Conversations with Scorsese (21 page)

RS:
Is that what the girl represents—loss as a form of penance?

MS:
To a certain extent. But mainly it’s Johnny. Because he says in the bar, Here comes my penance. Ultimately, I think Johnny senses something. Because at the end of the picture he says to Harvey, You’re doing it for you, not for me. So that you can feel better spiritually.

But he’s caught. He’s caught. In that world, they’re not dealing on the spiritual level. It’s fate. He has transgressed, and he’s going to have to pay for it.

RS:
I don’t understand why the uncle is so dead set against the girl, who’s perfectly nice—

MS:
She wants to move out. She wants to move out of the neighborhood. She’s different. She’s a troublemaker. She threatens the value of the family: to stay together and support each other.

RS:
Let’s talk about De Niro. He comes on—

MS:
—and he just inhabits the role.

RS:
It is certainly the beginning of the
Jake LaMotta character.

MS:
Yeah, it is. It’s the same picture, really.

RS:
The main thing, I think, is that Johnny has no sense of consequence. He has no sense of being able to look ahead.

MS:
Why should he look ahead? He’s got no place to go. He doesn’t have the education. He doesn’t have the temperament. And he acts out against these people, knowing to a certain extent that his youth will help him. He is all anarchy at that point.

He says, You want to stick with me, you’re coming down with me. It’s not just about how much you love me, and how much you want to take care of me. There’s a lot going on with you. You don’t even know what the hell you want out of life, he tells Harvey, in effect.

I thought what was going on between Harvey and Bob was great in those three and a half weeks of shooting. They understood that, ultimately, the relationship is based on loving each other, but that one was getting more out of it than the other. It was something that, in Charlie’s mind, was a more spiritual thing. But they’re all of them damned at the end. None of them die, which is worse, because they might
as well die. The worst thing that could be—and it happens to all the characters at the end of
Mean Streets—
is that they wind up humiliated, not killed. Humiliated.

And so it was very real. In
Mean Streets,
the shooting in the car at the end was based on something I experienced. I was at NYU when it happened. I got out of a car with a friend of mine only a half hour before a shooting like that occurred. On the weekends I’d hang out with my friends—at after-hours clubs, the backs of tenements, that sort of stuff. This kid had a car, and he was going around for a ride. He was a part-time cop, had a gun. And so we went with him in the car a few times.

And then on Elizabeth Street one night at about two in the morning, we realized he was acting with bravado, in a way that we pulled back from. So we told him we were going to go home. So, all right, he drops us off. On Elizabeth Street you had cars parked on both sides. And he’s driving down the block. And there’s a red light, and there’s a car in front of him. And the red light changes to green, and the car doesn’t move. A guy comes over and starts talking with the driver in the first car. Our friend blows his horn. The car in front of him doesn’t move. The guys are talking. He blows his horn again. The guys continue talking. He gets out, walks up to them, he takes his gun out or his badge. He says, “I’m a cop. Move this car.” The guy says, “All right.” He moves the car.

The next morning, we heard our guy was driving on Astor Place. He looked over at a car next to him and the people in that car started firing shots into his car. There was another kid in the car who got shot in the eye. And it was because he talked to the wrong people the wrong way.

And that became something that was very important to me and my friend, who had left the car an hour or two earlier. Because we could have been killed.
Mean Streets
had to be made because I was in the car that night. I went backwards from that. How the hell did he get into a situation like that? We didn’t even know the guys. And I said to myself, That’s the story to tell.

It made you stop and think—the kind of world we’re in, the society we’re in. So, anyway, that was a major moment in my life, and that’s what
Mean Streets
comes out of. And it has to explode like that. I’ve seen it happen, a lot of times. It’s just the way things work. So that’s why the chaos is there. I was almost a victim of it. Another friend of mine was killed, taken out because he was a wild cannon. But by that point, I was moving to California, you know.

You get a touch of that sort of thing in
Goodfellas—
the poor kid who gets shot first in the foot and then in the chest. When the kid is shot in the foot, why the hell does he come back the next week? Why? Because he has no place to go. Can’t get on a plane. He doesn’t know anybody. He doesn’t have the education. And it was
just one of those things. He came back. He came back and he said one word too many. You know? And that was it. It happens.

Marty directing Robert De Niro in
Mean Streets,
the film that announced both of them as stars in the making.

RS:
One other thing: Right here at the beginning of your career the violence seems to me so characteristic of what we’d see later. It just occurs. There’s not a lot of motivation. It almost comes out of nowhere.

MS:
Well, that’s the way it was. That’s the world I was in. The violence is always in the background. I’d go into a place, even in a movie theater, I always had my antennae out all the way, because I had to watch if somebody said something wrong to somebody else. Some complain that the films denigrate Italian Americans. But I’m just telling it from my perspective. That doesn’t mean that other friends of mine see it that way. But my experience is that there are certain groups of people who are aligned with certain families. I didn’t know they were called families at the time, but there were certain people with power, and if somebody hits somebody, or does something, not just on the street level, not just kids, the settling up is done, usually, in the old way, between the different groups. Lives were run that way. It’s a very tough way of living.

RS:
Is that violence explicable if you really, really connect it to the Mob? And it’s only to somebody like me that the violence seems almost totally inexplicable?

MS:
I don’t want to seem to contradict what I said before. But, no, at least in this world, it’s always explicable. People criticized the film for pointless violence. I said, No, there’s no such thing as pointless violence. It comes from something. In that world we have to be very careful as to who insulted whom, who brushed by another, who said something a little in a nasty way. In
Goodfellas,
where
Joe Pesci and
Ray Liotta are playing a game, and joking around, and all of a sudden Pesci is saying, Why do you say I’m funny? Well, says Ray, because you tell a funny story. Do you think I’m a clown? No, I didn’t say you’re a clown. What did you mean then? And somebody starts to speak—No, he’s a big boy, he can talk for himself. And it changes on a dime. You could be killed. You could get into a fight, not be killed, but get beaten up pretty badly if you didn’t know how to handle yourself.

I mean, there was always tension. None of this business of the happy immigrants jumping and dancing and doing tarantellas. It’s
Los Olvidados.
It’s
Journey to the End of the Night
by Céline. That is the closest of anything I ever read to the reality of the people in those
Lower East Side buildings.

RS:
So all of that fed into
Mean Streets
?

MS:
Mean Streets
was based on myself and a couple of friends I had, but particularly two guys. One of them thinks the Johnny Boy character is really about him, and in a way it was, but not fully. He no longer lives in New York, but he always felt angry about that.

After my father died, I realized what the hell the picture really was about: my father and that brother of his who we’ve talked about; a lot of money that was owed, a lot of sit-downs. Every night I’d hear the drama. For twenty, twenty-five years, that’s all I heard. About what’s right and wrong and you’re in a jungle. It had to do with the dignity of the name, and respect—walking a tightrope of respect, not being a wiseguy.
Mean Streets
was about him and my uncle, but I couldn’t verbalize it until after ’93 or ’94, when it really hit home.

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
And now for something completely different
—Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.
How did that come about?

MARTIN SCORSESE:
John Calley at
Warner Bros. said they had a terrific script called
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
by
Robert Getchell. He said they all thought I could only direct men. But, he said, this is all women, and you should really do it. I read it and liked it. He said, Let’s go. At that point, there was a part of me that wanted to erase everything of where I came from.
Mean Streets
was the acceptance of all that. It was said once and for all, and that was it.

I had a feeling that I had escaped. I was wearing those cowboy shirts. Our hair grew a little longer. And it was 1973 or so. It was really good.

Alice
was a way of trying to find another way, really—could I make
genre films in Hollywood? It was something like a vehicle, like a
Bette Davis vehicle, or a
Joan Crawford vehicle. I enjoyed Bette Davis films, like
Mr. Skeffington.
So I felt this would be a way of embracing the genre.

I knew
Ellen Burstyn as an actor, and
Diane Ladd, and all the other people in the picture—they were of the New York school of acting. It was very close to what Harvey and De Niro and I had been working with. I felt, after meeting her, that
we could deal with improvisations within Getchell’s work, but also at times out of it. Again, it was very inspired by Cassavetes’s pictures.

RS:
Really? Superficially, it doesn’t seem to have his kind of improvisatory roughness.

MS:
But it does—very much so. Especially the last third of the picture: a lot of improvs, between Ellen and
Kris Kristofferson, and Diane Ladd. It’s a problem, because people don’t understand the interplay of improvisation and script in some films. Getchell’s work was great in it. But there were times we were able to open up and take off, and then come back.

RS:
A lot of your characters in one way or another are kind of obsessive folks. And she, in her little way, is kind of obsessive. She really wants to be a singer. Then you hear her sing. Well, she’s fine, but she’s not great.

MS:
No, but for a lounge singer, she’s not bad. For lounge singing, it was, you know, better than whatever the hell else she was doing, she felt. And she had this dream to get in a car and take off. The first meeting I had with Ellen, we talked about the possibility of her divorcing the man.

And then I said, Well, no, if you divorce him, you’ve already made a step. You’ve already expressed yourself consciously. Here God comes in and takes him away. Now what do you do? Well, you have the kid. Okay. You can still deal with the kid, to a certain extent. But do you want to stay in this town? There’s nothing for you in the town. You might as well leave.

Ellen Burstyn visits Marty on the set of
Taxi Driver
in 1975.