Now, where were we? Oh, right, Martin Scorsese’s stream of consciousness. O.K., so one afternoon late last summer, seven weeks shy of the opening date of his most recent film, “Bringing Out the Dead,” we happened to be in a sound-mixing studio in the Brill Building, on Broadway, in the Forties. The floor was raked like a theatre’s, and Scorsese was situated at a console so that he was literally overseeing a couple of craftsmen—a rerecording mixer and a sound editor—who knew how to operate a control panel with about five hundred knobs and switches. For more than a month, Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker, who has edited each of his films since “Raging Bull,” in 1980, had been scrutinizing every millimetre of the film’s dialogue, music, and sound effects. A thirty-foot-wide screen spanned one wall, and at the moment it was filled with a medium shot of Nicolas Cage and Tom Sizemore, playing a pair of Emergency Medical Service workers named Frank and Tom. Heard but not seen as their ambulance cruised midtown was Scorsese himself, cast as a sardonic radio dispatcher, delivering dialogue courtesy of Paul Schrader (by way of a novel written by Joe Connelly) in a voice that was unmistakably, quintessentially New York—a quick-tempo wise-guy patois with a don’t-tempt-me edge of neurotic potential. He had bad news for Frank and Tom. He was assigning them to pick up a notoriously foul-smelling alcoholic derelict, and to escort him to a hospital: “First of all, I want you to know how sorry I am about this. I’ve always liked you two. A unit above none. A legend in its own lunchtime. So it hurts me deeply to do this. But I have no choice. You must go to Forty-eighth and Broadway. In front of a liquor store, you’ll find a fifty-year-old man unconscious. It says here, ‘Man smells real bad.’ Do I have to say more?”
It sounded snappy, funny, and fine to me. However, according to a batch of typewritten notes that had been prepared after a work-in-progress screening the previous week at a small theatre on the East Side, Scorsese’s voice was perhaps “too piercing.”
“ ‘Too piercing’?” Scorsese now said. “It’s one of my best performances. I can hardly hear myself.”
As Tom Fleischman, the rerecording mixer, paused the film and got busy modulating the pitch of this speech, Scorsese’s thoughts sprinted off in a different direction. He was reminded of the old Harry Belafonte calypso tune “The Banana Boat Song”—or, rather, a parody of same by Stan Freberg, which included a reference to “piercing,” and that reminded him of another Freberg routine, a parody of the television series “Dragnet,” which in turn reminded him of “Pete Kelly’s Blues,” a feature film directed by Jack Webb, the star of “Dragnet.” The production designer of “Pete Kelly’s Blues,” in which Webb played a bandleader during the twenties, was a Disney veteran who brought to it a remarkably vivid palette, a reality-heightening Technicolor glow reminiscent of the live-action Disney children’s films of the forties—stuff like “So Dear to My Heart” and “Song of the South.” And, Scorsese further recalled, “Pete Kelly’s Blues” had a screenplay by Richard L. Breen, whose name, curiously, Webb had heralded before the title. When the picture was released, in 1955, the year Scorsese turned thirteen, he followed it from theatre to theatre, as was his habit. He did most of his growing up on the Lower East Side, on Elizabeth Street—a self-contained Sicilian urban village where it was understood that you needed a good reason to venture far from the neighborhood. Going way uptown to see a Jack Webb picture in a first-run theatre wasn’t a good enough reason, even for an adolescent movie addict. You waited until it came downtown to one of the second-run chain theatres—the Loew’s Commodore, at Sixth Street and Second Avenue, or the Academy of Music, on Fourteenth Street—and the ticket price dropped from a dollar-fifty to seventy-five cents. For second and third viewings, you went to the independently owned Stuyvesant or St. Mark’s or Orpheum, all on Second Avenue, where the price was about a quarter. One particular Saturday-afternoon double feature at the Orpheum came to mind: “Bomba the Jungle Boy” and “Great White Hunter.” He’d gone hoping to see “something totally mindless,” and “Bomba the Jungle Boy” certainly qualified. But “Great White Hunter” turned out to be a rerelease of “The Macomber Affair” (based upon the Hemingway story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”), a whoa-what’s-happening-here sexual psychodrama directed by Zoltán Korda and starring Gregory Peck, Joan Bennett, and Robert Preston as the unlucky Macomber. On a Sunday afternoon when the Loew’s Commodore was completely packed, Scorsese and his father, Charles, saw Hitchcock’s “Rear Window.” Afterward, still tingling, they got caught in an intermission crowd on the Second Avenue sidewalk outside the Anderson Theatre, a Yiddish house where Molly Picon’s name was on the marquee (not to be confused with the lower-echelon Yiddish theatres on the Bowery, where Charles Scorsese, as an adolescent, used to sneak in and spend the night when he’d got into trouble at home).
I’d brought along a laptop computer, and, though I type very quickly, I was laboring to keep up. Hoping to slow Scorsese’s stride, I interjected that while I was growing up in Oklahoma my impressions of New York derived from the TV series “Naked City” and, most memorably, from the movie version of “West Side Story.” No doubt the Leonard Bernstein overture helped, but mainly I’d been hooked by the opening image—an abstract graphic representation of the Manhattan skyline that dissolved into the real thing. Yes, absolutely, Scorsese agreed, those graphics were the extraordinary handiwork of Saul Bass, who later designed the titles of “GoodFellas,” “Casino,” “The Age of Innocence,” and the four-hour documentary “A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies.” And the production designer of “West Side Story” was Boris Leven, who worked on Scorsese’s “New York, New York,” “The Last Waltz,” “The King of Comedy,” and “The Color of Money.” Not that Leven was necessarily to blame, but he also designed a 1954 stinker called “The Silver Chalice,” in which Paul Newman made his screen début, for which Newman later apologized with an advertisement in the Los Angeles Times. The performance that really stood out in “The Silver Chalice” was that of Jack Palance as Simon the Magician, “who gave Jesus a run for his money. . . . He was one of the holy men that the quote pagans unquote rallied around as an answer to the Jesus cult. He was said to have raised the dead—twice!—and he disappeared completely while being interrogated by the emperor.” That digression led naturally to Apollonius of Tyana, Hannibal, the Punic Wars, the fact that when you go to Tunisia it’s mainly Roman rather than Carthaginian ruins that you see, and how that landscape invariably evokes Federico Fellini’s “Nights of Cabiria.” Scorsese was barely warming up, I gathered, but Fleischman had by then solved the “too piercing” problem, and it was time to move on.
Across many months, I had many conversations with Scorsese, encounters that tended to engender a mixture of awe and sympathy. Along the way, I would speculate about this agreeably garrulous fellow: What’s the weather like inside his brain? Evidently, every movie he’d ever watched—and he’d probably seen more than any other living director, more than most movie critics—was stored there, along with five-plus decades of personal history, sensory memory, family mythology, music heard, books read, all of it seemingly instantly retrievable. Was it painful, I wondered, to remember so much? Scorsese’s powers of recall weren’t limited to summoning plot turns or notable scenes or acting performances; his gray matter bulged with camera angles, lighting strategies, scores, sound effects, ambient noises, editing rhythms, production credits, data about lenses and film stocks and exposure speeds and aspect ratios. Instinctively, he’d engraved facts and images and feelings that he’d been able to draw upon throughout his creative life. But what about all the sludge? An inability to forget the forgettable—wasn’t that a burden, or was it just part of the price one paid to make great art?
Since 1973, the year “Mean Streets” appeared—long before the label “America’s greatest living film director” became routinely appended to his name—moviegoers throughout the world have known what a Scorsese movie looks and sounds like, even if only from seeing the work of other auteurs, disciples, and wanna-bes who’ve gone to school on his camera moves, narrative innovations, and editing tropes. Scorsese once mentioned to me that the best new movie he’d seen during the previous year was “Rushmore,” an unpredictable and winsome comedy directed by Wes Anderson—who, he learned after sending Anderson a fan letter, was an ardent admirer of Scorsese’s exemplar, Michael Powell, the British director of such masterpieces as “The Red Shoes,” “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,” and “A Matter of Life and Death.” When I asked Anderson how he’d reacted to hearing from Scorsese, he replied, “I wrote back to him probably twenty-five seconds after receiving his letter.” Of course, Anderson also proved to be a careful student of Scorsese.
“So many Scorsese ideas have been used so much that they’re no longer Scorsese ideas,” he told me. “They’re just part of the grammar. The most obvious things are the ways he moves the camera and the cuts. And the way he uses music. Also, using documentary-style information in a fiction movie. . . . Take the counting of the money in ‘Casino.’ The movie just sort of stops for a few minutes, nothing is happening with the characters, because he’s telling you how the money works. He does it differently in ‘Mean Streets,’ when he shows you how that world works. He’s not the first director to do these things, but the way he does it combines realism and this dreamy and surreal expressionism.”
“Marty hates plots,” Thelma Schoonmaker often says, echoing remarks that Scorsese has uttered along those same lines. He is, of course, a masterly storyteller, one who refuses to settle for conventional three-act linear dramas with tidy resolutions, because since when does life work that way? What drives a Scorsese tale is his talent for weaving variegated optical and aural and emotional textures, for devising solutions to the paradox that truth and beauty and depravity must share the same frame. Underlying these dazzling gifts is Scorsese’s compulsion to provoke discomfort in himself and his audience. For instance, there’s the slaughter at the Norbulinga Palace in “Kundun,” or the torment and torture of Jesus in “The Last Temptation of Christ,” or the tattooed torso of the jailed Max Cady (Robert De Niro) in “Cape Fear.” Or there’s that sidewalk confrontation between Travis (De Niro) and Sport (Harvey Keitel, playing Jodie Foster’s pimp) in “Taxi Driver,” during which De Niro expresses his revulsion—and our revulsion—by stiffening his spine and looking away, into the uncertain distance. Our sympathy lies squarely with Travis at that moment, as opposed to the chill we feel in the famous “You talkin’ to me?” sequence. (For my money, and this is, I concede, a minority viewpoint, the most unnerving scene in the Scorsese canon is the passage in “The King of Comedy” where Rupert Pupkin, in a successful effort by De Niro to establish a gold standard for putzlike behavior, shows up uninvited, luggage in hand, along with a girl he’s trying to impress—Diahnne Abbott—at the weekend home of Jerry Langford, a Carson-like talk-show host played by Jerry Lewis. Pure skin-crawling terror, and nobody ever comes close to getting hurt.)
Barbara Hershey, who played Mary Magdalene in “Last Temptation,” spoke to Mary Pat Kelly, one of Scorsese’s many biographers, about the disturbing scene in which she copulates with a series of strangers while Jesus watches silently: “There was one shot, just a simple shot, where an Indian man is watching me make love. Christ is sitting out of focus in the background. . . . The camera slowly starts to move in, and you think it’s going to move onto Christ, but it swoops slightly and moves into the close-up of the eye of the Indian man, and then it locks focus and Christ is in focus as well, in the background. When I saw it I said to Marty, ‘How did you think of that?’ and he said, ‘I thought of that four years ago. I woke up in the middle of the night with that one.’ I realized that he had been preparing for this film his whole life. . . . Who knows what talent is? . . . I don’t think talent is as rare as the need to express it or the strength to handle the rejection. I don’t think Marty can help it; there’s nothing else he can do with his life.”
That combination of sensibility and urgency—the encyclopedic brain brimming with references to old movies and real-life experiences, waiting for just the right opportunity to download—is the dominant trait that distinguishes Scorsese from other filmmakers of his generation. In “Wiseguy,” the nonfiction bestseller by Nicholas Pileggi that “GoodFellas” was based upon, the wife of the main character, a Mafia soldier named Henry Hill, described how during their courtship he would escort her to the Copacabana night club: “On crowded nights, when people were lined up outside and couldn’t get in, the doormen used to let Henry and our party in through the kitchen, which was filled with Chinese cooks, and we’d go upstairs and sit down immediately.” Somehow, Scorsese translated those forty words into a seamless three-minute Steadicam shot, an exhilarating and revelatory blend of cinéma vérité and ballet—choreographed to the perfect music, “Then He Kissed Me,” by the Crystals. When the camera at last delivers us to the big room at the Copa, Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), whom we’ve seen crossing palms with twenty-dollar bills, and his future wife (Lorraine Bracco) momentarily disappear, and a pair of briskly efficient waiters hoisting a linen-draped table enter the frame to give the couple the V.I.P. treatment. Off-screen, some poor schmucks waiting to be seated whine futilely to the maître d’.
How was it that Scorsese knew to build that scene that way? Or, rather, how was it that Pileggi’s book found its way into the hands of the only film director alive who just happened to know by heart, along with a zillion other potentially but not necessarily useless facts, the protocols of the Copacabana in the fifties? “I’d been there a lot when I was fifteen or sixteen,” Scorsese told me. “And I saw this go on all the time. I had to explain it all to the crew. ‘Make sure we see the money. Money, money, money, money. Slipping money here and there, slipping money here and there, slipping money. Even if you don’t see the cash, you see the hand movements.’ Henry’s greasing his way all the way in. This guy’s like a king. This is his reward. The Copacabana was like, I don’t know, like Buckingham Palace, especially if somebody like Sinatra was performing. It was as sanctified in my world, where I came from, before making movies, as you could get. Especially when you’re younger, you get down there and you think you’ve got a great table and suddenly three more tables come flying into the room and these wise guys, all these gangsters, come in and you can’t say anything. You’re finished.”
“Marty never talks about his art,” Pileggi has said. “All he ever wants to know from me is ‘What really happened? What was he really talking about? How was he dressed? Where were they standing? What did his wife say?’ ”
Marty hates plots? It’s a reductive, not-to-be-taken-too-literally way of saying that Scorsese is, among other things, a cultural anthropologist (with an unscientific devotion to the notion that character is destiny). Reviewing “Mean Streets,” Pauline Kael, in an unalloyed rave, described it as “a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking” and observed that “every character, every sound is rooted in those streets.” In contexts as diverse as Las Vegas (“Casino”), Tibet (“Kundun”), Edith Wharton’s New York (“The Age of Innocence”), and the Mob’s outer boroughs (“GoodFellas”), Scorsese anatomizes the codes and rituals of whatever subculture he fixes his lens upon. He’s an articulate, generous explainer, and his elucidations of what he was thinking when he first imagined that shot or made that cut reveal a rigorous self-awareness and a mind that’s at once phenomenally cluttered and coherent. All that shelf space inside his cranium, it seems, is jammed with subtext—the footnotes, in effect, of his inspirations, footnotes that, as often as not, prove no less edifying or entertaining than the main text.
No longer young, not yet old, Scorsese is, at fifty-seven, contentedly married (to his fifth wife) and the father of an infant daughter (as well as two grown daughters). According to Raffaele Donato, a film historian who has worked for Scorsese for fifteen years and along the way has become a close confidante, “Fellini used to tell Marty, ‘As you get older, you’re getting as handsome as De Sica.’ ” Well, not quite Vittorio De Sica, who had wavy silver hair and a dolce-vita radiance, but handsome, yes, in a worldly way: wide jaw, easy smile, bony nose, espresso eyes, and thick dark eyebrows hoisted like a furled awning, as if to say, “Behind these frontal lobes, everything is open for business.” Each morning, he puts in a half hour on an exercise bicycle, a regimen that helps maintain his trim, bantam-rooster physique. But he has a history of shaky health, and he’s heedful of the physical demands of filmmaking, the weeks in a row of twelve-hour shooting days followed by months of nocturnal postproduction marathons. He keeps a supply of inhalers handy for the asthma that has shadowed him since childhood, an affliction that, in retrospect, had a distinct upside; he couldn’t run around with the other kids, but by studying street life from the living-room window he educated himself in the nuances of body language. Plus, his parents felt guilty that he was a shut-in, so they took him to see a lot of movies.
He now lives far from the Elizabeth Street tenement, on the East Side, in a brownstone he bought in 1987; he works there and in a suite of offices occupying half a floor in a midtown building. Door to door, it would be about a ten-minute walk, except that Scorsese’s natural gregariousness makes it hard for him to tell intrusive strangers to back off, so he gets around town with a car and driver. He has no listed phone number, nor does his production company, Cappa Films. (“We find that people who really want to get in touch figure out a way.”)
At this point in his life, Scorsese says, unless he’s grappling with a movie budget he almost never thinks about money, as opposed to the eighties, “when I thought about it a lot, because I had none.” A business manager advises as to what he can and can’t afford. An avid book collector (recently, of first editions of novels that have been adapted as movies, as well as of Melville, Hawthorne, Joyce, Greene, and Huxley, among others), he began thirty years ago compiling an enormous collection of old movie posters, most of which are stored at the Museum of Modern Art. He doesn’t have an agent, as such, but when situations arise that call for someone to represent his interests in a forceful manner—typically, dealing with certain people at certain movie studios—he often relies upon the Hollywood potentate and testicle squeezer Michael Ovitz. This arrangement dates to 1987, when Scorsese was despairing that he’d never be able to find a studio to back “The Last Temptation of Christ,” a story he believed he’d been put on earth to bring to the screen. Four years earlier, Paramount Pictures had pulled the plug just as production was about to get under way. A come-on Ovitz used in the wooing was “You know, Marty, you could get paid for being a film director.” (Though not, as it turned out, for “Last Temptation” itself, which, financed by Universal, had a bare-bones budget of seven million dollars, a cast of splendid actors virtually all of whom worked for scale, and a director so fervid he agreed to work for nothing.)
Ovitz tapped into Scorsese’s deepest dread: that a day will arrive when he’ll no longer be able to make movies. He understands the marginal nature of his Hollywood citizenship—the category reserved for those whose work is revered but rarely does boffo box-office. (No doubt, it’s harder for him to account for the bizarre fact that, despite five Academy Award nominations, he has never won.) In 1990, Scorsese showed Brian De Palma, an old friend, a rough cut of “GoodFellas,” and De Palma reacted with mock outrage: “You made the best movie of the eighties”—“Raging Bull”—“and, God damn it, we’re barely into the nineties and you’ve already made the best movie of this decade, too!” De Palma might have added that “Mean Streets” and “Taxi Driver” ranked among the best movies of the seventies, the decade when Hollywood reinvented itself. No wonder that in recent years Scorsese has received several awards of the lifetime-achievement variety, usually bestowed during black-tie ceremonies that test his ability not to squirm as moist-eyed colleagues deliver heartfelt testimonials. (Steven Spielberg: “Marty is the most honest filmmaker of our generation and in my opinion he is the best director in the world today”; etc.) Guided by a blend of pragmatism and Sicilian fatalism, Scorsese regards such tributes warily, as if they were a warning that gray eminence lurks around the corner. He knows how abruptly even the most original talents can discover that their services are no longer in demand. Despite Scorsese’s championing of his still-vibrant genius, Michael Powell couldn’t really get work toward the end of his life. Fellini faced comparable circumstances, and Scorsese intervened on his behalf, as well. (Of Powell’s “Peeping Tom” and Fellini’s “8 1/2,” Scorsese has declared that they “say everything that can be said about filmmaking, about the process of dealing with film, the objectivity and subjectivity of it, and the confusion between the two.”)
Scorsese’s worshipful respect for his forebears is, in a sense, indiscriminate, extending to the institution of cinema itself. In the early seventies, he attended a screening at the Los Angeles County Museum of Billy Wilder’s 1955 comedy “The Seven Year Itch” and was appalled by the quality of the print, the color of which was so faded that everything looked pink. This wasn’t an isolated case, he knew, and it led to a daunting, but ultimately successful, campaign to force Eastman Kodak, the leading manufacturer of color-film stock, to develop and bring to the market an affordable, durable product. Then, in 1990, Scorsese enlisted Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Sydney Pollack, Robert Redford, and Steven Spielberg, and created the Film Foundation, the goal of which was to heighten awareness of motion-picture history and, specifically, to encourage the restoration and preservation of millions of feet of endangered films which mainly resided in the not very well protected archives of the studios. Scorsese had already helped pay for the restorations of certain favorite movies—André de Toth’s “Ramrod,” Raoul Walsh’s “Pursued,” Abraham Polonsky’s “Force of Evil”—and he continues to do so. The Film Foundation shares office space with Cappa Films, and preservation advocacy and artists’-rights advocacy have evolved as a parallel enterprise to his work as a filmmaker.
What does it mean that Scorsese possesses this immense and astonishingly accessible knowledge of cinema? To the typical eight-dollar-ticket buyer on a Friday night, probably not much. And it makes understandable why one of his most interesting works—“A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies,” a brilliantly condensed and ingeniously autobiographical film-history survey that he undertook, in 1994, at the request of the British Film Institute—didn’t turn up in many neighborhood theatres. Film history à la Scorsese began in 1946, when at age four he was taken by his mother to see “Duel in the Sun,” a King Vidor Western that starred Jennifer Jones and a villainous Gregory Peck. He was mesmerized: “The bright blasts of deliriously vibrant color, the gunshots, the savage intensity of the music, the burning sun, the overt sexuality . . . the hallucinatory quality of the imagery has never weakened for me over the years.” Scorsese’s pedagogy in “A Personal Journey,” propelled by enthusiasm rather than by dogmatism, pays homage to a handful of relatively obscure filmmakers—Samuel Fuller, Anthony Mann, Jacques Tourneur—and barely touches upon or omits many celebrated works by celebrated directors (Hitchcock, Huston, Wyler). Facing the camera, he makes plain his mission: “I’ve chosen to highlight some of the films that colored my dreams, that changed my perceptions, and in some cases even my life.”
Typical is his discussion of Elia Kazan’s “America America,” the story of Kazan’s uncles’ journey from Turkey to America, a classic immigrant experience: “I later saw myself making the same journey . . . from my own neighborhood in New York, which was in a sense a very foreign land. My journey took me from that land to moviemaking—which was something unimaginable! In fact, when I was a little younger, there was another journey I wanted to make: a religious one. I wanted to be a priest. However, I soon realized that my real vocation, my real calling, was the movies. I don’t really see a conflict between the church and the movies, the sacred and the profane. . . . I believe there is a spirituality in films, even if it’s not one which can supplant faith. I find that over the years many films address themselves to the spiritual side of man’s nature, from Griffiths’s ‘Intolerance’ to John Ford’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ to Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ to Kubrick’s ‘2001’ . . . and so many more. It’s as if movies answer an ancient quest for the common unconscious. They fulfill a spiritual need that people have to share a common memory.”
Just in time for the Venice Film Festival, late last summer, Scorsese assembled a rough-cut version of the first two hours of “Il Dolce Cinema,” a treatise on Italian film that will have grown to six hours by the time it’s completed, later this year. Though “Il Dolce Cinema” seems a logical sequel to “A Personal Journey,” its conception actually predated the American documentary. For nearly a decade, “Il Dolce Cinema” percolated in conversations between Scorsese and Raffaele Donato, who in 1985 left the film department of the Museum of Modern Art to work as Scorsese’s archivist. Donato has described it as “an even more personal journey than ‘A Personal Journey’ ”—an assessment Scorsese shares.
The genesis of “Il Dolce Cinema” can be traced to a brief trip to Sicily that Scorsese made, somewhat reluctantly, in the late seventies, in the company of Isabella Rossellini, who would later become his third wife. They’d been vacationing in Rome when Rossellini proposed a two-day detour to Palermo and the exurban villages of Polizzi Generosa and Ciminna—respectively, Scorsese’s father’s and mother’s ancestral home towns. From Palermo, he phoned his mother, Catherine, in New York, and she gave him the name of a relative to look up. Arriving in Ciminna on a summer Sunday afternoon, Scorsese and Rossellini approached some men gathered in a small plaza, mentioned the person they were looking for, and were greeted with stony indifference. They continued strolling through town, Scorsese told me, asking the same question and making no progress. “Finally, a young man walked up to us and said, ‘You want to meet this person, come with me.’ He took us to a house where there was a woman with a child. She came out and said her husband was away on business. So I said we were cousins, I was a filmmaker, and I was interested in meeting him. The problem was my mother had given me the name of someone who was in hiding. I guess his wife thought I was the police or the member of a rival gang. Basically, we’d shown up, a couple of strangers, and dropped the worst possible name. That’s why we were received that way, just like you see in the movies.”
And, just like in the movies, clearing up the misunderstanding involved comic convolutions worthy of Pirandello. A brother of the fugitive cousin heard what had happened and ascertained that a famous American relation had been treated with great disrespect, which led to a falling out between the brothers, which naturally became the talk of Ciminna. An elaborate letter of apology was written—the situation demanded nothing less—but . . . how was one to dispatch the letter? Years passed. Whenever American visitors came to Ciminna, they would be asked, “Where do you live?” If the answer was New York, they were then asked, “Manhattan?” If the answer was “Manhattan,” the next question was “Uptown or downtown?” Did they know Elizabeth Street? Did they know Charles and Catherine Scorsese, the parents of Martin? Finally, a woman materialized who indeed knew Elizabeth Street and Charles Scorsese, only he’d moved. But, she said, “I know where he goes to take a shave.” Good. She was given the letter. Back in New York, she left a message at the barbershop and wound up hand-delivering the letter and reading it aloud in the Scorseses’ kitchen.
By now, the letter was almost ten years old, but its invitation to come to Ciminna for a family reunion still stood. Which is how two years later, in 1990, Charles and Catherine went to Sicily—their first visit—where they were joined by their son the filmmaker. Donato also came along. (In the intervening years, Scorsese’s marriage to Isabella Rossellini had come and gone, as had his fourth marriage, to Barbara De Fina, who began producing his movies when he was directing “The Color of Money” and, post-divorce, has continued to produce them.) In Sicily, Scorsese and Donato did what they always do—talked about movies, especially Italian movies, discussions that, according to Scorsese, “would go on for hours, about how certain films depicted the ways of life, the philosophy of the people.” Scorsese’s return to Ciminna, where, as it happens, Luchino Visconti shot “Il Gattopardo” (“The Leopard”)—based upon Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s exquisite tale of life among the Sicilian aristocracy during Garibaldi’s campaign for Italian unification—had an especially stirring effect.
Scorsese: “I think one of the reasons I hadn’t been eager to go when Isabella suggested it in 1978 was because I wasn’t yet ready to accept that part of myself. The cultural connection between Sicily and where I grew up—whatever’s been translated into Sicilian-American—has something very severe and strong about it, especially on my father’s side. He wasn’t a despot, but he had certain thoughts about what was right and wrong, a morality, based on that land. I knew that when I saw ‘The Leopard’ in its first release, in 1963. These movies weren’t just movies; they were all about the filmmakers and what they had to say, their art form, their version of cinema, their music. You know the funeral music in ‘Divorce Italian Style’? We grew up hearing that in the street on the Lower East Side. That was so much a part of me, and one way it stayed with me was that for years my American side was fighting with my Sicilian side. I guess I didn’t want to go to Sicily that first time because I felt if I stayed there too long I’d wind up in front of one of those cafés on Sundays drinking coffee, dressed in black, and I’d never make another film. The feeling that I belonged was so primal it was a little unsettling.”
Donato: “Every movie that Marty’s made, that he’s talked about, that he loves, that’s impressed in his mind, has some early family association for him. Movies for him aren’t abstract, cold, critical, objective things. They’re the air you breathe, what you eat. I like the metaphor from the Catholic Mass—Mary Pat Kelly also talks about this—the idea of transubstantiation, the wafer and the wine, body and blood. I think cinema for Marty is like that. When he discusses a film, it has a way of turning into flesh and blood.”
With almost evangelical earnestness, Scorsese expresses his desire to introduce “classical Italian cinema”—De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Pietro Germi, Francesco Rosi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, among others—to audiences unfamiliar with their work. His own familiarity with Italian cinema dates back half a century to weekend broadcasts by a New York television station of fare that wouldn’t have had much of an audience in, say, Omaha—“Paisan,” “Open City,” “The Bicycle Thief,” “Shoeshine.” The impact of specific images was enhanced by the context in which Scorsese absorbed them—the Elizabeth Street living room, where he and his brother, Frank, their parents, maternal grandparents, and uncles communed with a sixteen-inch RCA Victor television. On the other side of the living-room wall was the eight-by-twelve bedroom he shared with Frank, who was seven years older. When the plaster wall cracked next to where Marty slept, in the bottom half of a bunk bed, he covered it up by painting a face with penetrating eyes, then spooked his parents by explaining that the eyes watched him while he slept. “The eyes were sort of magical to me, what they saw,” he told me. “The idea would be: viewing, always viewing, always seeing, your eyes being on everything.”
Scorsese arrived in Venice burdened by jet lag, fatigue, and general stress. He and Thelma Schoonmaker had endured a string of seven-day workweeks, alternating between the editing of “Il Dolce Cinema” and the postproduction polishing of “Bringing Out the Dead.” Simultaneously, he and his frequent writing partner, Jay Cocks, were working on what was supposed to be the final draft of the screenplay of his next feature, “Gangs of New York,” an adaptation of Herbert Asbury’s history of an unheavenly nineteenth-century city plagued by corruption, poverty, crime, and savage tribal warfare. What else? Oh, yes, his wife, Helen Morris, was confined to bed all but one day a week—the safest place to be for a fifty-two-year-old woman with Parkinson’s disease entering the last trimester of pregnancy. The first night in Venice, despite his comfortable accommodations at the Hotel Cipriani, Scorsese dreamed he was being stretched in several directions. Earlier that week, in New York, he’d had a dream that plunged him back into final exams at the Catholic seminary he attended for a year during high school. (“Yes, we know you aren’t going to become a priest, but you still have to take the tests.”) The night after that, he’d found himself caught up in an epic battle between Gypsies and Sicilians, and the Sicilians were losing. Nightmare-wise, he was on a roll.
The Scorsese entourage included Donato, Schoonmaker, his producer and ex-wife Barbara De Fina, his personal assistant Gretchen Campbell, his media handler Lois Smith, and some devilish-looking professional muscle, a couple of night-club bouncers from Rimini, who wore matching black pin-striped suits and Oakley shades and answered to the same name, Francesco. The screening of “Il Dolce Cinema,” or at least the first two hours of it, would be the crowning event of the festival, following the awards ceremony and Scorsese’s presentation to Jerry Lewis of a Golden Lion statuette for career achievement (an honor he’d received himself, in 1995). That evening, Scorsese wore a black suit, white shirt, gray striped necktie, and, on his left lapel, a tiny red bar that signified his elevation to the French Legion of Honor (something else he had in common with Jerry Lewis). During the ride from the Cipriani to the festival site, on the Lido, the mood aboard Scorsese’s water taxi was subdued, inclining toward lugubrious. As we were about to dock, De Fina mused, “Well, is this the most cheerful group of people in Venice, or what?”
“It’s always tense before you go over the top,” Scorsese said, gritting his teeth and for all I knew quoting from “All Quiet on the Western Front” or “From Here to Eternity.”
“What could go wrong?” I asked.
“The kudos or the bomb,” he said. “You never know. And you only learn that by thinking you know.”
In this instance, it was definitely kudos. Scorsese sat in the balcony, flanked by Giorgio Armani, who was the film’s executive producer (his reward for contributing two hundred thousand dollars of its initial financing), and by the screenwriter Suso Checchi D’Amico. From my vantage point a couple of rows away, I didn’t see Scorsese budge during the screening, but he might well have been muttering. Nick Pileggi recalls sitting next to him during the première of “GoodFellas,” at the Ziegfeld Theatre, in Manhattan: “As we’re watching, I’m getting these elbows. He’s saying, ‘See? We let that shot run a little too long.’ And ‘Look at that, we should have taken that out.’ I say, ‘Marty, it’s too late now. We’re at the opening. You’re wearing a tuxedo.’ ”
As the credits for “Il Dolce Cinema” rolled, the entire audience rose and faced the balcony, applauding warmly. This was followed by lots of kisses and hugs, including a full body wrap from a tiny, wizened, gray-haired woman who was weeping and speaking in Italian, with Armani translating. Armani hosted a dinner that evening at a restaurant near St. Mark’s Square, and on our way through the square I asked Donato who she was. Her name was Marcella De Marchis, and she was Roberto Rossellini’s first wife—actually, the only woman he ever married and therefore his widow (and, if you defined the term broadly, sort of one of Scorsese’s former in-laws). What had she been saying?
“She described the emotions she was reliving as she watched the clips from ‘Paisan’ and ‘Open City,’ ” Donato said. “She’d never seen anything on Rossellini done in such a simple way, with such great taste, where you could explain what he was trying to do and capture what he was all about. And she was responding to the fact that this was, on Marty’s part, obviously a labor of love.”
I wondered if “labor of love” meant that Scorsese wasn’t taking any compensation.
“As far as I know,” Donato said, “it’s a pure labor of love.”
Had “A Personal Journey” also been pro bono?
“Well, that one was a little different. For that one, Marty didn’t want any money, but as payment he asked the British Film Institute for a copy of ‘A Kid for Two Farthings,’ a 1955 picture by Carol Reed, who also directed ‘The Third Man.’ And they promised it to him, but there have been some problems with the restoration. They’ve never been able to pull all the elements together. So, now that I think of it, he’s never actually collected.”
A few days after returning from Venice, Scorsese informed me, “What we’re going to do is give ourselves a little film festival, which really gets the energy going.” He still had to figure out the shape and content of the final four hours of “Il Dolce Cinema,” and the most expeditious approach was to watch a bunch of Italian movies that he’d seen many times but nevertheless felt he needed—and, remarkably, was able—to look at with a fresh eye. So, over the next few weeks, I spent several afternoons at the Cappa offices, inside a cozy, gold-carpeted screening room equipped with twelve cushiony green armchairs. Some of the films came from a collection Scorsese oversees—a few thousand sixteen-millimetre and thirty-five-millimetre prints, which he stores at the Museum of Modern Art and at Eastman House, in Rochester, New York. (These are separate from his video collection, which at last count included roughly twenty-five thousand titles.) We saw Pietro Germi’s “Divorce Italian Style,” Ermanno Olmi’s “Il Posto” and “The Fiancés,” Luchino Visconti’s “La Terra Trema,” Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up,” and Francesco Rosi’s “Salvatore Giuliano.” Thelma Schoonmaker was always present, usually joined by Jay Cocks and his wife, the actress Verna Bloom, and occasionally by Raffaele Donato and Kent Jones, a programmer for the Film Society of Lincoln Center and a co-writer of “Il Dolce Cinema.” Afterward, Scorsese and Schoonmaker would consider which clips they might include in the documentary, and he and Cocks, who for nine years reviewed movies for Time and for almost thirty years has watched a movie or two a week with Scorsese, would exuberantly analyze the ingredients, as if deconstructing a savory meal.
It became clear to me that Italian cinema matters to Scorsese as something far more than intellectual fodder. He was explicit about which passages in which films corresponded to specific motifs in his own work—a sorting out, it seemed, or a way of illuminating his understanding of who he is. A shot of empty coat hangers in an empty room at the end of “Il Posto” inspired a shot of a forlornly dangling light bulb in the final scene of “Raging Bull”: “That just stuck in my mind as a symbol of loneliness. In ‘Raging Bull,’ Jake La Motta is back, ready to go into the ring, only it’s a stage. He’s readjusted his life. He’s made peace with himself and the people around him, but he’s alone. And those images—when you’re sitting alone in a room, you see those little details. If I’m alone here, my eye catches the wall socket under the wainscoting there. The inanimate object makes you aware of your own loneliness, of being by yourself.”
Of the cinematography of “Salvatore Giuliano,” he said, “I think we translated that black-and-white intensity into the color of the neon in the streets of New York at night in ‘Taxi Driver.’ It has a truth and honesty to it that’s really devastating. It deals with humanity on a primal level. In ‘Taxi Driver,’ the way Travis looked, the way he glanced up and down the street, comes from some of this. ‘Salvatore Giuliano’ was an inspiration for that, and to a certain extent for ‘GoodFellas.’ And certainly we looked at it again for ‘Raging Bull,’ just for the black-and-white.”
Scorsese invited me to at least one screening that I suppose he wished he hadn’t. One afternoon less than a month before the première of “Bringing Out the Dead,” he and Schoonmaker settled into the back row of a multiplex theatre in the Viacom Building, at Forty-fifth and Broadway, to inspect a print of the film which had just been put through a process called skip-bleaching, the purpose of which was to subtly heighten the contrast between light and dark tones. As the film played, Scorsese’s own tone sounded anything but lighthearted. The basic flaw, he felt, was that now there was too much contrast. Throughout the screening, I could hear him moaning, “Oh, my God, Thelma. No good. . . . There’s like a haze over the picture. It’s an over-all problem. . . . Oy. No good.” He sounded like an alarmed mother—oddly, like a stereotypical Jewish mother—whose child had just wandered in after a nasty bicycle spill.
“I gotta tell you, the picture’s subject matter is depressing. The areas we shot in the city are down,” he told Schoonmaker afterward. “Each frame looks quite beautiful, but cumulatively, I think emotionally, we’re cut off from the picture, and it’s more depressing than it should be.”
The problem could be fixed, but a cleaned-up print might not be ready in time for a preview two days later.
“Who’s coming to that screening?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Who knows? It’s open to the world now. Everybody’s there—families, ushers, we’re dragging people off the streets, who cares at this point. Everybody’s gonna see it now. That’s the end. It’s all over. It’s gonna go out to theatres and get reviewed. I can’t take it. Oh, God. Oy. That’s it. It’s going out into theatres. Some people may actually come to see it. Oh, God.”
I was reminded of an anecdote about the editing of “Raging Bull” (for which Schoonmaker won an Oscar). As the film’s opening date became imminent, the people around Scorsese recognized that he was having difficulty letting go. Finally, the producer, Irwin Winkler, invoked a deadline of midnight on a Sunday. If the lab didn’t start printing the next day, the picture wouldn’t be ready to open the following weekend. Midnight approached, and Scorsese was still fiddling with a scene in which a minor character orders a drink from a bar at the Copacabana. The problem was that Scorsese couldn’t clearly hear the words “Cutty Sark.”
Winkler said, no, that wasn’t the real problem. “Marty, that’s it,” he decreed. “The picture is over. You have to give it up. If you can’t hear ‘Cutty Sark,’ it’s just too bad.”
“I’m taking my name off the picture.”
“People are going to look at this picture one hundred years from now and say that it’s a great, great movie,” Winkler said. “Because you can’t hear ‘Cutty Sark,’ which, by the way, everybody else says they can hear, you’re taking your name off?”
“Yes, I’m taking my name off the picture.”
Fine, take your name off, Winkler told him, but it’s going to the lab.
A well-travelled tale—recounted in more than one book about Scorsese—and, I think, easily misconstrued, seemingly a vignette about neurotic perfectionism but actually a wholly characteristic illustration of the multilayered subtext that underlies his finest work. “Raging Bull” is, in the Scorsese mythology, the pivotal event. In the late seventies, his personal life was a mess. He was living in Los Angeles, treating himself to a second adolescence following the collapse of his second marriage (to the writer Julia Cameron). After “Mean Streets,” “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” and “Taxi Driver,” which were in varying degrees critical successes, he made “New York, New York,” which was anything but. He agreed to direct Liza Minnelli in a Broadway musical, “The Act,” but, recognizing that he was out of his element, left the production two weeks before it opened (and quickly closed). He was more than mildly depressed. Drug abuse, and abuse of his body in general, culminated in a terrifying episode of internal bleeding. Robert De Niro came to see him in the hospital and asked, in so many words, whether he wanted to live or die. If you want to live, De Niro proposed, let’s make this picture—referring to “Raging Bull,” an as-told-to book by Jake La Motta, the former world middleweight boxing champion, that De Niro had given him to read years earlier. “Raging Bull” became, in Scorsese’s adaptation, the story of a severely flawed human being’s quest for redemption. Which is to say that it was about his own quest for redemption. “I put everything I knew and felt into that film, and I thought it would be the end of my career,” he said years later. “It was what I call a kamikaze way of making movies: pour everything in, then forget all about it and go find another way of life.” He genuinely believed it would be his last Hollywood-studio project.
And the “Cutty Sark” line—what was that all about? Well, it was the whiskey of choice of Scorsese’s father and his contemporaries, and the reference was a wink and a nod to them. The part of the bartender at the Copacabana, meanwhile, was played by Dominic Lofaro’s father, who in real life was a bartender at the Copacabana. Dominic Lofaro? One of Scorsese’s best friends from childhood (now dead), “a very interesting guy, as close as I could get to an intellectual in my neighborhood, he read books, he saw plays.” Dominic was, along with one other pal, someone with whom the young Scorsese felt comfortable revealing his pencil-and-watercolor storyboards, the frame-by-frame blueprints of movies he imagined one day making. He’d begun drawing them at around age ten and stopped at fourteen—actually, stopped only temporarily, to be resumed when he arrived at film school at New York University—having completed his pièce de résistance, “The Eternal City,” a seventy-five-millimetre saga set in ancient Rome, broken down into closeups, wide shots, medium shots, moving shots. As a full-grown professional, Scorsese laid out storyboards that were legendary for their specificity, their evidence of his matchless ability to visualize and map a movie in his head, along with soundtrack music, before he shot a single frame. Was it a coincidence that the storyboards for “Raging Bull” were the most elaborate he ever did? The fight scenes were diagrammed punch by punch, angle by angle. The unforgettable footage of the masochistic La Motta/De Niro’s face exploding in his climactic third fight against Sugar Ray Robinson was conceived and laid out shot by shot to mirror the shower scene in “Psycho.” . . . Cutty Sark? I would go on, except that with Scorsese you never really get to the bottom of this stuff.
The late movie critic Gene Siskel once asked Scorsese what he regarded as the most emblematic image in his body of work. Scorsese’s answer was the title sequence of “Raging Bull.” It’s a slow-motion wide shot, its foreground a frame within the frame, delineated by the three ropes of a boxing ring. In the middle distance, the focal point, a robed, hooded figure inside the ring—La Motta, but we don’t yet know that—shadowboxes. The background is bathed in fog. What I’d remembered about this tableau was its depiction of a lone warrior who must battle to survive, but when I looked at it again recently I decided I’d misremembered and misinterpreted it. I’d forgotten a handful of silhouetted background figures, barely discernible in the fog. And the fighter in the ring seemed no longer a ponderous metaphor but simply a man simultaneously at work and at play, moving air molecules with his arms and legs—something a newborn baby does just as instinctively and effectively. Was he a stand-in for Scorsese? Sure, to a degree. I also think Scorsese was one of the adumbrated shapes in the background—a camera flash goes off a couple of times—a witness, neither more nor less guilty than the dancing shadowboxer.
Two consecutive evenings a while back, Scorsese and I met at his home—in a warmly furnished parlor-floor living room, surrounded by neatly ordered bookshelves and framed posters of Jean Renoir’s “Grand Illusion” (the only other significant wall hanging being a sixteenth-century crucifix)—where we covered, among other diverting topics, anger, guilt, pain, suffering, and violence. Our second conversation preceded dinner with Helen Morris, a fine-boned blond woman with finishing-school manners and Old New York bloodlines. She and Scorsese met in 1995, when she was an editor at Random House and was working on the second volume of Michael Powell’s memoirs. Four years ago, they started living together, and last summer they married. Their infant daughter, Francesca, escorted by a nanny, made a couple of appearances while we talked, and Helen’s deaf but excitable West Highland White terrier, Silas, also dropped by.
The joys of new fatherhood and domestic tranquillity notwithstanding, Scorsese had had, by his reckoning, “a rough fall.” In late October, “Bringing Out the Dead” opened, accompanied by mixed but generally positive reviews. However, its grosses the first four weeks totalled only sixteen million dollars; by Thanksgiving it was fading fast; and by the time the Christmas-holiday movies turned up at the cineplexes it had all but disappeared. Like “Kundun,” his previous and more lavishly praised endeavor, it never really found an audience. Inevitably, this box-office disappointment did nothing to leaven the atmosphere during discussions with the studios that had provisionally agreed to finance his next film, “Gangs of New York.” The budget for “Gangs”—eighty-three and a half million dollars—would make it his most expensive picture. News items in the trade papers announced that Disney and Miramax would put up the money, Leonardo DiCaprio would star, and production would start in mid-winter. During 1999, Scorsese and Jay Cocks wrote and revised nine drafts of the screenplay. Each time they were done, they assumed they’d solved whatever problems had nagged them. But as the New Year arrived nothing was firmly resolved, including the question of whether the movie would get made.
To bring “Gangs of New York” to the screen would fulfill a vision of the city Scorsese had ruminated upon since childhood. On Prince Street, between Mott and Mulberry, next to Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the parish where he attended parochial school and served as an altar boy, stood a cemetery whose aged stones bore mainly Anglo, rather than familiar Italian, surnames. Who were these people? What had this corner of the world looked and sounded and smelled like when they were its inhabitants? Scorsese had absorbed fragments of century-and-a-half-old oral history—suggestive accounts of harrowing turf battles between mobs of nativist Protestants and recent-immigrant Irish Catholics—and in 1970 he happened upon the Herbert Asbury book, which gave a context to these inchoate emanations of the old neighborhood. He and Cocks wrote their first draft of “Gangs of New York” in 1976, and though the project lay dormant for more than two decades, it has withstood the vicissitudes of Scorsese’s career and refused to die. What’s in it, ultimately, for the auteur? Nothing more, really, than a chance to portray a city that millions of people think they know in a manner that no one has previously imagined imagining.
“If I get to make ‘Gangs of New York,’ ” he said, “I will have gotten to make every picture that I really, really wanted to make. If I don’t get to make it, I’ll move on to something else.”
But not so fast . . .
“Once I know that we’re moving forward with ‘Gangs,’ there are certain things I have to come to grips with in the script. The violence is the main thing. The violence is tricky, but that’s the way those characters behaved. I have to figure out how to shoot it. At the end, when everyone’s covered in dust and ashes, that’s got to be very stylized.”
Stylized violence. I thought, Well, Father Principe would be pleased. Father Principe was the priest from Old St. Pat’s who, when asked what he thought of his former acolyte’s interpretation of redemptive blood sacrifice—exemplified by the famous shootout at the end of “Taxi Driver”—said, “Too much Good Friday and not enough Easter Sunday.”
When the words “Scorsese” and “violence” are linked in my mind, I advert to the scene in “Casino” where a psychopathic gangster named Nicky Santoro, played to the hilt by Joe Pesci, puts a guy’s head in a vise after torturing him for two days because he refuses to give up some information. Before tightening the vise and slitting the victim’s throat, he implores him, “Please don’t make me do this!” By which we’re led to understand that Nicky’s just a working guy trying to keep his own head out of the vise. Earlier, we’ve seen Nicky the loving father cooking breakfast for his young son in his suburban kitchen. Later, we see him and his brother get beaten bloody with baseball bats and buried alive in the desert.
“I’m not interested in violence that way anymore,” Scorsese said, convincingly. “A lot of these guys”—in “Gangs of New York”—“don’t even have guns, they use bats. Well, I did that in ‘Casino.’ I don’t want to do violence like that again. I can’t even watch that scene. It’s upsetting, because I like those characters. And as far as the head in the vise is concerned—I should have played the whole thing on Joe’s face and the other actors’ faces but never shown the bulging eye in the vise. It has to do with the humanity of it. What it did to them mattered as much as what it did to the guy whose head was in the vise. If you can’t show the humanity—let’s say, the battle scene at the beginning of ‘Gangs of New York’—then you have to find a way to do the violence in a non-graphic way, so that it doesn’t become literally just scene after scene of people smashing each other across the head. Because that’s what they did. Fighting was a pastime. What you have to understand about these gangs is that they relate directly to Anglo-Saxon tribes and Irish Celtic tribes. The fact that one is Protestant and the other’s Catholic, that’s just a place you come from. You’re not arguing over the tenets of religion. These were warriors, and their gods were war gods. I’m dealing with making a film about barbarians. If I were younger, there’s no doubt that I’d be out there to shock. Here I don’t necessarily want to portray violence anymore in such a way that you lose half your audience halfway into the picture. Why should I?”
Implicit in all this is the question that “Gangs of New York,” like every new venture, evokes for Scorsese: How do I muster whatever it takes to keep making these movies, telling these stories, when the process itself is steeped in pain and suffering?
“It comes out of a very Catholic point of view,” he said. “I think it’s very delicate. People say, ‘What do you have to complain about? You make these movies, you do pretty much what you want.’ And I think the problem is that talking about quote suffering unquote makes me sound like someone who takes himself way too seriously. But there’s no other way I know to do the work. On a personal level, things are O.K. But the work alone is extremely painful. On the set, I’ll look like I’m having a great time, but in the trailer, in the preproduction phase, in the editing room, it’s painful to pull it all together. Maybe ‘suffering’ is a bad word—but I don’t really celebrate anything. I stopped, like, in the mid-seventies, celebrating. . . . ‘GoodFellas’ felt good because a lot of people liked it, but just because a lot of people liked it doesn’t mean it’s really a good picture. And that’s the other issue: How do I feel about myself and my own work ultimately? Something I’ll probably never know is whether a picture’s really good or not. I only know if it’s right. In other words, I know that what I did was the way it should have been done.”
“Why isn’t ‘right’ synonymous with ‘good’?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Then what do you mean by ‘good’?”
“I don’t know.” A three-beat pause. “O.K. Will it communicate to other people? Will it communicate to other people in the future, when the culture’s changed? Will it speak to a different culture?”
So it wasn’t very complicated. Scorsese merely desired what any artist desires: universal recognition and immortality.
On another occasion, Helen Morris said, “In the Catholic catechism there are all these absolute ‘no’s. Once you see how the world works, you get over these things. Marty never really has. You think of him as a child looking out the window and seeing people behaving badly. He could recognize it as a normal human instinct, but he understood that they have to get punished. He developed a sympathy for people doing bad things, studied the gangsters in the neighborhood, some of whom were good people. That dichotomy between Joe Pesci’s character in ‘Casino’ being very good to his children and being a horrible person otherwise—guilt and sin and what you can do and can’t do—it always comes down to the fact that you’re going to get punished.”
One snowy day not long ago, I got a call from Scorsese’s assistant Gretchen Campbell, telling me that she was faxing something he thought I should read. A few minutes later, it came chugging out of my machine, a fourteen-page Introduction to the Loeb edition of Philostratus’ “The Life of Apollonius of Tyana.” I read the text, which said, among other things, that according to popular legend when Apollonius, a holy man and miracle worker of some sort who was born around the beginning of the Christian era, died he ascended bodily to Heaven. This was good to know, but why had Scorsese sent it?
“You and I had that conversation a while back about Simon the Magician and Apollonius of Tyana,” he said the next time we spoke, by phone. “And I told you Simon the Magician was thought to have raised the dead twice, and that he disappeared in the presence of the emperor. Anyway, I recently saw a couple of television documentaries on the ancient world, and they sent me back to Philostratus. I first read Philostratus in 1983 or 1984, when I was looking at background material for ‘The Last Temptation of Christ,’ because I was interested in anything that discussed the pagans’ answer to Jesus. And when I picked it up again the other day I realized I’d given you some wrong information.
“Simon the Magician comes out of the New Testament. In the Book of Acts, there’s a confrontation between Simon and one of the Apostles; there were often these challenges between magicians and Apostles. Simon could have been a composite of different magicians of the period. Apollonius also could have been a composite figure. Apollonius appeared in front of one of the emperors, but he didn’t disappear. And it wasn’t Simon who disappeared either.
“I’m interested in the ancient world because of the nature of what they thought. It’s a hundred and eighty degrees from the world I know, which is Christianity. It’s the closest you can get to, I guess—this will sound funny—but it’s the closest you can get to what we would think of as extraterrestrials. Pre-Christian. I guess ‘Alien’ depicts that. Or, a better example, the closest we’ve come to the alien persona on film is Fellini’s ‘Satyricon,’ which depicts a sense of a world gone awry, crazy, a world in which you can be a victim any second, a dangerous place.”
“Where are you now,” I asked. “At home or the office?”
“I’m at home. I’m sitting up here in the den on the fourth floor, with two stacks of books on the ancient world. There are the main texts, and then there are the companion explanatory texts. The thing I really want to do these days is read Gibbon. But I don’t have enough time. I get to look at these Roman and Greek classics—I try to find the time at least once a week. What have I been reading lately? Well, Philostratus. I’m very excited by that stuff. That’s why I sent it to you. I couldn’t rest until I got the confusion cleared up.” ♦