Conversations with Scorsese (14 page)

I didn’t know what that was until I got to school, and
Michael Wadleigh showed me a
16 millimeter camera in our second year of college. You were able to take two camera courses in the third and fourth semesters. You had a
Filmo camera, which was the 16 millimeter version of the
Eyemo, which they used in
World War II. And it had parallax and everything. [Parallax is the difference between what the camera lens sees and what the viewfinder sees.]

RS:
You had those little two-minute loads?

MS:
A hundred feet. A hundred feet is about two and a half minutes. And so you’d do your film on that. You had to learn parallax view, which is very complex. But once you learned it and you tried it a few times, and once you got the basic ideas of exposure, you had somebody you could rely on to help you with it. I didn’t really understand too much about exposures. But I began to understand more light, less opening. Less light, more opening. And then I became fascinated with the idea of very fast film and fast lenses, because I didn’t like the encumbrance of the lights on locations.

That became a big deal. I didn’t have that skill until maybe
Taxi Driver,
when I got a little better at that. But in
Mean Streets
we just couldn’t get enough light. For
Who’s That Knocking
too.

RS:
There’s some very beautiful
black-and-white in
Who’s That Knocking.

MS:
There is.
Michael Wadleigh did the 16 millimeter sections. At the time I was inspired by the use of black-and-white photography by
Gianni di Venanzo. And also
Giuseppe Rotunno, but primarily di Venanzo. [Both were leading Italian cinematographers at the time.] I mean, I really loved to look at di Venanzo’s films—there was something about the bright white southern Italy in black-and-white, the Mediterranean, those white houses, like Greece. So I tried to get that look for
Who’s That Knocking.

RS:
But, since you couldn’t learn it at NYU except for this little camera course, where were you beginning to learn this stuff?

MS:
I’d go to the
Art Theater on 8th Street [in
Greenwich Village].

RS:
So you were learning just by looking?

MS:
Looking. Always looking. But in the second year with
Haig Manoogian, at the end of the semester, we had to do a report on one film that we liked. And I did
The Third Man.
And he gave me a B+ because, he said, “Remember, it’s only a
thriller.” So, that was it. We were at the opposite ends of the pole, in a way. He preferred
Paisan
and
Open City,
and I liked everything.

By the third semester and in the fourth, there were little exercises. You’d do something for exposures. Then you’d do something for editing. And you’d begin to understand what film is. By 1963 Haig gave a summer workshop. In six weeks you’d write a film, direct it, edit it, and print it in the lab. Now, you’d maybe have thirty-six kids join in. And he’d break them into six groups. And he’d say, Okay, you’re director, you’re grip, you’re camera, whatever.

And people would complain and say, “I signed up to direct a film.” “So where’s your script?” “Oh, well, I thought I could direct somebody else’s.” “No. Come in with your own idea. If you don’t have an idea, you’re not going to have a group,” he said. Another guy said, “I didn’t sign up to be a cameraman.” “You’ll learn from the camera just by putting your eye at the eyepiece.” So there were a lot of people who were very unhappy.

But what I did was write a script and get it to him as soon as possible, and he okayed it, so I was given a crew, and they all knew that they had to do what I wanted. And so we got it all set up in five days, and then we shot it in six, seven days, and edited it. It was a comedy, based on camera angles and it was very technical—quite silly and childish, all about the idea of clichés, and “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” That was a famous cliché and we used that. But there are some funny things in it. It’s more influenced by
Ernie Kovacs and
Mel Brooks than anything else.

Marty directing his first NYU student film,
What’s a Nice Girl like You Doing in a Place like This?
Made in 1963, it was nine minutes long and shot in black-and-white.

RS:
That’s not so terrible. I loved Ernie. He was great.

MS:
Ernie Kovacs was just my favorite. We all loved him, you know—the total surrealism on television. And pushing the limits, making innovations in television storytelling.

RS:
I came to know him. When I was a very young journalist, I did a story on him. We would meet in his hotel room, and we’d get lavish room service and we’d be there all afternoon, just bullshitting.

MS:
Oh, I loved him. I loved him. Anyway, my little film had all the tricks and the fun of just putting pictures together in slow motion and fast motion and stills, and intercutting with mattes the way Truffaut would do in
Jules and Jim.
It had no depth at all, but it was a lot of fun. And it won me a scholarship, so my father was able to use it for the tuition for the next year. And then that led to me doing
another short film in junior year, the second semester, and that became
It’s Not Just You, Murray.

RS:
I’ve never seen it.

MS:
It was basically
Goodfellas.

RS:
Huh?

MS:
It’s
Goodfellas.
I did it in 1964.
Murray
was a big epic, as much as I could manage, of two guys who were friends in the underworld, from my old neighborhood. But I did it with very
New Wave techniques. It was also a cross with
The Roaring Twenties,
an attempt at that sort of scale which led eventually to
Mean Streets,
which led ultimately to
Goodfellas,
and to
Casino
and
Gangs of New York—
the scale of it, the excessive nature of it. I mean, in
Murray
there’s just a hint of it. We didn’t have the money.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
Chronologically speaking, I guess we’re coming up to graduation at NYU. And I’m sure your parents are saying, Well, what are you going to do, Marty?

MARTIN SCORSESE:
Well, I was going to make a
first feature. As I said, my father kept saying that I should have something as a backup, like teaching. But my parents were heartened by the new world that they were let into—the academic world and Washington Square College. They came to the events, and they met all these very interesting people. And the short films were shown in the
New York Film Festival and other people liked them, people from different walks of life.

RS:
That, of course, is very important to parents.

MS:
The problem was, Did I have the maturity to make a first feature, the maturity to be able to say what you want to say, know what you want to say, and express it through cinema? That was the next big step. And that was the thing that they helped me with a little bit. Not money, but helping me, you know, psychologically supporting my ambitions. And then I started
Who’s That Knocking at My Door,
which came out in 1969. I started shooting in ’65, though. It took four years on and
off. I don’t think it’s very good. I mean, Harvey Keitel is good and
Zina Bethune is good. And the camera work is good. It was a favorite of
John Cassavetes. He liked it a lot.

RS:
Let’s stop there for a minute and talk about Harvey, who was so important in your early career. How did you meet?

MS:
He answered an ad that we put in
Show Business
for people to come and audition for a student film at NYU. I didn’t tell him this, but I had a friend of mine who was a comedian,
Bill Minkin, who is in a number of my films. I had Bill sit behind a desk, up on the eighth floor at the Greene Street building. And Harvey walked in. Bill says, “What are you doing here?” Harvey said, “I came to answer an ad.” “What ad?” Bill says, “There’s no ad. We didn’t take out any ad. Who the hell are you?” And they got into a big argument. I thought it was great! That was the audition I set up, but I neglected to tell Harvey [
laughs
]. And Harvey got so mad at me. But I said, “You’re wonderful” [
laughs
]. He said, “Well, why didn’t you tell me it was an improv?” I said, “I just never thought about it.” And so we started working together on
Who’s That Knocking.
He was a court stenographer at the time. And it was a big problem for him sometimes to get free to work with us.

But it wasn’t just a matter of Harvey’s schedule: Sometimes I didn’t shoot for three months, which created terrible problems matching scenes. Or we’d go to shoot in the building and we’d blow all the lights and then have to wait for four, five, six hours. It was a nightmare. We didn’t really know what we were doing. And when the film was finally finished, I tried to get it in the
New York Film Festival. They told us I was living aesthetically beyond my means [
laughs
]. Which was true, you know. But I was trying to formulate the narrative of where I grew up and I couldn’t articulate the emotional aspects of the love story. I could not articulate the scenes.

RS:
Do you mean articulate them to the actors?

MS:
Yes. Make it a dramatic narrative. It was kind of pastiche. But Harvey became like family, like a brother. He’d stay at the apartment and sleep over on a cot. He’s a lovely man, and a very sweet guy. We were also able to argue, which was a good thing, without holding a grudge for three years. He has a certain emotional strength that’s powerful, really powerful. And he grew up in
Brooklyn. So he came from a similar background. He was kind of the opposite of me, though, in some ways. I tended to pull back sometimes, but he would be much more comfortable around new people, or new women. He was a little more fearless. And he had forced himself to be a Marine. In 1958 he was in the invasion of Lebanon. And I told him I always admired people who had that courage. He never bragged about
it. He’s just a person who took the fear and accepted it and went through it, did it. And that’s the same thing he did in front of the camera.

Marty directs Harvey Keitel and
Zina Bethune in what was Keitel and Scorsese’s feature debut. At that point Bethune was a veteran TV actress. She has also had a notable career as a ballerina and choreographer. The film was released in 1969.

RS:
Oh, sure, you can see that.

MS:
The structure of his career is very interesting. He didn’t stop working a day in his life. He still hasn’t. He just kept working. He never bought into the Hollywood situation. He never went with the star system, he never went for the machine. He had a taste of it, and they had a taste of him, and they all decided they maybe should part amicably. But he also developed as an actor. He takes some chances, boy.

RS:
That’s an understatement.

MS:
And he’s a very, very warmhearted guy.

RS:
So you’re still in touch.

MS:
As much as possible. I guess in analyzing what is a friend, it’s simply somebody you can trust. And we trusted each other with what we wanted in film. We
trusted each other to make mistakes, to try different things—to go different ways, to be outrageous.

RS:
I know the first version of
Who’s That Knocking
was as a student, or maybe I should say a sort of postgraduate, film, but you actually undersold that movie to me before I saw it. When I did, I quite liked it. I mean, yes, it’s crude, it’s pretty simple in its development, but there’s something—I don’t know quite what.