Conversations with Scorsese (20 page)

That was on Mulberry Street. And we just couldn’t find a hallway like that, so we shot that climactic scene the fourth day into shooting. And then when we got to L.A., the first night we shot in this Skid Row area, Wall Street, downtown L.A. And we shot the way Corman had me do
Boxcar Bertha,
which is about trains.

RS:
Tell me about that.

MS:
Well, a train is one of the hardest things to shoot, because when you do a second take, you’ve got to wait for the train to come back.

So after Corman saw I had all my drawings worked out, he said, “You did all this? You’ll be fine.” Then he said, “For the first four days, you do all the train scenes.” I said, “The first four days?” He goes, “Yeah. Get the worst over with first.” And he was totally right.

But on
Mean Streets
the six days and nights in New York were like a student film. I mean, for example, the scene in the car on 8th Street, with De Niro and Keitel and the gay guys in the car, some of the coverage of De Niro was lost because the kids just forgot to bring it to the lab.

Anyway, when we got back to L.A. the night of my thirtieth birthday, November 17, 1972,
Paul Rapp decided to do the car crash, which comes at the end of the picture, to do the hardest part first. And that’s what we did.

RS:
The
music in
Mean Streets
strikes me as predictive of your use of it in many of your other movies—I’m talking about found music, largely about pop music.

MS:
Pop music, some Italian folk songs, and some opera. The music was very important in
Mean Streets.
And also the cutting with music. It was all designed.

This was the first time, I think, that music was used this way. I had no choice. I didn’t see it and I didn’t hear it any other way. The person who gave me the validation to do it was, really,
Stanley Kubrick, because of his
use of music in
2001.

RS:
You’ve mentioned Harvey Keitel’s character in
Knocking
feeding into his character in
Mean Streets.
And, of course, there’s De Niro, since this was your first picture with him.

MS:
I met De Niro through
Brian De Palma.

RS:
He’d done a picture with Brian.

MS:
Hi, Mom!,
yeah. And Jay Cocks. There was a Christmas dinner at Jay’s apartment, a walk-up in Manhattan. And Brian thought that De Niro should meet me, because of
Who’s That Knocking.
Brian was a big supporter of that film.

RS:
I’ve told you, I like it a lot, too.

MS:
I know. I’m sorry, I’m embarrassed because I know now—I knew after
Mean Streets—
what I could’ve done better in that film. But in any event, they said I should meet Bob, and Bob should see my film. He was getting some notices at the time. He was in plays. And after dinner, we—

RS:
You know, I really first noticed him in that baseball movie,
Bang the Drum Slowly.

MS:
We’re getting to that, yeah. I think this was 1972.

RS:
He was wonderful in that.

MS:
So he was sitting there after dinner, and he looks over at me, and quietly—he was always very quiet—he said, “I know you. I know who you used to be with.” And he mentioned certain names—Joey, and another guy named Curty, and a couple of other guys. I asked, “How do you know that?” And it turns out that when he was sixteen years old, he used to be with a group of young guys from Grand Street, or Hester Street. We didn’t necessarily frequent each other’s bars or
hangouts or whatever. In fact, there was always a little bit of frisson with these guys. But he always stood out in our heads. I was sixteen years old, too. He was always the nicest one, the sweetest one. Not that he said much, but he was always with them and he was always a nice kid. He looked different, of course, by the time he did
Hi, Mom!
So then, after that, he got to see
Who’s That Knocking.
We had a screening for him at
William Morris Agency. Then he called me, and he told me that he really liked it because it was accurate about the people he knew when he was growing up in that area. It wasn’t until the 1970s, or maybe even after doing
Raging Bull,
that I realized that his father was a fine artist. I had no idea of his background, none.

And so I’m editing
Unholy Rollers
for
Roger Corman. And I’m talking to Bob, who’s in Florida doing
Bang the Drum Slowly.
And I was trying to line him up for the part of Johnny Boy [the film’s antihero-victim] in
Mean Streets.
And actually Bob wanted to do the other part. And I kept telling him, “No, no, you’re perfect for Johnny Boy.” And he kept saying, “Oh, really. Maybe I should really do the other part. I don’t know.” I’ll never forget talking to him when he was on location shooting
Bang the Drum Slowly.
And, sure enough, we finally got to make
Mean Streets.
The title comes from the
Raymond Chandler quote, which Jay Cocks suggested. Both pictures came out at the same time.

RS:
I’d forgotten that.

MS:
I think
Bang the Drum Slowly
came out about a month or two before. By the time we did
Taxi Driver,
we were very close. He said less than, say, Harvey and me—we would talk for hours. But he knew specifically everything that I knew when I was growing up. And so to this day, it’s beyond finishing each other’s sentences. It’s like, we just look at each other, and shake our heads sometimes and move on.

And yet he could be extremely articulate about other things. So it became the three of us—Harvey, Bob, and me—up through ’76, ’77. We were almost the same person.

RS:
No rivalries, no jealousies?

MS:
As I said, I was writing
Mean Streets
for Harvey. And he was wonderfully patient about the project.

I had to do some shooting of the
San Gennaro festival, which took place three days before the main shoot of
Mean Streets
started. The heads of the festival had my father pay a certain amount of money to them. My father was furious. He knew it wasn’t necessarily the San Gennaro Society that would get it.

At the same time, there was a possibility that a big actor at the time was going
to play the part. He took us right to the wire. Harvey understood that if this actor would agree to be in it, that if I’d gotten a name of that level, it would have probably guaranteed distribution of the picture. Harvey was willing to take another part in the movie.

The other actor was a very nice guy, and he wanted to be in it, to help us. But he just couldn’t give us an answer, and we had to start shooting. So I made a call and he gave a definite no. I said to Harvey, who was waiting on the set for the phone call to be finished, “Here’s your coat,” and bang, he walked out onto the street and started filming.

Marty directs Harvey Keitel and onetime swashbuckler
Cesare Danova, playing an avuncular mafioso, in
Mean Streets.

RS:
Wow.

MS:
He was that loyal.

RS:
That’s a touching story.

MS:
Yeah. He was just waiting, and we were on a roof. I said, “Harvey, here’s your coat. Go down. Let’s follow him in the street, in the festival.”

RS:
I have to tell you: Of all your movies
Mean Streets
remains the hardest one for me to come to grips with.

MS:
It’s an aggressive film. I didn’t think anybody was really going to see the film.
Jonathan Taplin produced it. A young man named
E. Lee Perry gave us the money, and I just thought it was going to be a film that ultimately might be on a shelf. But we thought it was a pretty accurate portrayal of that way of life—not on the upper levels, like
The Godfather,
but on the street level, what I knew and how I lived.

But it’s tough: People would get up in the middle, saying of it, “Please stop the screening.” And walk out. “I hate pictures like this,” they would say.

RS:
Harvey, on the one hand, seems to want to be with these tough guys, he wants to be as tough as they are. He is as tough as they are, in a way. At the same time, he’s always going back to the church—there are those wonderful shots of him in the church. And the church is so beautiful and, as you said before, peaceful. It seems to me he’s projecting the conflict you felt.

MS:
After about six years of working on the script and story, that’s what I channeled into it.

One of Marty’s storyboards for
Mean Streets.
He draws nearly every shot in every film he makes.

I had three different groups of friends. One group went to Fordham, and are now lawyers and bank presidents—good guys who made good lives for themselves. I had another friend who was more the intellectual of the group, and a loner, and I’d go with him to see Broadway plays. And then I had another couple of guys who were more street toughs. I was split among the three. When I went to NYU, in 1960, when I walked six blocks down Houston Street, it was like going to Mars. I had seen movies like
Twelve Angry Men,
showing the American process, and I was living with people who were not part of that.

People complain about my depiction of
Italian Americans. But I can’t help them with that. I’m sorry. It’s just that it’s my perception of what I know. There are guys, as I say, who are upstanding members of the community. They’re doing fine. There are guys who are out of town, who can’t come back. There are guys who are dead. I was in the middle of it. In a way, I was trying to understand how one should behave in life. What is the moral code? What is right, and what’s wrong?

RS:
Harvey’s character has a little bit of you and a little bit of your father in him, doesn’t he?

MS:
Well, Harvey’s character is named after my father, Charlie, who is trying to live morally in a world that’s not moral, in a world that’s primal. But there are two things going on. There’s his relationship with his uncle, in which he can be elevated to a certain extent in that community. And I had him going to college at the same time, though he doesn’t have enough in him yet to utilize the American opportunity education provides to get the hell out of there. But he can, because he is generally a decent guy, work with his uncle and make a good living, and have a sense of dignity in that world.

He’s not a street tough. I mean, he hangs with them. But he tries to bring reason to all of this. And, ultimately, because of his relationship with Johnny and his girlfriend, Teresa [who is an epileptic], his chances are destroyed completely. He should have been killed, because he has nowhere to go. There’s no way his uncle could work with him now.

He’s messed up because he has this sense of love for the both of them. And he has to leave town and go to Texas or Florida or somewhere.

His love for the both of them, for Johnny and Teresa, is interesting, because for me it has religious implications, in that, for whatever reasons, this guy is just filled with guilt. Why he’s filled with guilt, that’s something else. There’s a kind of deep curiosity in him. He’s not part of a world in which he can go off into the desert, let’s say, and be a monk and a hermit: he’s got to deal in a rough world, a primitive world, a savage world. Can you still be a good person? Can good still happen? I know there’s no justice, but can it be worked out? And so that, along
with his own feelings about leading a spiritual life, he calls down upon himself a kind of suffering.