Conversations with Scorsese (29 page)

RICHARD SCHICKEL:
Is there any way you can relate
Taxi Driver
or
Raging Bull
to
The King of Comedy,
which is ostensibly less terrifying—though not necessarily to me.

MARTIN SCORSESE:
It’s about violation. It’s the way
paparazzi shoot pictures of you—not me, but certain actors. It’s an attack. The flashes and the shutters of the cameras are bullets. You see that in
Raging Bull.
The ring is like a bullfight. There the fighter is. Everything is being photographed.

King of Comedy
was really scary. Bob De Niro gave me that script when I was doing
Alice,
I think, and I didn’t get it. I just thought
Paul Zimmerman, who did the script, was a wonderful writer. The script is hilarious. But I thought the movie was just a one-line gag: You won’t let me go on the show, so I’ll kidnap you and you’ll put me on the show. Hmm. After I took
Alice, Taxi Driver, New York, New York,
and
Raging Bull
around the world to different festivals, I took a look at the script again and I had a different take on it. I began to understand what Bob’s association with it was, what he went through after
Mean Streets,
certainly after
Godfather II—
the adulation of the crowd, and the strangers who love you and have got to be with you and have got to say things.

I once wrote
Elia Kazan a note asking if I could be an assistant on his set of
The Arrangement.
I got to meet him for two minutes, because he had come to NYU to speak. He said, No, I don’t take assistants. It’s a good thing he didn’t. I would have been thrown out the first minute. I would have asked, Why are you doing that? Can I see this? When I got to know him later, it was all measured and proper.

RS:
Is what you’re saying that admiration can quite easily cross the line into a dangerous sort of identification and intrusiveness, the whole sad, sick side of our dysfunctional celebrity system?

MS:
The person you identify with, admire, and love—at a certain point, the adulation goes past all bounds. It goes to a level that could go any which way. It can go violent. They can embrace you. They could take you home. That’s what I think Bob was understanding.

RS:
I think it’s among your most disturbing films.

MS:
It’s very upsetting. It was really unpleasant to shoot, in part because I had pneumonia again when I finished mixing
Raging Bull.
Then Bob said, Let’s do this. I said, Yeah, I’d really like to do it, I understand it.

By the time I got to shoot it, I found that I didn’t like dealing with the story; it was so unpleasant and disturbing, it crossed so many lines that normally divide private and public lives. And I wasn’t a pro. I don’t know if I am a pro today. You know,
Michael Curtiz could do a picture in four weeks, five weeks,
Sam Fuller could do it,
Ida Lupino did it. But these were real pros, besides being, I think, some of the most extraordinary artists. Every day they’d be there at a certain time, they’d be there before the crew, they’d be there before the actors, fighting through whatever problems a shot or scene presented. I found I couldn’t do that.

I learned a lot about what a pro is through
Jerry Lewis, who explained it to me. Immersed in the subject matter, and seeing how much it was going to affect me, I couldn’t bring myself to really move quickly. The first night of shooting was the scene with Jerry coming out of the stage door, being mobbed by fans and winding up in a car with Rupert [De Niro]. Two nights go by, I don’t use Jerry. I got bogged down in other things, was dragging my feet. On the third night, I got a message that Jerry would like to talk to me. I had said a couple of things to Jerry the night before—asked how he was doing and that kind of stuff. But he was pretty much in his trailer from eight at night until seven in the morning, and I couldn’t go in his trailer, he always smoked at the time. So he came to mine. He said, Listen, we’re about to do the scene. I know we’ll probably get to it tonight. I’m the consummate pro. You tell me to be here at a certain time, then you want me to wait, I’ll do that. You’re paying for my time. The only thing is now, after two nights of it, I have to
ask you, If you think at a certain point in the night that you’re not going to get to me, could you let me know? I mean, I could go home early then. I said, Of course. I never thought of it. I had been completely selfish. I had wanted all my toys so I could play with them. And here was this pro.

I’m not saying Bob De Niro was not a pro. But the thing about Bob and me, we were kind of like siblings in a way. What we did was make movies together. By extension, I just thought we were making my movie, and everybody would wait on me—a complete megalomaniac.

RS:
In that film there are a couple of scenes that I call cringe scenes. Actually, I have to stop the film, go and get a cup of coffee, and then come back to it. One is where he—

MS:
Shows up at the house.

RS:
Well, that’s the big one. But there’s also the scene with Jerry’s assistant in his office. You know, “You can just leave the tape,” she says. “No, I think I’ll stay,” he says.

MS:
Shelley Hack, who does that, she’s great.

RS:
She is the woman we run into every time we go in to pitch a book or a movie or whatever.

MS:
But she’s right. Within the context of what she’s doing, she’s right. The kid doesn’t understand it, and he won’t take it. De Niro and I had been mining each other for years, maybe not understanding it, not being articulate about it, but by the time we were into
King of Comedy,
we didn’t know where to stop mining. So there were sometimes twenty-five, sometimes forty takes. For me it was a comedy of manners, walking the fine line between love and hostility. The key line is when she says, We think it’s interesting. What you should do now is go home, work on the act, get it edited, do some more work, and then bring it back.

And De Niro says, Well, what about Jerry? And she says, I’m telling you that that’s what you have to do. She starts to go, and he stops her and says, Excuse me, are you speaking for Jerry? It took twenty-six takes. One had more hostility between them. One was not hostile at all. One had smiles. One was without smiles.

We found it excruciating in a way. We also drew upon a lot of things. There was some improvisation in the picture, like between Margo
Winkler, Irwin’s wife, as the receptionist. We thought it was like when you’re younger and you go to the
William Morris Agency, and you become friends with a receptionist. And they had a relationship, so we improvised with that. Then, when he gets thrown out by a security guy and the embarrassment, the humiliation of that.

RS:
Some of it really is grotesque.

MS:
There is a part of it that’s grotesque, you’re right about that. But I was trying to capture something. As I was making the film, I realized that a part of me was in that story, and I was forced to confront it. I look back now and I realize why I couldn’t make
King of Comedy
back in 1975 when De Niro first gave it to me. I was too close to it. I didn’t understand it. And I haven’t seen it since I made it. It’s too embarrassing.

RS:
“Embarrassing” seems to me like the wrong word.

MS:
Not embarrassing. It’s—

RS:
It gives you the creepy crawlies.

MS:
Yes, it’s very unsettling.

RS:
At the risk of repeating ourselves, I’ve got to say that’s really true of that scene with Irwin’s wife, Margo, playing the receptionist, not letting the young comic past the gates.

MS:
That scene
is
great. It took days. I just couldn’t get through it. It took six, seven days to shoot. It was scheduled for two and a half days, and it could have been done in that time. But there was something … For example, in the case of the receptionist relationship: If you’re trying to get to see Jerry, you have to get past the elevator operator. And then the receptionist and then Jerry’s assistant.

RS:
What you’re saying, I guess, is that there are a lot of subtleties in a seemingly simple scene, a lot of undercurrents the characters themselves aren’t fully aware of.

MS:
It was so sad. The poor guy wants to get in there. He can’t get past her. He tries to make himself likable and yet there’s all this extraordinary violence and hostility in him. I can articulate all that now. I couldn’t articulate it then.

RS:
I can imagine why it was very difficult for you to do.

MS:
Oh, it was awful for me, as I said.

RS:
But it’s interesting, that he, too, like Travis Bickle, gets rewarded for his antisocial behavior.

MS:
Turn on TV. That’s part of our culture that is just totally accepted. People have a hard time with
drugs, go to rehab, then it’s all over—forgiving magazine covers and everything else. Our values have gotten skewed. I don’t feel comfortable anymore—and probably never did—with the values of our society.

I mean, I’m a self-centered, selfish person. When I make my films, it’s like
Frank Capra said, a disease. It’s not an excuse, either. But I find that I miss those values—the firm lines drawn between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Maybe I’m just getting older and more conservative [
laughs
], but I think in the early eighties, I began to notice the cult of celebrity. And I like making fun of it. It’s why I like the
Letterman
show, for example. It has a great deal of tough, ironic humor.

Psychotic fan Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro) finally fully entraps Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis), the star he’s been stalking in
The King of Comedy
(1982), Scorsese’s thoroughly creepy meditation on the celebrity system.

RS:
The scene where they invade Jerry’s house, I mean, honest to God, for a minute there I thought it was going to be a fantasy scene. It took me a minute to realize it was actually happening.

MS:
It’s important you say that. You know why you feel that way? Because I made a clear decision when I decided to make the picture to create no difference between the fantasies and the reality. Because if things are going on in your mind, and you can’t go to sleep, and you’re going over discussions and arguments, it’s real. It’s really happening. You can rewind. You can erase. The fantasy is real. You want to be a filmmaker, you want to be an actor, you know, it’s palpable. It’s there. It’s tangible. It’s not a ripply dissolve.

RS:
Was that hard to do, that scene?

MS:
Not for the actors. I was the one who was not getting up to speed. The scene was only scheduled for three or four days and went for seven, because there was something so grating and so upsetting, and so irritating and so embarrassing, I just couldn’t do it. Luckily we had some very understanding producers.

RS:
As I say, I can watch
Jake LaMotta, because I never met Jake LaMotta, know nothing of his world. But I do live somewhat in the world of the Rupert Pupkins and Jerrys, and those people. So I have an instant kind of embarrassed understanding …

MS:
I also was interested in television in the 1950s
—Broadway Open House,
Jerry Lester and
Dagmar. The great
Steve Allen, who would have amazing guests on, or then
Jack Paar, along with
Your Show of Shows
with
Sid Caesar and
Carl Reiner and
Imogene Coca. It was a golden age, I thought, of American television. And we possessed those people. We loved them. If we saw them on the street, it was as if we’d been conversing with them all our lives. And a couple of friends of mine who were students at NYU were also into that world; they worked on the Paar show.

I used to try to get into television with them, and do some game shows and things like that. I soon realized it wasn’t for me professionally, but Jack Paar’s psyche out there at night, though it lacked the drama that was going on inside that man, was still fascinating. I was very much into that world, and we’d talk about it, and that’s why we ultimately came to the decision to cast Jerry Lewis if he would do the picture, because who’d better represent the night talk show host? The thing about it, of course, is that Jerry is the comedian, the actor, singer, cabaret performer, director, talk show host, guest—he did everything in that era.