Conversations with Scorsese (3 page)

RS:
It was obviously a trauma for your family. What happened? I mean, Corona was kind of Edenic for you.

MS:
Oh, it was wonderful.

RS:
What exactly happened with the landlord?

MS:
Well,
Nick Pileggi and I worked on it in a script that I’d like to do.

RS:
Really?

MS:
Yeah. I don’t know if I can bring myself to do it. It’s complicated. If you’re not educated and you’re working in a certain area, your fealty is to a certain group. There were different families. My father was assisted by a crime family.

RS:
He was not as a criminal, but he was a—

MS:
A friend. They made it possible for us to have the house in Queens. But my father had many problems with his brother Joe. From what I understand, he had “sitdowns,” where he tried to make sure that Joe wasn’t killed by the Mob people.

The landlord was a guy who had a vegetable truck in a garage next door. He didn’t like my brother. And he had a chicken. The guy grabbed the chicken and just wrung its neck in front of my brother, and made the kid run and cry, you know. And he started to resent my father, because my father became friends with the landlord’s brother. And he took the brother to get a new suit in New York.

Anyway, the landlord may have felt that my father was involved with underworld figures, which he wasn’t really, but he behaved maybe a little bit like that; my father always liked to dress, you know. And this guy was a man of the earth, so to speak. And I think also his wife liked my father. So all this resentment was building up. And then there was a confrontation. Probably my father used some language he shouldn’t have, because I remember he apologized for it. So, next day, my father got back from work and confronted him in the yard. That led to the fistfight, and the landlord picked up an ax.

RS:
Oh, God.

MS:
And my mother’s younger sister literally walked out there and pushed him aside and said, “Stop that. Don’t pull an ax. Don’t do that to my brother-in-law.” And he stopped. [
Laughs.
] You talk about
The Quiet Man
[the
John Ford movie that contains a similar scene]. I mean, the women just stopped it. And that night there was another fight on the corner. I saw the two of them fighting at the bar. And I came back in and told my mother, “They’re fighting.” And she was ironing clothes and said, “I know.” And then the next thing I knew we had to leave.

We moved back to the apartment my father was born in, 241—it’s still there—living with my grandmother and my grandfather. My grandmother, my father’s mother, was very tough. My brother had problems there, fighting with my grandmother. There were like seven people living in three rooms, until we got rooms
down the block at 253. It was tough leaving a nice place that was idyllic, or at least in my mind was idyllic.

Marty, age seven months, takes the rooftop air with his mother (left) and Aunt Lena and her son, Anthony (right).

The
Lower East Side was pretty rough. You’ve seen it in the old movies in the thirties and forties and fifties—the Dead End Kids, it was pretty close to that. Kids ran up and down the street. You played with what you had. You know, you had a garbage can, and the top of it became a shield. The orange crates—you’d rip off one of the pieces of wood and it was a sword. A lot of cars. A lot of everybody living on top of each other. And a lot of tension. I was living virtually on the
Bowery, which to this day has marked me in a way.
Gangs of New York—
I couldn’t even get it close to what I saw on the Bowery.

I had gone to a public school for two years, but the next thing I know I was in a Catholic school, being taught by the
Sisters of Mercy, Irish nuns, at the St. Patrick’s elementary school, which is still there. Irish nuns in an Italian, Neapolitan, Sicilian, neighborhood. There was conflict. But the school introduced me to the church, which was
St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral on Mott Street. It was the first Catholic cathedral built in America. And I found some peace there, and a little bit of protection.

In
Queens, the house had bigger rooms, and you could always hide out a little bit, kind of disappear. Here you couldn’t disappear. Here I was in the room. And I couldn’t say anything, because I was the youngest. So I’d go in the church, and I became fascinated by the rituals of the mass. It was 1949, 1950, and the image of the Catholic church was the one from
Going My Way.
Barry Fitzgerald.
Bing Crosby.
Ingrid Bergman,
The Bells of St. Mary’s.
You know, it was a pretty good image. And inside that cathedral—the sense of peace. It was quite, quite amazing.

Marty, happy in Queens, plays Indian without a cowboy in sight.

And then, of course, my father didn’t know what the hell to do with me. After working in the garment district all day he’d go to my grandparents’ and deliberate with them about family issues at night, and my mother didn’t like that very much. And then he’d come back around eleven o’clock, having picked up the tabloids, the
Daily News
and
Daily Mirror.
They’d argue it out a little bit, and then everything was fine. And the next day he’d go back to work. So I didn’t see him much. But he was forced to take me to the movies; he took me to the movies all the time.

RS:
Relating the movies to the church, was there something in the movies that was ritualistic, that appealed to you that way? An analogy between the big picture on the screen and the gorgeous altars of the church?

MS:
I think that’s a good point. My asthma isolated me from everybody else. And so in this isolation, I was made to think that I couldn’t do anything physical. I had to be very careful, and be sort of coddled in a way.

So the ritual of going to the movies with your father—it didn’t matter what film you saw—became important to me. It was a matter of going to the Loew’s Commodore on 6th Street and Second Avenue, which is now part of New York University, by the way. (In the sixties it became the
Fillmore East.) And going to the
Academy of Music, which is gone now, on 14th Street. We were always walking into the middle of the film. There was a sense of peace there, too; there really was. You had faith when you went into the church. And you had faith when you went into the movie theater, too. Some films hit you more strongly than others, but you always had that faith. You’re taken on a trip, you’re taken on a journey. The posters outside sell you dreams, you know. And you go in there, and the dream is real, almost. And then if you’re sharing these very strong emotions with your father, whom you don’t really talk to very much, this became the main line of communication between us.

I mean, he took me to see
The Bad and the Beautiful—
the first movie I saw about the process of filmmaking. I loved
westerns, so he used to take me to westerns.
The Day the Earth Stood Still
was one of the great theater experiences: a Sunday afternoon at the Academy of Music, a couple of thousand people reacting to that picture. Or
The Thing—
Christian Nyby and
Howard Hawks—that was an amazing experience, the shock of it, the humor of it, the overlapping dialogue, the moment when they open the door, and
James Arness [playing the monster] is standing right there—you ever see two thousand people jump at once? That was an amazing experience.

RS:
Movies in those days, because the Code was in place, were judgmental, or, shall we say, moralistic? I mean in a certain sense there is an analogy between the church
and the conventional morality of movies. I wonder if we could explore that a little more.

MS:
Around 1954 you started to get the United Artists films
—The Big Knife,
even
Autumn Leaves,
with an extraordinary performance by Cliff Robertson. And you have
Otto Preminger,
Stanley Kramer, producing and directing. One way or another their pictures were addressing serious social and psychological matters. And all of a sudden the whole Code is breaking down.

RS:
Did you like those Stanley Kramer movies? I mean, try and think back to then, not what you may feel now.

MS:
Sure, we went to see them. They were pretty strong and shocking, you know. I don’t know if they hold up over the years. I liked
Judgment at Nuremberg
a lot. And I’m talking about Kramer’s productions, too, like
The Men,
Fred Zinnemann’s picture, and
Home of the Brave
and
High Noon,
to a certain extent. I prefer the Ford and Hawks
westerns. But still, there’s something about
Gary Cooper and that music and the editing that’s just remarkable. There’s so much tension in the way the film is developed. [It is about a sheriff forced to capture an outlaw gang alone, when no one in town will aid him.]

RS:
But Cooper was in and of himself a remarkable figure, don’t you think? I mean, he was such a great minimalist movie actor.

MS:
Oh, you’re absolutely right. In the forties he went into a dark period, like
James Stewart had with Hitchcock and with
Anthony Mann—I think of films like
The Fountainhead.
But primarily there’s a film, a very lurid melodrama called
Bright Leaf.
Do you know it?

RS:
I ran it just recently.

MS:
I saw it at the age of about ten. I have been affected by that picture.

RS:
How so?

MS:
The hysteria of it, and his destructive character. And the sensuality between
Patricia Neal and him and
Lauren Bacall. And the whole way it develops, with him killing his father-in-law,
Donald Crisp. And, of course, the whole film ends in a conflagration.

RS:
Yeah, and what’s interesting about it is that it takes you about half the movie to realize he’s nuts.

MS:
The fact that the film was glorifying the making of cigarettes has nothing to do with it. Right? It has nothing to do with it.

RS:
Right [
chuckles
].

MS:
There’s something about this crazy character that was terrifying, and very interesting.

RS:
Because, after all, this is nice, heroic Gary Cooper.

MS:
You know: Come on, what’s happening here? It was shocking. It’s not a great film. But it was a very surprising one.

RS:
He was an amazing actor. I mean, I don’t think he ever consciously acted a second in his life. But there was something in him that could bring you close to tears sometimes.

MS:
I’ll never forget him writing his last will and testament in
High Noon.
And the last shot, I went back home and I drew a scene from the film. You know what I drew?

RS:
No.

MS:
I drew his boot and the star next to the boot, his sheriff’s badge when he threw it on the ground. Just that. That represented the film to me. Because that boom out [a huge camera pullback, isolating Cooper from the rest of the community] made me understand a little about effective imagery on the screen. Why was that so effective when he was so small in the frame? I went back and studied that one.

RS:
That boom locks him out of the town that has betrayed him.

MS:
And the betrayal idea for me was very powerful. I mean, it always has been, and I still explore it in the pictures I make. So that’s why that image of the star in the dust by his boot was so strong for me.