Conversations with Scorsese (30 page)

RS:
It’s a very nice controlled performance.

MS:
It is, but I’m afraid I tortured the poor man. I used to be notoriously late until I realized that no matter what time I got there, I still had to deal with whatever I didn’t want to deal with. But I would never be ready until two thirty in the afternoon. The last time I saw Jerry was in Venice. I said, “We should get together more, I’m on time now.” He laughed. I finally got a laugh out of him!

But
King of Comedy
is my coming to terms with disappointment, disappointment with the fact that the reality is different from the dream.

RS:
I think I know what you’re saying, but can you try to distill it? Are you saying that you, Marty, had a similar infatuation about movies, about being famous and all that stuff?

MS:
It’s like Rupert going to Jerry’s house, and his girlfriend says to him, “Well, what are we going to do? What are we going to talk about?” Rupert answers, “These people don’t speak the way we speak. They’re very witty. They have wonderful things to say all the time.” That was his dream of the celebrity life. When I first went to L.A. in 1970, there was a little bit of that need in me—to buy into, participate in, the dream world of celebrity.

RS:
Sure.

MS:
It’s almost as if they are like gods and goddesses—that’s the impression they make on you from when you’re four or five years old. That’s the old story. I hear a lot of actors talk about this, where people come up to them and talk to them, and finally the actor gets mad and says, Please, leave me alone. Then the fan thinks, Well, actors are a different kind of person, and also, What do you think I am? I am a person, too.

RS:
That’s just grotesque.

MS:
It’s embarrassing now to think about it, being in a way a part of all that back in the 1970s. We did it to so many people. I guess meeting Peckinpah was quite different from meeting
King Vidor, let’s say, or
George Cukor, who was so encouraging. He and
Peter Bogdanovich and
Sam Fuller signed my DGA [Directors Guild of America] card.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
You’ve said to me that you thought
After Hours
was your most Hitchcockian film.

MARTIN SCORSESE:
The picture has direct references to Hitchcock’s style, but as a parody. I also mentioned a connection to Kafka, and I got pummeled for saying it. The picture was torn apart by some.

It was a parody of the visual interpretations of Hitchcock—how guilt plays out a great deal in the camera moves and the cuts.

RS:
Can you explain that?

MS:
Well, in
After Hours,
when the character walked into a room and it was dark, and he turned on the light, it was important to take a close-up of the light switch turning on—click—as if you expected something to happen but it didn’t. It created a sense of foreboding—until finally he screamed out into the street. He just wanted to come downtown, he just wanted to make love, did he have to die for it? Yes, he did. [
Laughs.
] He had to die for it.

Maybe it has a lot to do with me. It’s about guilt; even if it’s something that I reason out, I still feel bad. So the only thing is to deal with it and just move on. You can’t run away from it.

I think there was a lot that wasn’t said in the film about that. All the camera moves are reflections of the character’s own dread and guilt. I keep getting drawn back to Hitchcock movies like
The Wrong Man,
which I used as an example for [cameraman]
Michael Chapman and everybody else on
Taxi Driver.
The way Henry Fonda is in the line at the insurance office, the way the camera moves as a woman sees him and he reaches into his coat. She thinks it’s a gun, but we know it’s an insurance policy. It’s the way the camera moves and it’s the way he edits.

I had the cast and crew look at it again for
Aviator,
for the scenes that have to deal with
Howard Hughes’s obsessive behavior. It’s when Henry Fonda sits in the cell the first night. You see the corner. You see the ceiling. You see the lock. It’s the nature of the framing and the pace of the cutting.

Marty directs
Griffin Dunne in
After Hours
(1985), an underrated black comedy which turns lower Manhattan into the Lower Depths, as a mild-mannered clerk looking for a little sexual action is almost killed by the forces of anarchical modernism.

RS:
Which gives it such a powerful sense of entrapment. I recently did a DVD commentary on
The Wrong Man
and I had forgotten how much religious iconography
it contains—but almost casually referenced. It has to be Hitchcock’s most overtly Catholic film.

MS:
It probably is. I was just going to say that I’m probably attracted to his work a lot because of the Catholicism. It’s not overt to me, but it’s there.

Actually, I like some of the minor films, like
Dial M for Murder.
It’s theater. The actors are sitting in a room talking, but yet at a certain point in the dialogue the camera angle changes very slightly. I always tell film students to study that, to look at where the camera changes. How does it change? What’s the image size? What does that mean psychologically and emotionally? What does that make the audience feel? The audience doesn’t seem to notice it—but it makes itself felt.

Again, one of my favorite scenes in
Psycho
is when
Martin Balsam is interviewing
Anthony Perkins. There’s one shot that’s sort of strange, where Balsam tells him to lean over and look at the name in the book, and the camera is sort of suddenly looking up at Anthony Perkins’s throat as he leans over. Watch the angle, watch the way he cuts, on which line of dialogue, and where Balsam begins to figure out there’s something funny in the story, and where Perkins starts to realize the guy knows there’s something funny.

Even the business about turning on the switch of the Bates Motel lights. Balsam says, But your lights aren’t on. Perkins says, Oh!—then click—you see the lights come on. The insert is less than a second, I bet you, but when the lights come on, it’s like a slap. The repressed violence there is in that turning on of that light switch. I find that kind of thing both interesting and entertaining.

RS:
I saw
After Hours
first, I think, in a screening room. There was a fair-sized crowd. It was a very jolly experience. But I found that when I watched it alone at home I wasn’t laughing so much. It seems like a comedy, because a lot of truly unexpected stuff happens that makes you laugh—but it’s not really funny because what’s happening to the main character is really pretty damned dire. I think when we talked earlier, you called it a descent into hell.

MS:
Yeah, yeah. [
Laughs.
]

RS:
I guess he is someone who’s kind of on the edge—I mean, he’s got this dull little job and he’d like to be something that he isn’t. He goes into this place where he thinks maybe he could be transformed. But he isn’t.

MS:
Transformed into what, though? That’s the thing. There’s an emptiness there in that world that he’s discovering, and there’s a desperation. In my mind, it’s reflective of what’s all around us, the menace we don’t usually notice. Looking at it as a black comedy, I was thinking, This could happen to me. Maybe it has.

I did a commercial for American Express, where I’m complaining about snapshots I took at a kid’s birthday party. My associate director saw it and he said, I loved the commercial. He said, It’s like being back at the monitor with you when we’re shooting. And I thought, You take yourself so seriously.

But you know the damned thing is, you’ve got to be serious about making a picture. Yet you’ve still got to have that sense of humor.

RS:
What’s going on in
After Hours
is really “Oh, my God, this is the worst evening.” Yet it starts out really—

MS:
Promising. But there’s also a technical thing about the film. I always liked those two farces by
Allan Dwan
—Up in Mabel’s Room
and
Getting Gertie’s Garter.
I liked the way their multiple stories enfolded upon each other, and how these people found themselves in these ridiculous situations, with everybody speaking so fast and moving around. To me, if you put any kind of reality into it—I mean, who cares about Gertie’s garter?—you’re not going with the game. You’ve got to go with the game.

RS:
I think that’s true. In this film there is a logical step-by-step descent, no? It starts with an innocent encounter in a lunchroom. And by the end—

MS:
—he winds up encased inside some statue. It’s just wild. I’m always interested in the ancient world, what it was like to be living in the Roman Empire or among the Greeks before
Christianity—their relationship to their gods, and, in a sense, their relationship to life; their sense of the chaos in the world and their acceptance of it. I read a lot about the ancient world, for pleasure. I get into that mindset, and understand that the world is chaos, and understand that there may or may not be gods. And if there are gods, they’re not really interested in us very much. I understand the cruelty and understand that death can happen any second.

That’s the key thing to me—that idea of being a pawn, that the gods really don’t care and we’ve got to make a life in spite of that. It comes down to accepting the reality. Rather than complain about it, we deal with it. We try to live a morally good life on this basis.

RS:
So that’s what
After Hours
is about.

MS:
In a sense. It should just be a good black comedy, and you shouldn’t have to think about this. But that’s the impulse behind a lot of the things I do: I just find it fascinating to imagine what it would be like meeting an ancient now. I’d like to see what their similarities to us are as human beings, what they cared about, what they felt was right and wrong.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
The Color of Money
seems to me your most conventional picture to date: a sequel starring a major older star and a younger one very much on the rise. How did that happen?

MARTIN SCORSESE:
My agent,
Harry Ufland, helped put the movie together with Mike Ovitz, then, of course, the famous superagent.
Paul Newman liked
Raging Bull
and wrote me a letter. So it was basically worked around Newman, that’s how we got it made. By the time the film was being edited,
Tom Cruise had come out in
Top Gun
and he was suddenly a big star. The film came in a day under schedule and a million dollars under budget and it did very well.

RS:
How did Tom Cruise get involved?

MS:
Michael Ovitz at that time was representing Cruise. He called me and said, “Why don’t you use Tom Cruise?” Cruise had been in [cinematographer]
Michael Chapman’s film
All the Right Moves
[as a high school football player fighting with his coach]. And I thought he was very good. I said, “Sure, let’s put him in as the young pool player.”

Still, there were issues. You know,
The Hustler
[by
Robert Rossen, which
starred Newman as the young pool shark, Eddie Felson] is a masterpiece, so I couldn’t emulate that. But I always loved Newman, and he was giving us a great chance.

At that point my main goal was to try to get
The Last Temptation of Christ
made. I knew I had to make it Italian style, in the style of
Ermanno Olmi, Pasolini—

RS:
Especially Pasolini. It put me in mind of his Christ movie—

MS:
Especially Pasolini. Exactly. And the
Trilogy of Life
films. Anyway, I was out in L.A. and Ovitz had me come to his house. He told me he wanted to represent me. He explained to me that I could get paid for what I do [
laughs
]. He literally said that: “You know, you can get paid for this.” Because at that point I never got a salary, I didn’t care. Sometimes I just took scale. In
Raging Bull,
De Niro and I split our salaries, out of a bond of trust.