Anyone who had the pleasure of attending the public interview with Martin Scorsese in Dublin in May of last year will be aware that the gifted American film-maker is a motormouth - in the best sense of that term. He talks and talks, saying two or three words in the space it takes most people to utter one, and bringing wit, wisdom and a trove of knowledge to bear on matters cinematic.
Ask Scorsese a question, and as he begins to answer he dovetails on to one tangent after another and eventually goes full circle and completes the answer. These tangents are generally replete with anecdotal autobiographical snippets, and with movie references and observations from a director passionately enthusiastic about cinema - classics, contemporary work, films from all over the world, and his own prodigious output.
When we met again last month, this time on his home turf of New York, Scorsese was in even more talkative form, if that concept is imaginable. He was radiating the excitability of an expectant father. Helen Morris, the book editor who became his fifth wife after they collaborated on a book about Kundun, had been taken to hospital, and their baby daughter was born the next morning, just a day before Scorsese's own 57th birthday. And he was still buzzing after launching his latest creation as a film-maker - Bringing Out The Dead - on US audiences just a week earlier. Sitting in a Manhattan hotel room he laughed aloud as he remembered his trip to Dublin as a guest of the UCD Film School. "Do you remember that kid who brought the taxi door along?" he asks, recalling the fan who went to the trouble of bringing the door of a New York yellow taxi along to the public interview at the Savoy - where he asked the director to sign it, and Scorsese happily obliged. For all his 22 movies to date, Taxi Driver arguably remains Martin Scorsese's most famous film, even though some of his later work was more commercially successful and Raging Bull is widely regarded as his masterpiece. Bringing Out The Dead invokes Taxi Driver in many respects, not least because the new film is Scorsese's fourth film from a screenplay by Paul Schrader. Schrader turned out the Taxi Driver screenplay in just 10 days, drawing inspiration from Sartre's existential novel Nausea, Dostoyevsy's Notes From The Underground, the films of the late Robert Bresson, and the diary of Arthur Bremer, the publicity-seeking gunman who attempted to assassinate the Alabama governor, George Wallace, in 1972. Five years after Taxi Driver opened, John Hickley cited it as a key influence in his attempted assassination of President Reagan.
"There's a correlation to Taxi Driver, there's no doubt," says Scorsese regarding his new movie. "Only it's 25 years later and we're a little mellower now. Instead of killing people, our protagonist is trying to save people. We were all about 30 then - Schrader, De Niro and myself - when we made Taxi Driver. But now we're 56. It's a different world, and we're different, too."
Bringing Out The Dead, like Taxi Driver, is a quest for redemption which is played out in a nightmarish nocturnal Manhattan. This time the setting is the early 1990s, the driver is an Emergency Medical Services paramedic, and many of his passengers are as strung-out and despairing as in the earlier film. Paul Schrader adapted the screenplay from the book which Joe Connelly wrote to exorcise his harrowing experiences as an EMS worker for 10 years.
"What these paramedics do is extraordinary," says Scorsese. "They're like doctors of the streets. They take care of people nobody else will touch. It's as simple as that." Connelly returned to the mean streets to act as technical advisor on the film, sharing his experiences with Nicolas Cage, who plays the principal character in the film, paramedic Frank Pierce, a man collapsing under the pressure of his job. He calls himself "a grief mop".
This intense, uncompromising film follows the red-eyed, insomniac, haunted-looking Frank over three eventful nights, on each of which he has a different partner. One (John Goodman) approaches his work with a certain detachment, another (Tom Sizemore) is a self-confessed sociopath, and the other (Ving Rhames) has learned to adopt the spiritual approach. Cage's wife, Patricia Arquette, plays the reformed junkie with whom Frank tentatively gets involved.
"It got pretty upsetting for the cast," Scorsese says. "John Goodman thought for quite a while about whether he could bring himself to take the role. Tom Sizemore was crying at times on the set. It just overwhelmed him. Humour was the release valve."
Daylight rarely intrudes on the movie, I note, which was also the case when Scorsese filmed Taxi Driver and After Hours in New York. "Well, when we were younger we didn't mind shooting by night," he says. "I live mostly at night, anyway. When I was three years old I had this terrible asthma. I was given this medication that made me speedy and I was hidden in a room in the dark. I couldn't go out, I couldn't play, and it was lonely. I was up at night a lot. I couldn't sleep because of the asthma. I became used to the night.
"When we moved back to Manhattan and lived in an Italian-American area on the lower east side, the daytime was always so alive. There were three grocery stores on our block, two butchers, a funeral parlour, a trucking company, and people yelling in the streets - one might be yelling in Neapolitan, another in Sicilian, someone else in Calebresean. And my grandfather whistling. Each person had their own signature whistle. "I was living in two and a half rooms with my mother and father and my brother, who was seven years older than me. So I just relished that time alone at night. I didn't have anyone bothering me. And ever since then I've seen the night as the contemplative time. "But there is no doubt whatsoever that shooting this picture 75 nights in a row was too much. We began to realise that on GoodFellas, and I was doing this scene with Bob (De Niro) and Joe (Pesci) out off the New Jersey turnpike. Bob and I were sitting in our chairs on the set and our eyes started closing, and Bob turned to me and said, `How did we ever do this years ago?' And that was 1989. "When you're 56 years old the mood of the night is different. Ultimately, one of the reasons I did this film is that I wanted to throw us back into that world. If you move out of the cloistered ethnic area you grew up in and go into the greater America, you become desensitised and that's bad. Over the years it cuts you off from caring about other people, and you can't do that. You have a Christian obligation to care. "One way of caring is to make a movie like this. I don't mean it in a bleeding heart liberal American way. That's not it. It's about throwing yourself, and throwing your audience into a situation about compassion, about suffering, and about the obligation one has as a human being to others. That's all."
The movie is set in the pre-Giuliani era, when New York City had a soaring crime rate and the medical services were overworked and under-resourced. However, Scorsese believes that there is somewhat less to the mayor's much publicised cleanup of the city than meets the eye.
"Go to 49th St near 8th Avenue," he suggests, "and go up towards 53rd, 54th St near 10th Avenue, and at certain hours, especially on Friday nights, there are lots of things going on. I think Giuliani did a good job in cosmetically clearing up, by getting rid of some of the graffiti. Now there's no more graffiti there, and less homeless. "But less homeless doesn't mean the homeless don't exist. Where did they go? They're underground, in tunnels. The Coalition for the Homeless told us. The city has been cleaned up for tourists and upper-middle-class people so they don't have to see these terrible things, all this suffering. "I know `out of sight, out of mind' is not the right way. But I'm telling you, no matter what you hear, don't ever let your guard down in this city. It's just the nature of it. It's big, with lots of different ethnic groups coming in here from all parts of the world and trying to make a living. All the cultures are clashing. "Would you go to Central Park? I wouldn't go through Central Park even in daylight. I go through there in a car. There are so many trees and bushes there where people can hide, and you can't reason with a crazy drunk person who's got a broken bottle or a knife. I'm totally paranoid about it - and with good reason. But it's really just a case of being streetwise."
Isn't it all such a very different picture of Manhattan to that presented by the city's other best-known film-maker, Woody Allen? "I love Woody Allen's films, but this is my homage to Woody Allen's Manhattan," says Scorsese. "Only in my homage the fireworks are going off and there's a man impaled on a fence 14 storeys above the ground, shouting, `I love this city!'. And he's right. I love it, too. "This is a great city. Only in Manhattan could this happen. I hope Woody sees my film. I must send him a print. Because I love Manhattan. It's one of the great American films. The ending is one of the great moments in movies, where Mariel Hemingway looks at him and says, `You have to have some faith in people sometimes', and it cuts to his face and he looks at her. And then suddenly it cuts to the city and the Gershwin music comes in." As ever, music plays a crucial role in establishing and enhancing the atmosphere and rhythm of the new Scorsese movie. "I was in a house in the country where my wife took me and I was dealing with this script and on the stereo listening to Van Morrison, REM, and some Nirvana, and the images come from the music - and from those streets that I really know so well. "I grew up downtown, in a gritty area right off the Bowery where the derelicts were dying on the streets. As a child you saw everything on the streets. You saw every bodily function happening. You saw sex, fighting, robbery. You saw a bum falling asleep and somebody stealing his shoes, his clothes. Everything! You're eight or nine years old and you have a certain view of mankind then.
`Music was a very important thing when I was growing up, popular music whether it was country and western like Hank Williams, which my mother listened to, or the crooners like Bing Crosby, Perry Como, and of course, rock'n'roll and opera. All that music was always playing through my neighbourhood, so every time I saw, say, a Holy Communion procession, there was an Italian band playing a religious song. Then, as they go past a building, opera is playing out of a third-floor window. Then a jukebox is playing down the road. Everywhere there's music playing. Life has a music score. So, when I was working on this film and riding in those ambulances, that's how it hit me."
Scorsese is already planning his next feature. His long-cherished plans to make movies about Dean Martin and the Rat Pack and about George Gershwin must continue to take a back seat while he pursues another pet project, Gangs of New York, which gets to the roots of the culture clashes he discussed earlier. He becomes effusive at the mention of the movie, settling down to a short history lesson.
"It takes place downtown in the 1840s to the 1860s," he explains. "The Irish came in. They brought in Catholicism. What happened was, you had the Anglo-Saxon gangs in the 1830s, '40s, '50s, '60s, that were basically native American. Not Indian. They were white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. And you had the influx of the Irish immigrants - many of them uneducated peasants, the way the Sicilians and Neapolitans were when they came over later. "The Irish would get off the boat and head for Manhattan and Boss Tweed and the others would take them to Tammany and remind them who was taking care of them at Tammany. To Boss Tweed it was a case of give them soup, and disinfection at the time of cholera, and he would get their votes in return. The Anglo-Saxons would turn around and say, `We have enough people in America at this stage. Besides, our people fought the British not once, but twice'. "And they feared that it would be the Archbishop who the Irish would listen to when it came to deciding who to vote for. And who would tell the Archbishop? The Pope. So they felt there would be a complicity of a foreign power in America through a religion. And there were some people sent by the Vatican to preach on street corners, and that caused a lot of riots. So you have this complete clash.
"And of course, you had the Orange thing going on between the Irish themselves, the Catholics and the Protestants. That's what the film's basis is, really, the Catholic groups and Protestant groups fighting it out and all being taken advantage of by corrupt government."
He hopes to shoot Gangs of New York in April or May. Leonardo DiCaprio is the only actor he has cast so far. "He's going to be playing a boy who's adopted by a Protestant leader," he says. "The film ends at the Draft Riots, which burned down a lot of that area downtown. It's like the birth of New York and the birth of America."
