Martin Scorsese: Interviews, Revised and Updated

Martin Scorsese and the American Underground

Doris Freedman / 1970

From Artists in the City, WNYC, July 17, 1970. Courtesy NYC Municipal Archives.

Reprinted by permission.

Welcome to Artists in the City, presented each Sunday afternoon at 4:30. The series is designed to introduce you to some of the professional artists who are doing some exciting works in the communities and neighborhoods of New York. Here now is our moderator, Mrs. Doris Freedman.

Doris Freedman: Thank you. In the past weeks, my guests have been artists who have moved out of galleries, concert halls, theaters, and museums to share the excitement of their work with a larger audience. And in many cases, to involve people in creating works of art of their own. These artists have left their signatures all over our city, in the form of sculpture in the park, in open spaces, large wall murals painted on the sides of buildings, or in a storefront workshop. Today, I’m very pleased to have as my guest, Mr. Martin Scorsese, who is involved with perhaps the most contemporary and exciting art medium of our day—filmmaking.

Martin is currently working with the city’s department of cultural affairs, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and Signet Productions in bringing, I think, our most exciting summer program to the citizens of our city, Movies in the Park.

First, let me tell you a bit about my guest. He is graduated from NYU in 1965. In 1964 his film It’s Not Just You, Murray won about almost every outstanding student film award, including the National Student Association citation, first prize at the Screen Producers Guild, and several awards abroad.

His short films have been shown at several New York Film Festivals. He was supervising editor and assistant director of Woodstock, that quite popular film of today, and he has been teaching filmmaking at NYU since 1968. At the moment he is working on a film about the student strike at NYU. Welcome, Marty.

I’m sorry those introductions take long because I have many questions to ask you. And perhaps the first is, can you tell us a little bit about Movies in the Park? Martin Scorsese: Well, Movies in the Park. Essentially, the program was designed to bring to the people of the city somewhat of a showcase for young filmmakers in the city, if possible. And of course again to entertain the people on a hot summer night, you know, just to sit there in the grass, that sort of thing, and watch films. With the backdrop of the city and the moon and the trees. It looks very nice.

Primarily the programs that we’ve been setting up have been films by filmmakers who are coming out of the universities, from the city, and filmmakers who have been literally just making films on their own in the streets, and this sort of thing. And older people, in the sense of, I think they’re older people. [laughs] People who have been working professionally but are based in New York. That sort of thing.

DF: Marty, when we talk about, and I think it’s even a misnomer to say just young filmmakers, because as you’ve said, older people, and I have a feeling for you that means the thirty-year-olds, which puts me in some aging category.

MS: I’m getting there, so . . .

DF: But I think it’s this idea that it’s no longer the underground film.

MS: No.

DF: What is the kind of film? It’s not a commercial film. We don’t see these films in our commercial houses. How do we categorize, if we do at all, what these films are? What are they about? What is the impetus to involve a creative student who could have perhaps gone into painting or commercial art, or some other of the creative fields? What is this attraction—I know I’m asking a lot of questions at once, but it’s sort of flooding in. My concern is twofold really. What is the attraction to a young creative person today to filmmaking? And second, what actually are these films about and where do you think it’s all going?

MS: Well, I’ll try to start talking about that. For example, I think that there is a great deal more people involved in this right now mainly because of 1: the energy that’s around it. I think we’re in such frustrating times that people can’t find any other immediate means of expression. Immediate means of expression meaning you can send it to a laboratory and get it back like magic within five hours if you’re lucky, or if you paid them well enough. And suddenly you start making a film and get it shown even if you have to show it in a loft to your friends or your family. It’s an immediate means of expression. And it’s almost like therapy. People are doing it. Kids are doing it. There’s this Timmy Page film we showed that he made at ten or twelve years old as a filmmaker. Not only this, but the accessibility of equipment and the new developments in equipment which have really started developing since the late fifties and which helped the French New Wave get started in France in the late fifties, ’58, ’59, when the original critics from Cahiers du Cinema, that’s Godard and Truffaut, and Chabrol and all those people. Eric Rohmer, whose only American success now is My Night at Maud’s, but he’s been making films for like ten years you see. And all these people got started with the destruction of old cinematic techniques. The conscious destruction, and yet a reverence for it and a respect for it, you see. That’s the beauty about it.

DF: In other words the new technology—

MS: The new technology’s important, sure. You can pick up a camera and suddenly you start shooting. For example, this afternoon, one of my ex-students has decided to shoot a film, mainly because he has access to equipment. A friend of his said, I have this Éclair, which is a very light camera. French camera. Shoots synchronous sound. Noiselessly, we hope. Most of the time, if the camera isn’t getting old. Plus editing equipment. Plus footage. He’s been trying to make a film for a year with Pierre Clemente in Paris, this sort of thing. And now he’s back in New York and he’s decided, well, I might as well start shooting. And so he decided to shoot. We have no script, we have nothing, but we’ll go this afternoon and we’ll just start.

DF: I was just about to say to you, now what is this no script? Do you just literally go out—

MS: Me? I don’t. He will, and I have faith in him because I’ve seen him work that way.

DF: So then what you’re really saying it’s the eye that’s going to captivate.

MS: Mm hmm. The vision. The vision of what he puts on the film—meaning the actual picture within the frame and what he puts in the film.

DF: Which is, I imagine the way a painter would in terms of his aesthetic.

MS: Exactly.

DF: But it’s interesting to hear you say that because usually when you think of films you hear, Oh someone’s wrote a book and now we’re going to make a film of it. It was the thought process that took place first, the writing down, the idea, and then the translation into a visual. Now you’re saying something very interesting—

MS: This is where it splits, you see, because the traditional film has more or less been based on literary foundation. For example, the first films, very many of the first films were to be respectable. I believe Lasky’s company had Famous Players or Famous Players Company, to have Eugene O’Neill’s father doing The Count of Monte Cristo on film, with the camera static, and Sarah Bernhardt doing something else. Joan of Arc and something, etcetera. On camera. Static. Because it gave film, which was a phoney art a respectability to the theater, which was an art form, you see? And theater, meaning literary plays, Shakespeare and this business. That still exists. It’s very, very strong. It’s still a very good point. And it’s also one of the drawbacks of filmmaking today and the industry because the fallacy exists that if a fella writes three pages, and he’s going to write a novel, and he gives you a three page synopsis you can buy that novel for a hundred thousand, if you’re lucky. Maybe less. Or even more. A novel’s being bought for a million right now. And that’s going to guarantee a great film, because it’s going to have a great—you do have a certain amount of publicity beforehand, this sort of thing. And major studios still go along with that. And even to a certain extent, I read a novel and I wish I could buy it. And I find out how much it is—$75,000—I can’t afford it at the moment. [laughs]

And on the other hand the underground, or what you call the underground now—I never really felt that it should have been called the underground, it’s just a publicity term. These were people who started to, who were more or less fed up with the old ways, the traditional ways of doing film, and felt a need for expression. People who, mainly many of them were in other fields of art. Len Lye, and people like this, who were sculptors or painters. And they started picking up the camera and playing around with what they can do, and what they could see. Like Ed Emshwiller shoots as if the camera is his eye. He literally goes over objects as if he’s looking at it. It’s a very, very difficult thing to do. He’s a marvelous cameraman, craftsman. This underground came into being—the real underground in the sense that the New American Cinema they coined the phrase and had some sort of publicity organization that people can refer to, you know. Actually it was a group of filmmakers and friends, people who were helping each other out and giving each other equipment and working together. This came also into existence in a way, really came into bloom, around the late fifties, early sixties, with Shirley Clarke. Around the same time the French started to move. And lately, now, there have been so many people involved with it that the old grand old masters of the underground, that’s Emshwiller and Shirley Clarke, and people of that nature—and even Kenneth Anger on the West Coast, there’s a whole other West Coast school now. They still continue hopefully making their films, whether they still have great difficulty getting backing, but the kids coming out of the universities, the kids, literally coming out of the streets, you know, just picking up a camera—there’s more accessibility now than there was ten years ago, so you have more people now. And therefore if you can’t show it at the Cinematheque, for the traditional underground you can show it at the Millennium Film workshop, or you can show it downtown at somebody else’s loft, or you can show it at a university, you see? And you can enter it into any festival you can, you know, as long as you have the entrance fee.

DF: Are these films the seeds of what we see in the so-called Art Cinema theaters? In other words, what has become the commercial aspect of it has reached the film houses within cities throughout the country, is what is called the art film. I imagine that has stemmed from this. I don’t know if there’s a relationship or not. I’m not sure what we mean by that term. I think when we started to hear it, or we’d hear about a new film that was breaking traditional barriers, we were seeing the camera used much more artistically or aesthetically. And I have a feeling this is the excitement that maybe attracted a lot of other creative people to this particular media, because it does open up every possibility for sound, for sight, for form. What about the technique of teaching filmmaking? Is there such a thing that can actually be taught?

MS: Well, I teach down at NYU and I use the term teaching loosely because one thing, when I was a student there, one thing that I did not like was sitting and listening to lectures about filmmaking. There’s no such thing as a lecture on filmmaking. You just can’t. The only lecture on filmmaking you can do is to pick up a camera and go out yourself with somebody who knows more than you that can literally guide you. So the kind of teaching I prefer is, more or less, on a production house scale. In other words, I come into a class and I have my students and they submit scripts. And I read the scripts aloud, and we discuss the script and what’s wrong with it or what’s good with it, or what can be changed. And the whole class works on the revisions or suggestions for the scriptwriter. And he comes back with another revision. And a week later another revision. Some people don’t come back with a revision, and they stay in the class for the rest of the year, and they work on other peoples’ films. That’s the way they are. Some people come back with a completely different script. Some people come back with revisions for three months, and it’s just as bad as when they started, but they have guts, so we have to make the movie, you know? That’s all I can say. And it is difficult at times because out of a class of forty-two people, you have to select six directors or seven directors, and you have to give them a certain amount of film each, and a certain piece of equipment. And this sort of thing. And of course enrollment has tripled since I was a student, and the amount of equipment that’s available at New York University has not really caught up with the amount of enrollment. And the last student strike has caused a great deal of difficulty because a lot of the equipment was stolen or lost or broken. But what happens during the class, what happens during the teaching session, is that I really try to run it like a professional outfit, as if I were a producer, and a filmmaker comes over to me and says, Alright, I have to make this film. And I say, Alright, I’ll produce it for you. And I’ll make sure that when you have the revisions, I’ll work on the script with you, and also work on casting with you, and also work on, when I see our rushes, I like to see our rushes completely, and I like to see exactly what we’re doing. I never go down to where they’re shooting. I never stand with them that closely, but the actual supervision I do really comes into play in the editing, when they get their film.

DF: Which I understand is a major part of filmmaking, the editing.

MS: Oh yes.

DF: What happens, let’s say the whole process has been completed, what then happens to the film? Supposing you find something, a beautiful creative vision has just taken place?

MS: This is the biggest problem in a way. Many kids when they start making their first films, they feel that, under the bad production conditions that they’re working, many insane things have happened. Things disappear, people never show up because they’re not paying their actors, their cameraman decides to quit school and never comes back, and this sort of thing. They think these are all great horror stories. But they don’t know that by the time they finish, if their film is any good, their troubles are only beginning. Because the writing of a script is one problem, the production is another problem, the editing is another problem, and the post-editing, that is the sending it to a lab and making sure the prints are correct is another problem because you begin dealing with more and more people as you go along. First it starts with you in your own head. Then you begin dealing with more and more and more people. And the more people you deal with, the more chance there is for messing up, and the more chance there is for you getting treated badly, in a way. And finally what happens is that the biggest problem is getting your film shown, and getting it appreciated. And many of these films are very bad. For example, when I was a student there would be seven or eight films made a year at the university, and two or three would really come out and win awards and maybe even get commercial release, commercial distribution in theaters. Now, last year, there were fifty. In the same rooms, the same rooms that I worked in.

DF: Interesting, Marty. I want to interrupt, because in a way there are some contradictions here. You mentioned that the student starts with a script, and yet we said we’re getting away from that literary interpretation. I think you mean something different than taking the novel or taking something written and just making it a visual experience. Certainly, educationally, we know enormous values in all of this for teaching. I wonder in the future if young people even will be reading, if they won’t be using their eye, the whole fluent theory, I think is you know, unbelievable when you get into it. But there is always a concept, I imagine. You talk about this young filmmaker that this afternoon is just going to take the equipment and go out and film. I assume this can only happen after you’ve made a number of films.

MS: Oh sure.

DF: That the concept develops in the process of the filming. But that is, in a way, as I say, a bit of a contradiction. And also you mentioned the instantaneous results, as you described the long process, and then there are some complexities I’m sure in developing and editing. It’s not quite so instantaneous. But perhaps it’s the very process that is going on and the result becomes instantaneous. I don’t know if it’s different from painting.

MS: Sure, some of the best decisions are made under incredible pressure. Because the laboratory is closing in five minutes. Do you want this process to push it one stop so that we get more grain? Or do we just let it go and get it out underexposed or what have you? And finally you decide. Or your titles are being messed up by the lab and you have to go with a certain kind of title because you can’t get—so many, many things in filmmaking, of this nature, are done like that. Decisions are made on that basis. But the literary point is another thing altogether. When they come in with a script, when I say a script, some people come in with, in a way, a literary script, in that, I mean they have an idea, they follow it through, they have dialogue, they have characters, they have fairly full-drawn characters, and they present it to me in that fashion. And they go ahead and make a film pretty much according to that script. And they have enough flexibility to change as they go along, if the conditions warrant it. However, many other people come in, like this fellow this afternoon. And he doesn’t have a script, he tells me an idea. And I say, well, just write it down because I want to see, I want to understand it. Some people I do, some people I don’t. Some people I know, and I trust them. I know the kind of film they make, and they go out and do it. But if they do write it down, even these people who don’t go according to the traditional literary standards, they do write it down, maybe two pages. And, it’s an idea. And it has a little bit about a girl, or a character, or what have you, and maybe a couple of things that the person is going to do in the course of the film. And then suddenly the rushes start coming in, and the movie is alive, you know, it’s really there because it’s coming from the person, it’s coming from him, and you know he can do it, you see? For example, this fellow again this afternoon. Last year, he didn’t do a film all year. He just kept talking to me. And yet, if a person doesn’t do a film, or just comes to class, talks, maybe doesn’t do anything, I normally discount it. I don’t have much faith in the person. But there was something about this guy. So, next thing I know, two weeks until the end of the class, he comes in with a film he shot in four hours. And it’s marvelous, one of the best films made during the year. The movement, the characters and people. A film of which he is now ashamed. He won’t show it, because his head is a little different now, he says.

But it was a gestation period, I guess, that went on and the creative energy within him, then put on film. Well, you know it is, it’s without question, it’s the communication media of today, it’s the artistic media of today, it’s—the potential is endless. And I think, for every artist. And I have, as you mentioned, the painters, the sculptors. The actors who are turning filmmaker. I imagine it’s because of the great variety and range of things that can be done with film. The abstract film, which sometimes is purely color and form and has no particular theme in terms of literary, it’s just a visual experience. I think our audience will understand more about what we’re talking about if they get to the parks and find themselves sitting on the lawn and watching some of these really remarkable films that are being turned out. And for our audience’s information, if you call. . . .

DF: And I hope all of our audience will get to the parks. The series is free. And I know, Marty, you’ve viewed how many films?

MS: It’s about three hundred and fifty.

DF: And the end result is?

MS: Maybe twenty films, or nineteen films that we’ve considered. And there are still more films coming in.

DF: Well, it is, and I think all New Yorkers should get to our parks. See what our young filmmakers are saying. I was very pleased with the first program because of the variety. There was everything in it—the abstract, purely visual, the animation, which we didn’t get a chance to talk about, which always fascinated me. And then just the social comments that were made. It’s a very remarkable media to get across in a very succinct way exactly the feelings of people in terms of their society. And I remember one film made by a black filmmaker, I believe, called Biafra, that sent chills down my spine when I saw it. It was a vision, it was a visionary thing, and yet the impact of the thought behind it really did leave you a little awestruck. So I think what you’re doing, Marty, is where it’s at today, in the creative media. And I’m delighted you were able to join us this Sunday afternoon and give our listening audience a little more information about the so-called underground films, or the newest creative media of our time. And Martin Scorsese, I am delighted that you are with us.

MS: Thank you.

Dialogue on Film: Martin Scorsese

The American Film Institute / 1975

From a Harold Lloyd Master Seminar with Martin Scorsese, held on February 12, 1975.

©1975 American Film Institute. Reprinted by permission.

James Powers: Okay, ladies and gentlemen, in violation of all fire laws, I welcome you to this crowded seminar. You’ve just finished seeing Mr. Scorsese’s work and I won’t intrude myself any further between you and him. Questions anybody?

Question: Why did you choose to move the camera so much in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore?

Martin Scorsese: There are a lot of reasons for that. First, and it’s really an intellectual reason I’m giving you now—it doesn’t mean anything to you, watching the picture, it’s just something for me, that’s all. The intellectual reason is that I was trying to capture a number of characters who were really very much in a state of confusion and never really settling. So the camera is always kind of shifting around, moving around, slightly sliding. Whenever it seems to stop, it starts all over on the other side again. When it does stop, they are usually in scenes of stability, like in the bathroom scene between Ellen Burstyn and Diane Ladd. And in the scene where she has just made love to Kris Kristofferson—the two of them talking—it’s basically a medium shot on her with Kris in the frame, a medium shot of her with Kris in the foreground, or a medium shot of him with her in the foreground, so the two are together in the frame. The camera only moves twice in that scene—when she gets up to demonstrate what she used to do as a kid, the camera moves this way [motioning] and when she comes back to sit on his lap, the camera moves in, just the way she’s moving in, on him.

Q: In other words, you move the camera essentially because the character moves the camera?

MS: Oh, no, no. It has nothing to do—sometimes the camera moves because the person moves, so you move it. But other than that, in this case, the camera moved when she got up to move. I could have just panned but it was an actual track. It has a different meaning for me. The other thing is I like a moving camera.

Q: You didn’t move the camera much in The Big Shave either. Why was that?

MS: The Big Shave—you couldn’t move too much in that room. That was all clips like a TV commercial. In Mean Streets, it was the same thing, the guys talking at the table, the sliding, sinister feeling to it. In Boxcar Bertha, when Barry Primus was trying to pull a fast one with the cards so he’s kind of smiling sleazily, the camera’s kind of sleazy, sliding against the edge of the table. That’s where it really started, in Boxcar. What I was looking for was to give a kind of psychologically unstable feeling to the audience with those characters at those moments. You just don’t feel quite settled watching those scenes. That sequence in Alice where Ben breaks into the room—now, if you notice, that sequence begins with Alice talking to her young boy, Tommy, and he says, Are you coming home late again tonight? That scene could have been shot simple two-shot, close-up to close-up, but I did it hand-held and went around this way, and in that sense it was a premonition of violence because the camera is kind of violent, seemingly for no reason. But if you go back and look at it—and the whole picture is like that—I mean, we did it that way. Sometimes I was in rooms where I couldn’t avoid it; I had to use a hand-held camera. The room was the size of this couch so I had to move the camera by hand, whereas many times I had planned it to be moved by dolly. Like in the scene in Alice where they go pick up the kids in the police station, the whole thing was laid out in dolly, all in one take. It is in one take now, only it’s hand-held. People think I did it hand-held to give it documentary, quote, unquote, feeling, the old phony black-and-white realism, because in the late forties, it was all grainy black-and-white and it gave you the impression of something being realistic. But in this case that was definitely not the reason. The reason was because I had a welfare worker and I had to get rid of the kid. We couldn’t dolly to the point where now we get the measurements here, focus, now you move over here, get the measurements here, they have to hit each mark. This way, we did it hand-held with a 16mm lens on an Arri BL and everything was in focus and I could shoot the scene fast and get the hell out of there. That’s a pain in the neck. I would have liked to have done it with a dolly. This scene was all laid out nicely.

Q: Did you rehearse Alice? How did you rehearse it?

MS: Alice was rehearsed. Alice has more rehearsal and improvisation than Mean Streets had. The reason was—Ellen asked me to do the picture for her. She got the script through David Susskind and Francis Coppola told her to, you know, she was looking for young filmmakers and Francis said, "Take a look at Mean Streets." Mean Streets hadn’t opened yet and Warner Bros. had just bought it. She looked at it and liked it. Sandy Weintraub read the script for me and she said, This is one of the few scripts that have any interesting characters in them so you’d better take a look at it. Because we were getting hit with scripts that dealt with similar worlds to Mean Streets. The reason I’m going all the way back is because it’s very complicated—you can’t just say how much rehearsal we had on that picture because it’s really a crazy thing. Anyway, the point is that what happened with Alice was that we started working when I met Ellen. I wanted to see if Ellen had the same ideas I had about the script. And she did and I had similar ideas to what she had. John Calley wanted us to, you know—Ellen was an Academy Award nominee for The Exorcist and Mean Streets was going to open. They had no idea how good or bad it was going to do financially but we got incredible reviews at the time. So they said, Let’s put the two of them together and if they agree on certain things, fine. And that’s what happened. We agreed to do that kind of a film. You could call it, I don’t know what. It’s a picture about emotions and feelings and relationships and people in chaos. Which is something very personal to me and to Ellen at the time. We felt like charting all that and showing the differences and showing people making terrible mistakes ruining their lives and then realizing it and trying to push back when everything is crumbling—without getting into soap opera. We opened ourselves up to a lot of