
It was the first time I remember seeing it. Technicolor promised happiness, light. It promised something transcendent, an experience of joy. And yet a lot of these films that I was beginning to become aware of had elements that were darker. Living in the world that I was living in, I asked, So why can’t we do that in Technicolor?

RS:
But in the early era of three-strip Technicolor, I think it was very hard to do because the colors are just so glaringly bright.

MS:
Some are so strong you’d have to duck. They’d come flying at you. Especially when 3-D came out. Maybe I could’ve done it in black-and-white.

RS:
Well, you couldn’t have by that time.

MS:
No, by that time you couldn’t. Especially accepting it as a way of doing
homage to the old studio system.

RS:
Well, as we discussed earlier, it’s a particular homage, it seems to me, to
Vincente Minnelli.

MS:
Particularly
The Band Wagon.

RS:
Because his use of color was different from other people’s use of color.

MS:
Amazing, amazing. And we used many of the stills from
Band Wagon
as research, with
Boris Leven designing. But really it was that element of Technicolor promising one thing and yet having a darkness. I wanted to combine the two. [
Laughs.
]

RS:
I understand that. But I’m also not sure there’s a really good chemistry between Bob De Niro and
Liza Minnelli in that film.

MS:
I thought there was. But I couldn’t tell.

RS:
There’s something that doesn’t quite jell, that doesn’t quite say that whatever else is between these people, there is a passion.

MS:
Maybe.

RS:
They’re acting it. They’re trying. Yet—

MS:
That could be because of what we did to the material. The thing we got interested in more was the competitiveness, and how that ate away at the relationship.

RS:
But one of the things that’s striking in the movie is that De Niro’s character is much more consciously passionate about his work, his music, than she is. She’s kind of a natural.

MS:
That’s the thing. I think, ultimately, she is a natural. And he has to work at it and work at it. And there’s a resentment. And it’s very unpleasant.

RS:
The ambition of the movie really does come through, though. It’s manifest in the way the movie is shot and staged. It just doesn’t quite get translated into the dramatic action.

MS:
Well, that’s in the writing—in the rewriting, I should say. That’s what we were trying to do with improvisation, working with
Earl Mac Rauch, the writer. Other people worked on it, too—Mardik Martin, Irwin helped, Jay Cocks, a number of people. People who were experimenting to see where we could go. It was a dangerous thing because, of course, there was a lot of money involved. But beyond that, I’d come off three movies that were well received:
Mean Streets,
although it wasn’t a financial hit;
Alice
was pretty well received; and
Taxi Driver
was certainly well received. So there was a lot to lose. It was a big gamble.

“The best-laid plans …”: Marty attempts to solve his overwhelming problems on the
New York, New York
set.

RS:
What is Marty up to? I remember that feeling being in the air at the time. Doing a film of a type you had done nothing like before.

MS:
Maybe it was wrangling something like six to eight horses in the chariot before they just run wild. And they ran wild. And then the film was reviled for it.

I didn’t go through that very well. And, interestingly enough, by the time I was pulled back together and we were doing
Raging Bull,
articles were coming out asking, Will this be his comeuppance?

RS:
And you thought, I’ve already had my comeuppance.

MS:
And if I hadn’t, why would I have to have a comeuppance anyway?

RS:
Well, that’s an interesting point: If you do pretty well, whatever you do, directing movies, writing books, whatever, there are a lot of people out there—

MS:
Waiting.

RS:
—who really want you to have a comeuppance.

MS:
They’re waiting for you.

RS:
Some don’t even want to say it.

MS:
No.

RS:
But they do.

MS:
Yes.

RS:
I mean they say, in effect, Oh, screw him. He thinks he’s hot stuff.

MS:
And often the stuff that is reviled or soundly trounced is years later revealed to be something more interesting. It’s fashion, I suppose.

RS:
No, I think it’s more than fashion. I think there’s active resentment out there.

MS:
I don’t know. For me this goes back to the family, my expecting the world to be like my family. But that is not the case. For instance, your collaborators are there, and you collaborate very well, but there’s a limit.

RS:
That’s true.

MS:
Loyalty only goes up to a certain level in this kind of work. And the sooner you get to know that, the better it is. People very often have to take stands that might be against you or hurt you. And other times they may take stands at the wrong time.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
The Last Waltz,
your first full-length music
documentary, was kind of squeezed in between
New York, New York
and
Raging Bull.
And it’s very different in tone from your other music docs.

MARTIN SCORSESE:
It reflects a totally different mindset.

RS:
Sure. But how so?

MS:
Because
The Last Waltz
was really a last waltz. [The Band was breaking up and the film is, among other things, a record of their last
concert.] They stopped playing. The group broke up. It also gave us a chance, although I didn’t realize it at the time, to look back on something that was definitively ending by 1980, ’81, maybe even earlier. I was kind of seduced into it by
Jonathan Taplin, the producer of
Mean Streets,
who called me when I was doing
New York, New York
and said a lot of the rock people were watching the film, and a lot of younger actors. He said he wanted to have a screening for a few friends, including
Robbie Robertson.

We loved the sound of
The Band. No one has ever equaled that sound. It incorporates so many different facets of American music—the South, Canada, the Southwest. And influences from all over the world, too. There’s a character they
created with their voices, like in “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” which was a song that went against the grain at the time, don’t forget.

These guys were coming out against the
hippie movement. It was a special sound, different from Dylan, different from everyone else. And it was almost as if they didn’t give a damn, either. They had placed themselves in a special place. So to go back to Woodstock for a moment, it was a big event. I was delighted, though The Band were really angry to be at Woodstock.

RS:
How come?

MS:
Because Woodstock was the place where they worked and lived. What were all those people doing there? It had become hippie heaven suddenly. It was a revolution. And they wondered, What is this shit?

They didn’t allow the film onstage. The lenses had to be on the lip of the stage, rather than close to them. They gave a look to the audience which said, Do not come near us, especially you guys down front. Don’t come up on the stage. We said, “Okay.” We loved them so much that even if we couldn’t shoot, we were happy just to listen. They wouldn’t let us say anything. They weren’t ruffians, but they had a determination about them: We don’t want to play, but we’re going to play. It was too bad they didn’t get into the final cut of
Woodstock.

Anyway, I met Robbie the night of the screening of
Mean Streets
at Warner Bros. and said hello, and he said he liked the film. So when Jonathan called me, saying there was going to be this farewell to The Band, and they wanted to get special guest stars, and would I want to shoot it, I was open to the idea, especially when I heard the people who were going to be there—Muddy Waters,
Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young. So over a series of dinners—Robbie had a way of seducing you into it—I decided to shoot it just for archival, in
16 millimeter. And then one thing led to another and I said, “You know what? Why don’t we do a film like this in
35 millimeter? Nobody’s done it before in 35 millimeter.”