TWENTY MINUTES with Martin Scorsese. It is both a daunting and a stirring prospect. Nobody else from the generation of American directors that emerged in the early 1970s — think of Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Peter Bogdanovich and a dozen others — has retained his dignity as convincingly as has Marty, writes DONALD CLARKE
Recent films such as Gangs of New York, The Aviatorand The Departedmay not be on a par with earlier classics such as Taxi Driveror Raging Bull, but they are good enough to ensure that Scorsese still matters.
If you still had doubts about his relevance, his latest film, the agreeably unhinged Shutter Island, should have dispelled them by clocking up a juicy $41 million on its recent opening weekend in the US. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a cop investigating a disappearance at an asylum for (cacophonous minor chord) the criminally insane, the picture looks likely to be his most financially successful to date.
So there’s plenty to talk about. This would be worrying enough if Scorsese were not known as one of the most verbose men in the movie business. Many journalists have made the mistake of mentioning a favourite film, only for Marty – a brilliant student of cinema – to eat up 45 minutes expounding his views on the director, star and key grip.
Ten minutes into our chat, I make that mistake myself. I had read that, in preparing Shutter Island, he had encouraged the cast to watch the great 1945 horror film Isle of the Dead. Produced by the legendary Val Lewton, whose B-movies for RKO were often better than the feature presentation, Isle of the Deaddoes, indeed, walk the same ground as Scorsese's new film.
He’s off.
"I don't see Shutter Islandas a horror film," he says. "But there was definitely something about Isle of the Dead. It's a compromised film. But when I saw it at 11 or 12, I didn't know it was a compromised film. All that I knew was that it created a mood and atmosphere that was unbearable. When the woman comes out of the tomb, that's when I left the theatre. Then I went in again and left at the same point. You get a real sense of the ancient world in that film."
Running from the cinema during a ghost story? He must have been a sensitive child.
“I guess I must have been,” he chortles. “But it’s a wonderful film.”
I am happy to report that he comes across as a very nice man. Neat and trim in a grey suit – “MS” monogrammed beneath his shirt pocket – he listens more carefully than anybody in his position needs to and laughs heartily when you try to be funny. Mind you, of that generation of movie brats (most movie pensioners now), he always came across as the least precious. Seriously asthmatic, somewhat shy despite his verbosity, Scorsese was never as flamboyant as the massive Coppola or as assertive as the noisy Brian De Palma.
Nonetheless, he did seem very much part of a gang. With the benefit of hindsight, he must have gained some understanding as to why that generation made such a difference. Was it to do with their attending film school? Or influence of the French New Wave? Were they just hopped-up on 1960s goofballs?
“Well, we all felt we had something to say with our films,” he says. “Maybe I am saying the same thing over and over again. If I am, I don’t know I am. I try not to. The things I make films about are the things that interest me.” But there must have been something in the air that energised these old chums.
“In a sense. It was finally the demise of the old studio system and we all had an extraordinary amount of ambition. We all had such energy.
“Lucas, Spielberg, De Palma, Coppola: the energy levels were so high you couldn’t stay in the same room as us. It was all enjoyable, though. We were difficult no doubt, but we were also always helping one another with each other’s films – until everything changed in the late 1970s.”
The story has been told so often that it has calcified into a kind of legend. After transforming Hollywood with risky films such as Coppola's The Godfather, William Friedkin's The Exorcistand Scorsese's own Taxi Driver, the movie brats were eventually reigned in by the rise of the blockbuster. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg – contemporaries and friends of Scorsese – gave the studios the means to regain control.
“Since the 1980s, Hollywood has developed a new studio system,” Scorsese agrees. “It’s all to do with the blockbuster.”
Is that a bad thing? “Yes, I think in terms of personal expression it is. Now, people forget always that there were big-budgeted films made even in the 1940s. What concerns me is that there are fewer huge pictures that take chances. Maybe, you take a risk with $50 million. When you make a film for $250 million, what risks are you going to take? I mean, really.”
Scorsese knows the value of money. Raised as a working class kid in the tenements of New York’s Little Italy – his parents worked in the garment district – he remembers seeing hoodlums do “terrible things” in the locale’s darker alleyways. Obsessed with movies from an early age, he enjoyed snipping photographs from magazines and (he still feels guilty about this) library books to compose elaborately annotated scrapbooks.
Yet before he entered New York University’s film school, he famously dallied with the idea of becoming a priest. References to the Catholic faith still litter his films and his conversation. He hasn’t escaped yet.
“I don’t think I have much choice,” he says with a full-throated cackle.
“That’s the religion I know. That’s the religion I was formed with. Yes, it still seems to come through the material. We are all human beings.
“What’s human nature? I have always been looking ultimately to address that part of ourselves that embraces religion – that embraces the spiritual. What can one do to be purified, to get a pure line right into the soul for transcendence? Can religion help that? Obviously to some extent. Maybe you have to reject religion to find that.”
If you were searching for a phrase that summarised Scorsese's quest, then "What can one do to be purified?" will do as well as any. "You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the street" was the curt, appropriate tagline for Mean Streets(1973), his first major film. Taxi Driver, released three years later, found Robert De Niro washing his (and our) sins away with a gallon of tenement blood. Atonement, sacrifice and absolution spill out of his films like viscera from a jagged wound.
Glancing at that odd list of films, one, once again, marvels at the director's ability to stay behind the camera. There have been many catastrophes. Gangs of New Yorkran hugely over budget and, it is said, was edited to the accompaniment of vocal rows between Scorsese and producer Harvey Weinstein. The Last Temptation of Christtook about a decade to finally stumble controversially onto screen. Nobody on earth – I mean nobody – went to see Kundun, but Scorsese has always managed to keep making films. How does he charm the money men? "I just understand that they need what they need," he says with a shrug.
“If they give you $50 million or even $1 million, then it’s a lot of money. It’s real money. If you go over, it comes out of your salary. You have to respect that. They have their own mission. That doesn’t mean that when you start out making a movie, then everything will be fine.
“Every day the pressure is on. How much do you hold on to? How much do you give away? Sometimes, I admit, that’s an unreasonable struggle.”
More unreasonable when working with Harvey Weinstein?
"Somewhat, somewhat. Ha ha ha! But that's only because Harvey is a film-maker, not just a businessman. The Weinsteins understand movies. 'We don't have enough money to finish, so what are we going to do. Let's try and deal with what we have.' They grasp those questions. Look, the other day I was in Rome, where we made Gangs, and I thought: if things had gone differently, we could still be shooting this film now. It could have gone on forever."
Scorsese seems to have entered a calmer space of late. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, deep into a near-fatal cocaine habit and hobbled by congenital ill-health, he poured out his anxieties through bitter, brilliant films such as Raging Bulland The King of Comedy. Over the past eight years, following the trauma of Gangs of New York, he has eased his way into slicker, more mainstream dramas such as The Aviator, The Departedand, now, Shutter Island. Marty's new muse, star of his last four films, has been the cherubic Leonardo DiCaprio.
“With him, I see a young man with the ability to take his maturing and utilise it,” he says. “He channels his personal life and his development as a young man into his creative life. I can ask 1,000 questions of Leo and he will come up with 1,010 answers. He is deadly serious.”
We are bound to wonder about the contrast between DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. Having worked together on six occasions, De Niro and Scorsese are still viewed as one of cinema’s great double acts. Yet, remembering all those stories about De Niro’s immersion in The Method, one imagines he might not always have been the most affable person on the set.
“Bob is always affable to me,” he says. “We get along very well. Both methods – Bob’s and Leo’s — are very deep. Part of the difference is, I am 35 years older than Leo. Bob and I have the same contacts – we can finish each other’s sentences. When other people are around, they can barely understand what we are saying as a result.”
Scorsese goes on to confirm that, in a year or two, he and De Niro will reunite for a film about the twilight years of a regretful hitman. Before that there will be a biopic (casting still under wraps) of Frank Sinatra and a documentary on George Harrison.
Then what? Hollywood is such a weird place these days. What with all this 3-D rubbish and . . .
"Oh I love 3-D," he says to my surprise. "I remember I was 10 or 11 when it first came round and we were so excited. I remember Dial M for Murder. It wasn't one of Hitchcock's best, but it showed that you could make a serious film in that medium. Look at the very early days of cinema, and the initial impulse was for sound, colour, widescreen and 3-D. There are early examples of them all."
So might we see Sinatra in 3-D? “You have to find a way for the medium to make sense. I may not be able to do it. But my daughter’s generation might.”
At which point, he rolls back his shoulder and prepares to launch into a speculative history of cinema’s next century. Sadly for us both, the busy, chatty 20 minutes are up. Small man. Big, big personality.
- Shutter Islandopens today
Setting the Shutter Island mood
While preparing Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese encouraged his cast and crew to watch a clutch of films that foreshadow the film’s grim, heightened mood. Here are five of them.
OUT OF THE PAST
(Jacques Tourneur, 1947)
Robert Mitchum (with Jane Greer, right) plays a gas- station attendant who, it is revealed in flashback, was once a private investigator in New York. Shutter Island’s writers aspire towards the film’s pitch-black humour in their own, oddly theatrical dialogue.
THE TRIAL
(Orson Welles, 1962)
Anthony Perkins is a perfect Josef K in Welles’s expressionistic take on the great Franz Kafka novel. The Scorsese film also depicts a world skewed towards the absurd.
THE INNOCENTS
(Jack Clayton, 1961)
The definitive adaptation of Henry James’s Turn of the Screw stars Deborah Kerr as the governess whose charges appear to be in communion with dark presences from beyond the grave. More sombre terrors in an isolated location.
TITCUT FOLLIES
(Frederick Wiseman, 1967)
One of the great documentaries of its era, Wiseman's chilling monochrome film exposed mistreatment of the inmates at a Massachusetts mental asylum. Some of the horrors in Shutter Islandhave their basis in sordid reailty.
ISLE OF THE DEAD
(Mark Robson, 1945)
Two men, including an unhinged Boris Karloff (below), approach a remote island on a boat. Before long, they find themselves stranded on the rocky outcrop in the presence of an obscure horror. The merest glance at the Shutter Island trailer will reveal conspicuous narrative overlaps between the two films. DC
