Martin Scorsese: True Confessions

This programme contains some strong language.

Martin Scorsese...

is one of the world's most acclaimed film-makers.

His career spans half a century.

He's making a rare UK appearance

at the British Film Institute in London,

where a major retrospective of his films is under way

and a career summary interview will take place.

As the editor of the BFI magazine Sight & Sound,

I'm thrilled to be the one interviewing this giant

of contemporary cinema before a packed house tonight.

Dozens of fans waiting for hours are hoping to get the autograph

of this film legend.

Spellbinding films by Martin Scorsese

typically have a central character

haunted by a deep, personal or spiritual conflict.

His movies have left an indelible mark

on the collective consciousness of modern culture.

Martin, you know Stuart, don't you?

Hello, Stuart, hi, how are you?

Great to see you again. Welcome, welcome.

Oh, it's the kitchen, very nice.

Hello. Wow.

I've actually seen a lot of kitchens over the years.

A lot of kitchens.

'As a kid with asthma growing up in Little Italy, New York City,

'he lived and breathed cinema from an early age.

'Scorsese completed his first feature film

'at the age of 25 in 1968.

'Between features, documentaries, music videos and TV programmes,

'he has about 60 directing credits.'

This is the clandestine way of getting in?

It is a clandestine way of getting in.

-They'll never know.

-You'll never know.

Be careful of these stairs.

'Martin Scorsese has long known how to hustle

'with the Hollywood studio system.

'He can deliver the big box office hit that studios crave

'to gain studio backing for a high-risk,

'personal passion project.'

-Let me introduce you to Michelle.

-Hi.

-Hi, Michelle, hi.

-It's so great to meet you.

-Nice to meet you. Nice meeting you.

-Be careful of the stairs.

-Oh, wow, this is a great hallway.

Nice and narrow.

Here we go, it's the bowels of the BFI.

-Yes. Here we are.

-Inside.

Scorsese brings an encyclopaedic knowledge of movie history

to his film-making palette,

which he uses with virtuoso skill

to seduce, shock, dazzle and transport his audience.

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

Thank you.

Thank you, thank you.

Thank you, thank you.

Welcome, everybody, welcome to this amazing evening.

-That was quite a walk.

-You've just come off this amazing,

exhausting publicity tour for Silence...

a film about Jesuit priests in the 17th century

going to Japan to help out oppressed Christians.

-Well, that's the plot.

-That's the plot.

But it took 30 years for you to get that made.

-Yes, yeah, yeah.

-And you've had other films like that,

like The Last Temptation Of Christ.

They take time, I think, in terms of...

in terms of Silence, it took many years,

because I knew I wanted to make the film of this,

but...the last 20 or 30 pages of the book,

I just didn't know how to approach it.

I knew I wanted to make it, but I didn't know how

and I knew why, but I couldn't say it.

SHOUTS IN OWN LANGUAGE

SHOUTS IN OWN LANGUAGE

I immediately tried to write the script with Jay Cox

and it wasn't very good.

The problem was, ultimately...

I went off in different directions,

I was able to get Gangs Of New York made

and immediately after Gangs Of New York,

I wanted to make Silence, I still didn't have the script.

And so what I'm trying to get... to answer you, is that

whenever I was told by my managers, my agents,

"This is insane, this project has gone on for years.

"There are so many legal problems there.

"One of the producers, unfortunately, is in jail.

It goes... "This is like the Gordian knot,

"the money has been put up against it, so don't do it."

And I said, "No, no, no, I want to hold on to it,

"I want to hold on to it." And so, whenever circumstances allowed,

I should be able to make this picture.

'May 25th 1640.

'Pax Christi. God be praised.

'Father Valignano, as I begin these lines, I cannot be sure

'that when they are done they will ever reach you.

'But I want to maintain your confidence in our mission

'and vindicate your faith in us.'

Careful.

Ultimately, it was independently financed.

The budget was 22 million below the line,

which is pretty low for the kind of films I was making at the time.

Yeah, but you had to raise that kind of money

-and that's one of the things...

-We had to go to Cannes to raise it.

I stayed in a room for two days and nights

and people came in and I talked.

LAUGHTER

-And what's your success rate?

-We had a pretty good success rate.

It was IM Global... Is that it?

Yeah, they put it together

and we just talked and the next thing I know

I was in somebody's yacht,

next thing I know we're in some mansion somewhere at night.

And there was... Baz Luhrmann was there,

I had no... I can't tell you what was happening!

It's that thing of how you manage to persuade the money men each time.

I wouldn't stop, I just wouldn't stop,

I'd keep complaining and arguing.

And, yeah, sometimes behaving badly,

um...temperamentally at times

And not answering the phone until I get an agreement

of some kind, at least an agreement to proceed.

Lost to God.

But as to that, indeed, only God can answer.

Was there a particular moment in your very early career,

your early days when you were first making your films,

where you felt that you had found, like, you know,

writers always talk about finding their voice.

I think in terms of my own voice

I tried to with Who's That Knocking At My Door.

Eventually, it was developed in Mean Streets, really,

and that's what I felt was...

I felt comfortable, at home, yeah.

'I mean, if I do something wrong, I just want to pay for it my way.

'So I do my own penance for my own sins.

'What do ya say, huh?

'That it's all bullshit except the pain, right?

'The pain of hell.

'The burn from a lighted match increased a million times.

'Infinite.

'Now, you don't fuck around with the infinite.

'There's no way you do that.'

I mean, it goes back to being involved very seriously

in Roman Catholicism and that became very influential.

Let's go back a little bit further than that.

I'm particularly interested

in whether there was a very first film that you saw,

what was the most kind of important film?

The first films I saw were in theatres.

I was born in '42, so contracted the asthma

at the age of three and so they couldn't do anything

with me and said playing and running and that sort of thing,

not laughing a lot, because you get spasms and the kid starts coughing.

So they'd take me to the movie theatre and I saw these films.

Duel In The Sun was the first I remember seeing.

It was a western, there's no doubt,

and the open, vast spaces that King Vidor shot,

and some of the other guys too who also shot it,

was just extraordinary.

I aim to defend Spanish Bit with lead.

Now, if there's any yellow-bellies among you, get out now.

My mother took me to see it because she said, "He likes westerns."

And, actually, it was condemned by the church,

so she used it as an excuse.

The vibrancy of the colour and the music

and the intensity of the kind of baroque...

..erotic behaviour, I should say, of the leads.

It was so strange, so strange.

I was six, I guess.

THUNDER RUMBLES

People take their kids to see Psycho at six or something, I don't know.

And then, from then on, I just remembered everything

from all the Hitchcock films we saw as they came up.

At the same time, there's been a split

and that was when I was five years old

that I saw, on television were the Rossellini films -

Paisa and Open City.

Mama! Mama!

And De Sica's Bicycle Thieves.

The other night, actually,

I went to see Richard III at the Barbican...

Oh, we restored that, yeah.

And, do you know... I mean, not the film, but an actual stage play.

-Oh, sorry.

-LAUGHTER

I forgot where I was, I'm sorry!

LAUGHTER

..where the actor did a really fantastic job

of making us empathise with a psychopath.

You yourself have also managed to put us, as an audience,

inside the head of some quite, you know, troubled people.

You know, Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver

and Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull.

I wonder whether there was any...

particularly amongst your influences,

a film-maker who was the best person to teach you how to do that,

how to get inside?

I remember being very taken by the...

..noir-ish, or should I say,

the darker elements of Sunset Boulevard, let's say.

There's nothing else,

just us...and the cameras

and those wonderful people out there in the dark.

Right, Mr DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up.

You're a great fighter.

But if you want to stay here,

if you want to stick close to the real money,

this one you lose.

Kirk Douglas's performances in Champion

and The Bad And The Beautiful and Lust For Life.

Brando, of course, in On The Waterfront.

On The Waterfront sort of changed everything for me,

cos, again, it's the first time I saw people that I...

It was like a documentary for me, people that I knew around me.

You shoulda taken care of me just a little bit,

so I wouldn't have to take them dives for the short-end money.

I had some bets down for you, you saw some money.

You don't understand, I could have had class.

I could have been a contender.

I could have been somebody...

..instead of a bum,

which is what I am, let's face it.

Why not go to those characters and why not explore that?

What's immediately around you?

Yeah, it's who I... You know, it's the old story.

I've seen some... I know basically good people do very bad things.

'You see, people like my father could never understand,

'but I was a part of something and I belonged.

'I was treated like a grown-up.'

All right, look...

'Every day I was learning to score.

'At 13, I was making more money

'than most of the grown-ups in the neighbourhood.

'I mean, I had more money than I could spend, I had it all.'

When we're so intrigued, thinking about The Age Of Innocence,

in particular, which is filled with paintings.

Oh, I'm so pleased...

-She's already surrounded by so many rivals.

-Yes.

And also, you made that short

about an abstract expressionist painter.

-Oh, the New York Stories.

-New York Stories.

Life Lessons.

I've not really heard you talk about paintings as an influence on...

That would have been nice,

that's the first thing I wanted to do.

Cos I wasn't able to do anything, so I saw films,

went to the parochial school, went to the church,

but the key thing for me, originally,

was drawing and painting.

I wanted to go that way.

I drew my own little films and that sort of thing on paper.

-Different aspect ratios.

-LAUGHTER

You talk about how documentaries, in general,

you see as a counterpart to your fiction films.

For example, you once said that Italianamerican,

the documentary about your parents,

was the counterpart to Mean Streets.

Yes, because that basically is the average person of that world,

really, my parents, yeah.

-Rolling?

-Yeah.

-OK, is that the light?

-Why you sitting down there, why?

-Why is he down there?

-He can do what he wants, he can do what he wants.

Why are you so far from me?

'And I discovered that as we were shooting the film,

'it took a few hours to shoot on a weekend,

'I figured I'd warm them up a little bit and start talking,

'but they took over, the picture.

'And so I let it go and then tried to focus it

'with certain questions.'

Lovey-dovey sort of, you know,

they say as you get older, your love grows stronger.

So for some reason, it is getting a little stronger, you know.

Right, Daddy?

'But I learned a lot about them too

'and I learned about how they lived

'and so it was a big revelation to me

'and also holding a shot of a person speaking,

'depending on the personality,'

depending on the physical body language and the face.

And the rhythm of the storytelling, without cheating or jump cutting

or, you know, cutting to another angle,

just hold and how some people could command that

and to have faith in that.

And then I go here, this is what my mother-in-law taught me.

Take a few spoonfuls of tomato,

throw them in here, because your meatballs remain very soft.

You've got a reputation for giving actors

a lot of freedom to improvise.

Is that only with the actors you've kind of worked with a lot

or is it that you just have that approach with everyone?

Oh, no, no, it has to be with... first of all the character.

The role in the story in the film, um...

and, of course, the script that accompanies that.

Does the script allow and does the world that those characters are in

allow a kind of overlapping sense of freedom and dialogue?

Does it allow that, that's one thing.

And if it does, how far can we take it per scene,

which doesn't throw us too far off the tracks?

You know, push and push and push and see.

If you have the time.

You talking to me?

You talking to me?

You talking to me?

There are so many of lines of dialogue from your films

that are repeated by people endlessly.

I wonder how many of them are kind of from the script

and how many are improvised?

The key one is "You talking to me?"

Which is the mirror in Taxi Driver

and that was the last week of shooting

and in the script that's not... The dialogue is not there.

And so I asked Bob, I said, "I think we need...

"He has to speak to himself in the mirror."

And I forget what Bob did, I think he called Paul Schrader

and I forget what it was, but somehow

we were under a lot of pressure to shoot.

We were five days over on a 40-day shoot and the studio was furious

and they were killing us and we just locked the door of the place,

the location we were in. And I got on the floor in front of him

and he started playing with the gun or whatever that was

and then started saying "Are you talking to me?"

And he just kept repeating it.

"Keep going, keep going, keep going."

Well, then who the hell else are you talking to, you talking to me?

Well, I'm the only one here.

Who the fuck do you think you're talking to?

Oh, yeah?

OK.

And he developed that moment and, as I say,

it was done under a lot of...

The AD was a good guy, he was banging on the door saying,

"We've got to go, we've got to go, man. We are in trouble."

I said, "Give me two minutes, two minutes, this is good."

Is that the greatest surprise you've ever come across from improvisation

or was there an even bigger one?

A bigger one I think in Mean Streets with De Niro wanting to...

Again, it has to do with trust, really.

In Mean Streets he wanted to do something further

about the character of Johnny.

He wanted to show why Charlie is taken in by Johnny,

how he could talk, how he could tell him, give him excuses,

always excuses, you know?

What's the matter with you?

You can't go round bullshitting people that way.

If you're worried about something, you gotta keep it.

You don't know what happened to me.

I'm so depressed about other things, I can't worry about payments.

I come home last Tuesday, I have my money in cash,

you know, blah-blah, bing-bing.

Coming home, I ran into Jimmy Sparks.

I owe Jimmy Sparks 700, like, for four months.

I gotta pay the guy, he lives in my building, hangs out across

-the street, I gotta pay the guy, right?

-Yeah.

-So what happened?

I had to give some to my mother,

then I wound up with 25 at the end of the week.

Then what happened today, you ain't gonna believe,

-cos this is incredible, I can't believe it myself.

-What?

I was in a game, I was ahead like 600, 700, right?

-You got to be kidding me.

-Yeah, that's the streak...

-You know Joey Clams?

-Yeah.

-Joey Scala, yeah.

-I know him, too, yeah.

-No, Joey Scala is Joey Clams.

-Right.

-Right.

-They're the same person.

-Yeah.

-Hey.

-Hey.

'To see the two of them work that way,'

I knew that we had something I thought special

about what it was like to be there in that world.

Hopefully there's an element of trust,

you know, and if not, you have enough footage

that you could shape it, in the cutting.

And is this why you keep coming back to...

to you working with Bobby and DiCaprio and...

Yeah, it's the same with Leo, a similar thing.

There's a 30 years' difference, but he has a similar sensibility,

he's not afraid of going certain places.

He's younger, he's younger, so there's a tendency to...

..er, be excitement level in rehearsals.

LAUGHTER

I said, "Calm...calm down."

You yourself have done quite a lot of acting,

-especially in your own films.

-That was accidental.

-Is that partly

-a sort of Hitchcock thing?

-No.

No, no, no, don't, don't, don't.

Whoa! The fucking meter, what are you doing?

What are you doing with the meter?

Did I tell you...did I do, did I tell you to do that with the meter?

Put the meter back, let the numbers go on,

I don't care what I have to pay, I'm not getting out.

So we could build our own

-movie studio.

-Excellent.

You've also done serious stuff.

You're in Kurosawa's Dreams, you know.

I was asked to do that by Kurosawa,

because Francis Coppola told him I would.

LAUGHTER

Yes, I consume this natural setting,

I devour it completely and wholly.

And then when I'm through...

..the picture appears before me complete.

So, I memorised it while I was shooting Goodfellas

and then, by the time we finished shooting Goodfellas,

he had finished shooting Dreams and he was waiting for me.

-Right.

-And he was going to be 82 years old.

And, boy, it was pressure.

Two days after shooting we wound up going to Japan,

that's when I read Silence.

You make such a huge variety of different kinds of cinema

and, you know, people talk about there being

explicit religious themes in some of your films and not in others.

Are matters of faith and moral crisis an important ingredient,

is that an essential ingredient of one of your films, do you think?

Well, that's what I grew up around.

I mean, I saw it happening around me

and it was very much in the dialogue of the family.

So everything was very...

clearly had to do with right and wrong, the morality.

The church added the other element

and what I heard spoken about in the church by certain people

was really strong and had a comfort to it in terms of compassion

and love and what does that mean, really?

And also, as I say, I saw some people do,

some genuinely good people, were just ruined, ruined,

ruined and disgraced.

Disgraced. And so I lived with that.

I was impressed,

I was impressed by it, because that's your world, your universe.

But when you go out into that, as you did,

go out into the wider world,

are you saying that you sort of carried this into every film

that it's a thematic element in...?

I think that drives me, there's no doubt,

I can't get away from it. I tried.

Over the years, you've been attached to many, many projects,

gone after projects.

Brando in a film about Wounded Knee,

a film about Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra,

Dostoevsky's The Idiot,

been attached to many, many projects.

Is there one of them, just one of them,

that itches you the most now that you've made Silence?

Well, there's a reason for every one of those that didn't get made.

Yeah.

Um...ah... It's sad about the Sinatra one.

Yeah. There are some elements...

Naturally, family has to be respected, I think,

to make a film about him

on a certain level, with the kind of production

that calls for it, at least I think so.

You also have the problem of who could play him?

Who could play Sinatra? Who would be accepted?

Maybe with the younger generation who didn't grow up with Sinatra,

they could accept easier a new person playing...

a different person playing him.

But, for me, we tried with Dean Martin,

it didn't work out in terms of the angle,

the perception of the story,

the way in, I couldn't figure it.

It always seemed that there was more action

with the Sinatra stuff and so we spent a lot of time on it.

So is Sinatra the one that hurts the most?

Probably, I think, yeah, yeah.

And now I believe you're preparing to make The Irishman.

Yeah, it's a similar world that we...like Goodfellas or Casino.

But in a very different way, I have to find another...

What about the style?

Should I...? You don't change style just to change style,

but one doesn't want to become atrophied, in a way.

-No.

-But, no, I'm looking forward to it.

You know, looking forward to it, I mean,

each one is a separate journey,

each one is, like, a separate universe that you go into.

You've long been a passionate evangelist for film preservation.

You've established The Film Foundation,

dedicated to restoring early colour films that are in danger of fading,

you've established the World Cinema Project,

dedicated to preserving and restoring

neglected masterpieces of world cinema.

How did that come about?

Did you wake up one morning and think,

"Oh, my God, my films are going to fade, what should I do?"

Well, what happened was that myself and a number of other film-makers

in California were trying to screen prints

of, let's say, something exotic, like The Leopard

and I called Fox at that time.

They said, "We just didn't have room for the print,

"we had to get rid of it."

We began to realise that all those cinematic moments that inspired us,

in a way, it isn't just watching movies,

it's a matter of how they played into your life

or how you lived your life alongside and within them

and what they meant to you.

I wasn't just going to a movie.

And so this became part of who you are and part of how you saw life

and experienced emotions, psychological impact,

whether it's L'Avventura or whether it's, you know,

seeing at ten years old Singin' In The Rain.

So we realised that no-one was taking care of them

and at that time it was pre-video,

so all the vaults were being sold, these old films, get rid of them.

And it was myself, Steve Spielberg had the same problem.

So he'd call me and say,

"Did you get a print of such and such?"

I said, "No. I can't find it."

He said, "It's amazing."

And so we eventually, by 1979, had begun to realise

that the films that were being made in colour, at a point in which,

you have to understand,

at a point in which all films had to be made in colour.

That's when the colour technique

or the colour system used was the weakest,

because it was cheaper.

They had to make all these prints, which meant that within the right

or wrong circumstances, you could lose the colour of the print

and maybe the negative in maybe six months.

It was one of the reasons why Raging Bull

was shot in black and white, because...

And George Lucas shot Star Wars as if it had already faded

and he said, "Watch it, if you have the white, sort of pink, in a way,

"so this way, when it fades, it looks the same."

We were all very conscious of this, you know.

-How's your driving record?

-It's clean, it's real clean,

like my conscience.

In Sight & Sound, I wrote an editorial

saying that we wanted ten more films from you.

Do you think you'll get another ten features done?

-What do you think, ten more?

-LAUGHTER

-Ten more!

-LAUGHTER

Do we want ten more Martin Scorsese films?

-Oh, no, God.

-AUDIENCE:

-Yes.

-Thank you very much, Martin.

-Thank you.

APPLAUSE

-Thank you.

-Thank you very much.

EXCITED CHATTER