Conversations with Scorsese (41 page)

What I’m saying here is that I never really was able to focus on how much of the story I wanted to tell, how much the story of that area reflected the overall city, the growth of New York, the growth of America. When I got together with Jay Cocks in the seventies and started working on it, Jay came up with a very beautiful script. It was almost like a novel: 179 pages. At that point, though, I was going through
New York, New York,
I was going through
The Last Waltz,
I was going through my own difficulties. I came out the other side through
Raging Bull,
even though I had thought I was going to come out of it with
Gangs of New York.
Maybe that was good, because I still hadn’t gotten my hands around what Jay’s story was, I couldn’t quite grasp it. We became very influenced by the way Fellini did
Satyricon.
He said to
Danilo Donati, his great costume designer, “We’re walking in the streets of Rome and we lift one of the stones on the street, and underneath you see crawling around the ancient Romans.” Fellini said about
Satyricon,
“It’s science fiction in reverse.” And there’s a similar thing with aspects of [Sergio] Leone’s
Once Upon a Time in the West.
All these styles were converging in our minds, and there are aspects of them in
Gangs.

It eventually straightened itself out about 1990, when Jay and I worked on the script again and shaped it down to the story of Bill the Butcher and the young boy, Amsterdam, whose father Bill murdered and who wants to gain revenge. Then we came up with the idea that, for some reason, he can’t kill Bill. But we knew that at the end we had to have the
Draft Riots, and we moved the killing of Bill back to that part of the story. We made all kinds of adjustments—streamlining the story, developing set pieces depicting the anthropology of the time, the way people lived. There had to be, for instance, a scene in which there was a theater riot. Because there were theater riots all the time. The working class and the gangs had no recourse to newspapers, so they all showed up at the theater to make themselves heard. There was a famous
Astor Place riot where something like a dozen bystanders were killed.

RS:
You’ve said to me that however horrendously you portrayed those times in your movie, you can’t touch the reality of it.

MS:
No. Even Dickens, when he came here, in his
American Notes,
said it was worse than anything in the East End of
London. And I don’t think we can even begin to fathom what it must have been like, what was going on in those cellars, in
those caves below the streets—the pure evil of that criminal life. There were tunnels under 253 Elizabeth Street.

RS:
Really?

MS:
They’re probably closed off now. But if you go into what used to be old Chinatown, there are still sweatshops below the ground.

RS:
I had no idea—

MS:
You can go there. Jay will tell you, he went with a policeman one night, because he was doing research on something and they took him through these sweatshops—illegal immigrants working there. I mean, that’s a very old part of the city. It’s filled with all these things.

What if you were really poor and there was no money, there was no work? The girls were dying at fifteen, drunk and having been prostitutes at twelve years old. People were just being washed away like garbage in that world.

That world was also reflected in the politics of the time, with
Boss Tweed and others. So we had to fit those characters in, ending with the
Draft Riots, which destroyed a lot of the city. Soldiers came in, howitzers were used. The soldiers had just fought at Gettysburg, you know. Nobody knows how many were killed in the riots.

RS:
It seems to me that
Gangs
is harmed in a curious way by its greatest scene, which is that huge fight—

MS:
—at the beginning. That was in the script from the very beginning in 1979. You never know where you are, and then finally you realize it’s New York City.

RS:
That fight is one of the great sequences—

MS:
—and maybe we never topped it.

RS:
That’s what I was going to say. The Draft Riots just can’t compare to that fantastic scene.

MS:
Yeah, I know. But as I said, when it came to the Draft Riots, there were tensions with the money. We had focused on violence at the Colored Orphans Asylum in the script and then we couldn’t shoot it. That’s not an excuse; we just didn’t have the dough, and we had to drop it, and it’s therefore flawed. Maybe we should have shot the Draft Riots differently. But somehow it fell together that way, and that’s all we were able to get. We knew it all had to end in some sort of conflagration of the whole city, like the volcano erupting in
The Last Days of Pompeii.
We did not get enough of that done.

RS:
Whereas I’ve never seen anything better than that opening.

MS:
That was shot at the end of January 2001, and after that, the money ran out. The studio said to just finish up the movie. I’m not blaming them. If I had planned it differently, if I’d rewritten it right, we could have done more. But I took a chance. I wanted to get the opening the way I wanted it, and the pagoda scene, too—the center of the film. That had been shot around Christmas 2000. I knew we would have to fill in the rest and try to get as much of the Draft Riots as possible.

RS:
Is it right to say that intensely action-oriented scenes are much better done in a limited area, and that the Draft Riots are—

MS:
Massive.

RS:
So that’s almost an endemic problem in doing the Draft Riots?

MS:
Right. We had specific incidents—it is all very well documented. But we were only able to shoot a few. That’s not an excuse—we chose them. We had to have the elephant go by, for example.

RS:
Right!

MS:
Harvey Weinstein was very funny about that. At a certain point he said, “Marty, out of these ten scenes, we can only afford three. What do you want to do?” I said, “Three, okay.” But I squeezed another two out of him. He turned to me and said, “Okay. You can have the elephant, although we don’t really need the elephant.” I said, “Yes, we do, because it’s probably the most surreal shot.” When
Barnum’s Circus blew up and the animals were running in the streets [an event that occurred two years later but was incorporated into the film]. Can you imagine? But it reminded me of the bombings of Berlin in ’45, when the zoo was hit and the animals ran out. Civilization in Berlin was gone. That’s what it must’ve felt like in the Draft Riots.

RS:
Earlier, you said this was manifestly a movie you just had to do. You said it reflects the history of your people—

MS:
Well, New York. And how it reflected the country overall. As I did more research over the years, people kept saying that if
democracy didn’t work in New York, it wasn’t going to work anywhere else in the country. Urban areas such as Philadelphia and Boston had similar gangs and troubles.

RS:
I know you sometimes develop scripts for many long years, everyone does. But this one seemed to go on forever. Maybe it’s just because I knew Jay so well. I think the first time I ever met him I asked, “What are you doing?” And he said,
“Oh, I’m working with Marty on
Gangs of New York.
” And thirty years go by and he’s still—

MS:
It’s a good point. I don’t think I ever wanted to finish it.

RS:
Really? Why?

MS:
I was obsessed with the story of the city. There were so many wonderful elements to it, so many anecdotes, different characters, so much I wanted to show. It just never settled satisfactorily in my mind. I felt I had to sacrifice too much of all that, and I never felt comfortable about it.

RS:
Is it fair to say, no matter how much money you had, how much time you had, that it just had to be some kind of giant epic?

MS:
Yes. It would have been a good five-hour picture. It’s not that odd today. People see things in two parts. There are television shows like that. I mean,
The Sopranos
goes on and on and you have an almost endless film, really. People like that.

RS:
But
Gangs
was conceived before the possibility of doing a
Sopranos
-like development, which might have satisfied you better.

MS:
It
would
have satisfied me more. When television films started to be made in the sixties, especially things like
Don Siegel’s
The Killers,
we thought they would explore character: there would be a chance to do a twelve-hour film when needed. But it became a different medium. And, in a sense, not a director’s medium.

RS:
I was thinking of something like
Rome
on HBO.

MS:
Yes, exactly.

RS:
That has the sweep, and it’s telling the story of that particular place and time.

MS:
Or
I,
Claudius
on the
BBC. That would have been ideal for
Gangs of New York.
You’d just have to conceive the picture differently, like a television film where you shoot ten pages a day. I mean, the amount of money that was going into the costumes, the shooting, the extras, bringing people in from Ireland and from England—this could only go on for a certain amount of time. You have to be incredibly schedule-conscious.

But I still have part of my mind back in the seventies—when you were able to do an epic film, maybe a three-hour film, and the marketplace accepted it.
Apocalypse Now,
for instance. That’s what I had in mind. I think
The Departed
is longer, actually.

RS:
It is.

MS:
There’s nothing that I cut out of
Gangs of New York
that I would want to put back in the picture. Whatever I cut out I did better in another movie anyway. It’s just very simply, as I said, that I never finished the script.

RS:
It’s almost as if you get trapped in projects. You want desperately to make a given film. You keep thinking of compromises that could get it made. But there’s some part of you that doesn’t want to make those compromises, you hold on to some unrealizable dream.

MS:
Yes. There’s no doubt of that. I mean, you actually said it. The other thing is that at that point we were able to do it, we were able to actually build a lower Manhattan in Rome, where we shot. And it behooved me to try to find a way to pull it together.

RS:
Absolutely.

MS:
Or at least, Part One. In my mind it was sort of like Part One. In a way, whether it’s good, bad, or indifferent. There are some interesting scenes.

RS:
There’s a lot of good acting in the movie.

MS:
The acting is wonderful.

RS:
Particularly by
Daniel Day-Lewis.

MS:
He’s great. I loved him in
There Will Be Blood.
He was amazing. At first, I didn’t even know it was him.

RS:
Those last minutes in the bowling alley are beyond the beyond. [It’s a scene in which Daniel Day-Lewis—playing perhaps the most misanthropic character in film history—bloodily beats to death the preacher-son of his longtime business rival.] I’ve never seen anything quite like it in a movie. You’re following this interesting story and then suddenly this outburst of insanity happens.

MS:
I went with it, you know. It’s pretty wild.

RS:
It’s astonishing. I said to Day-Lewis when I met him, “I’ve just never seen anything like it. I couldn’t imagine where that came from.” And he said, “It’s funny, my mother said the same thing to me.”

MS:
They asked me to do the Q and A for an event in New York with
Paul Thomas Anderson. There was only one other movie from my generation about oil discovery
—Giant.
And I said, I guess for your generation it’s more
Chinatown.
He goes, “No, no, it was
Giant.
” He had seen
Giant
a number of times and loved it. And I said what I love about the picture is that it eschews the epic conflagration at the end which seems like it always has to happen.

RS:
Right.

MS:
In
Giant
there is this great scene where Jett Rink [James Dean] is fighting with
Rock Hudson in the basement of the hotel, where he gets drunk and all the shelves collapse. And then, of course, the fight in Sarge’s restaurant.

RS:
That’s a great scene. It’s corny as hell.

MS:
It’s corny as hell and he loses the fight. Anyway, what was interesting here is that instead of exploding, the scene implodes. In this ridiculous bowling alley!

RS:
A mansion having a bowling alley—it’s almost the ultimate in conspicuous consumption.

MS:
Oh, boy.