Financial Times, 30 October 2009
It’s just as well that the couch I’m sitting on is plump and hospitable or I might have fallen off it when Martin Scorsese tells me that the real inspiration for the tone and voice of Goodfellas was not Scarface or Public Enemy, but Kind Hearts and Coronets. Oh, right, Alec Guinness in drag, Joe Pesci in murderous hysterics, I see. But then, when you think about it for a minute, the revelation makes perfect sense. The note of black glee in Ray Liotta’s interior monologues (‘As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster’) is not that far away from Dennis Price’s cool plan to murder his way into the landed class that presumes to despise him. They share the smirk of superior knowledge, the contempt for the chumps who do things the regular way. Mayhem and chuckling are never far apart in either the British post-war comedies or Scorsese’s opera of mischief. Stick a fedora on Dennis Price or Alastair Sim, unclip the accent and they could breeze downtown. The wiseguys in Goodfellas spend even more time laughing than killing. Sometimes the uproar is so unhinged that it looks like de Niro, Liotta and Pesci will dislocate their jaws, like pythons guffawing as they digest a goat.
In his sixties, Scorsese is at the height of his powers, which is saying something. After a long day in the cutting room working on a pilot for a television drama series about Prohibition-era Atlantic City, his conversation is still high-octane, the enthusiasms sparks, that catch the weighty pack of his idea-loaded imagination. Lately, he’s got a lot to be happy about. His new movie, Shutter Island, based on a thriller by Dennis Lehane, scheduled for release early in 2010, is set in an institution for the criminally insane off the Massachusetts coast, a pile that makes the hotel in The Shining or Motel Bates look like day-trips to Disneyland. Scorsese built the set around the shell of the old hospital. The gurneys were still there, the stainless steel of the cafeteria giving off a bad glint. ‘You walked in and you could feel it, the disturbance,’ he says. Ben Kingsley and Leonardo di Caprio (doing most of his own stunts) stalk and scuttle through it like cat and rat, and the storm-blasted island turns in a performance of thunderously Calvinist gloom. If there were an Oscar for best acting role by a landscape, Shutter Island would be a shoo-in. For the first time Scorsese had to work with those pesky extras, trees. ‘Never worked in a forest before. Hard to get the shots, no room for dollies and tracks.’ In many ways the movie, a crazy quilt of dreams and terrors, was a tall order. A week into filming the director realised what he was up against, the fiendishly complicated layering of Lehane’s story asking him to ‘make three films at the same time’. Maybe Scorsese works best when most stretched, for the result of all the perfectionist head-scratching and pitch-in ensemble acting is a triumph of what you might call heavy entertainment, but only in the sense that bits of King Lear are too.
And like everything Martin Scorsese does, Shutter Island is enriched by its director’s encylopaedic memory of the cinema. Nothing so laborious as ‘homage’ gets inserted; there are no billboarded visual quotations, but it’s as though Scorsese has internalised the entire history of the medium, turning himself into a one-man archive on which he can draw for inspiration in whichever genre he happens to be working. Sometimes even the admirers forget his astounding range. The same director who made the agonised Raging Bull and the manic, temple-pounding Bringing Out the Dead also made the exquisitely patient Kundun, the camera letting a small boy come at his own pace to the realisation of what it meant to be the Dalai Lama. The guiding light of Satyajit Ray seemed to be at Scorsese’s shoulder when he dissolved the camera into the chosen boy’s point of view. So which movies guided him this time? ‘Oh, for the atmospherics, the way of setting mood: Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and Out of the Past,’ he says, as if I was bound to know all about the work of Jacques Tourneur. Caught out like an undergraduate claiming to have ‘looked’ at the assignment rather than actually to have done it, I make a quick hit on YouTube after our meeting and there are the Tourneur films, moodily off-kilter, tautly scripted, nagging little shards in the psyche.
This total immersion works curatorially. Scorsese doesn’t just make individual movies, chasing box-office and the annual-award madness, though he’d be inhuman not to want both. But he has always felt lucky to be able to work in the art to which he’s been addicted since, as a bronchial altar boy, he sat bewitched in the Saturday-morning movie theatre darkness, or watching on black-and-white television (as I did an ocean away in London) Alexander Korda costume movies like The Private Life of Henry VIII or David Lean’s Great Expectations, in which John Mills was scared pipless by Magwitch and Jean Simmons as Estella stomped on our balls even before we had any.
Never taking this good fortune for granted (it was an outrageously long time before The Movies finally returned the favour with Oscars), Scorsese has done everything he could to look after the memory bank. He has been a major force in the conservation and restoration of decaying and damaged film; devoting special care to films which meant a lot to his own education as student and practitioner. Olivier’s Richard III he first saw in a black-and-white television broadcast, but it was shot in a process called VistaVision, and he is currently restoring a surviving print to its original splendour. The winter of discontent will never look so sunny. Meanwhile, the ‘crawl’ that opens the film, ‘England, 1485 . . .’ etc., sits in his personal treasure trove in New York along with the Red Shoes from Michael Powell’s masterpiece. In between feature films he and his long-time friend and editor-collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker, who was married to Powell and whose perfect touch is all over Shutter Island, are putting together a documentary chronicle of the British cinema from the late 1940s to the gritty neo-realist films of the early ’60s: Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Tony Richardson’s Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life. Like his Italian documentary, the work will be unapologetically personal and when I hear him summon up the shade of Ian Carmichael (I’m Alright Jack is a favourite), the improbability of the young Scorsese, spending time in the world of the Lawrentian slagheaps and the two-ups, two-downs, strikes me all over again. But for Scorsese, the fried eggs and rolled-down nylons, footy in the smoke and puke in the pubs, brought a scuffed-up truth of documentary realism to Ealing, Pinewood and Elstree, much as Rossellini, de Sica and Visconti did for the fantasy world of Italian films. He may be the only director who can invoke Rocco and His Brothers and This Sporting Life in the same sentence, as if it were obvious they were rivers flowing into the same deep sea of social drama. Talking about them, I have a presumptuous hunch and wonder out loud if the bone-crunching sound track of the rugby-league movie, with Richard Harris’s skull smashing against other mangled faces, had any influence on the way Scorsese recorded and shot the boxing devastation of de Niro’s Jake la Motta in Raging Bull? A pause. Ever the tactful gent, he replies, ‘Maybe, yes, maybe!’
Sure. But generosity comes naturally to Scorsese. So it shouldn’t be surprising that he agreed to participate in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative – one of a group (other distinguished mentors work in theatre, literature, dance, music and the visual arts) – that gives younger artists the opportunity to learn something about their vocation by directly experiencing a work-in-progress. (Stephen Frears was a Rolex Mentor in 2008.) The lucky young director who got to spend precious time, months of it, with Scorsese at work on Shutter Island is Celina Murgan, an Argentinian with two films already on her résumé. Scorsese chose her from a shortlist of three, impressed by a film she had made about teenagers doing their thing in a gated community after the parents had gone. ‘I sat there, and around twenty-five minutes into it, I realised this was something; that, almost casually, she had created a world that already seemed to have been there, no starting, no stopping.’ A benevolent chuckle and ‘Of course that’s a different sensibility, not the way I work, but . . .’ And it was exactly because he does things differently, generates the worlds he creates out of the plot, that Scorsese, so open to other ways, picked his lucky protégé. Murgan got to go to the shoot of Shutter Island as often as she wanted and must have seen the toughest of movie-making challenges bloom into something extraordinary; the actors reaching hard; the director revising and revising again as things went along. Could she talk about particular shots? ‘Sure, sometimes, to the assistant director.’ She was welcomed to the cutting room, to the sound mix and, exceptionally, even to rushes – ‘not always . . . I like to speak freely to Thelma’.
There’s a back story to this great gift. Murgan – and many others, it turns out – are getting the chance that the young Scorsese was himself denied. In the 1960s, a young film student in NYU School of the Arts, Scorsese badly wanted to get experience first-hand from a master. Elia Kazan – whose On the Waterfront and East of Eden were just the kind of epics of social pain he revered – was visiting the school. Scorsese, script in hand, made an appointment. He arrived ten minutes late at the great man’s office. Kazan had his coat on, listened to the young enthusiast, riffled cursorily through the script and wished him luck. Indies hardly existed in New York, other than John Cassavetes’s company that produced Shadows. There was nowhere to go and no one to help a novice through an apprenticeship. Scorsese, without any ill will, thought at that moment, ‘If ever I was in Kazan’s position, I’d do something to help.’ So starting with Taxi Driver, he brought novices onto the set, sometimes youngsters with absolutely no experience of film-making beforehand, and into the crew as apprentices, ‘So long as they didn’t get in the way of the actors and knew when not to speak up.’ Some of them decided film wasn’t for them, but others began their career this way and went on to make good features and stay in touch. I’d never heard of such a thing, directors normally being ruthless about keeping ‘outsiders’ away from the set. But Scorsese was, and is, different. He makes outsiders insiders and all he asks for is rapt attentiveness. So, I ask him, which films after Taxi Driver did he open to this kind of apprenticeship. ‘All of them,’ he says. ‘Anyone else do this kind of thing that you know of?’ Scorsese smiles, shrugs.
Which only reminds me that to spend any time with him is to be in the presence of someone for whom his hard craft is an exacting labour of love. He burns with the anxiety and pleasure of that knowledge like a perpetually glowing coal. And some lucky people get to draw close to the warmth. His ten-year-old daughter Francesca, for example, to whom he’s showing the British comedies of the 1950s that still fill him with delight. ‘Does she get it, the wickedness?’ I ask. ‘Oh, The Ladykillers, she and her friends they all love it. There’s this moment when there’s a fight going on and the little old lady comes in and they stop fighting! They stop!’ Scorsese laughs like the connoisseur of mischief that he is – and like the ten-year-old he once was, watching that malarkey unfold for the first time. One thing is for certain; he’s the perpetuum mobile; he doesn’t do stop.