Mr. Scorsese (2025) s01e02 Episode Script

1
I knew I could
express myself with pictures,
but you don't make movies
where I came from.
All the filmmaking was in California.
So that's what I did.
In my late 20s, I went off to Hollywood.
Marty was so driven
when he was young.
He was absolutely--
He had to get there.
Not very relaxed at all.
I mean he really had a mission,
and he was gonna get there
if it killed him.
So, he was sometimes not easy
to be around for that reason.
And I thought maybe
the home would be
Los Angeles, California, Hollywood.
But I found myself ostracized from it.
I found myself on the outside.
There were a lot of people
I wanted to work with
but basically, you know,
it was, "Keep away."
Themes that he gravitates toward
what would you say they are
across genres?
I think one of them is
underdogs trying to score.
Wall Street had swallowed me up,
and shit me right back out again.
Whether it's that guy
with the coke and the stock market,
Wolf of Wall Street.
A gangster trying to make it big.
The kid in Kundun.
I mean, they're all long-shot underdogs.
- Would you be my agent?
- No.
Okay, boy, say goodbye to your father.
And they're willing to do almost anything
to become big shots.
It's about him.
He's the underdog striving
to become a movie director.
This is it.
What price did he pay,
socially and personally,
to make the life
he made for himself as a filmmaker?
I mean, I don't know.
But it's you know, you do pay a price.
Y'all get on the floor fast.
I shot Boxcar Bertha in the fall of '71.
I said, hit the ground.
I showed the film
to a number of my close friends,
but my friends didn't like it.
It's as if I had caught
a disease or something.
Showed it to Cassavetes,
and he goes, "What are you doing?"
"You're not meant to be
making films like that."
And so Marty abandoned his plans
to make I Escaped from Devil's Island.
And he decided to make a movie,
from his heart.
And I said, "What if you take
characters I am interested in?"
The darker edges, I guess, you would say.
"What if I can do the kind of story
I wanna tell and push it to the edge?"
With Marty, there was an inner turmoil.
And film, was the perfect, sort of,
you know, sump pump.
To get it out of his system.
It was 1972, and I was trying
to get Mean Streets made.
I still had Mean Streets in a kind of
Neverland, in a way.
In my mind it wasn't really a film.
It was some sort of representation
of who I was, and my friends,
and myself, and the world I came from.
My wife, Verna,
introduced Marty to someone
who helped finance Mean Streets,
Jon Taplin.
He was a Princeton dropout
who went on the road
with Janis Joplin and The Band.
He had a friend
with some inherited money
who was looking to finance
an independent film.
But Marty needed
an actor that people would know
and he had an actor, who was a friend,
that kind of, was interested in doing it.
That was Bruce Dern.
But, Bruce's agent told him,
"Absolutely not. You shouldn't do it,
because this is an independent film,
and it's gonna go nowhere."
Nobody made independent films
at that time, except for John Cassavetes
and mostly independent films were pornos.
Marty had to find an actor
and my wife Verna
was in a play at Lincoln Center
with this, wonderful young guy.
So, they said,
"Yeah, you gotta meet this guy."
I said, "Who is he?"
I had done Bang the Drum Slowly,
The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight.
I had done two De Palma movies,
Greetings, and Hi, Mom!
So, we had this little party
in our railroad flat.
He's an actor, he wants to be a director,
something'll happen.
Marty was his usual self.
You know, making jokes,
and Bob sat in the corner like this
watching Marty.
You could sense something happening
between these two guys.
And we were sitting there,
after dinner, in this little living room,
and De Niro looked over at me and said,
"I know you, you used to hang out
with Curti"
That's Robert Uricola,
"and Joey so-and-so."
And I said, "Well, you know,
how do you know them?"
He goes, "I'm so-and-so.
I'm Bobby from Grand Street."
I said, 'cause he looks different,
and I said,
"Oh, my God, that's you. It's amazing!"
You gonna take both of them? Madonna mi--
You're gonna take them?
You know what they're gonna do to you?
You know what you do,
when you knock somebody off?
You take a gun, you shoot him
right up against his fucking head.
We used to call him
"Bobby the Hat" at that time.
He always had these hats on.
He loved wearing hats.
And we became good friends.
We hung out together.
It's interesting to me,
because you were an artists' son.
I hung I just somehow found myself
hanging out there with them,
when I was a teenager.
I just I just hung out there.
Curti, we were over,
right across the street,
sometimes you'd sit
right on the railing here.
Then we were in the Alto Knights
most of the time.
The Alto Knights is right there, right?
That was a social club that
we hung out in on Kenmare and Mulberry.
That was the main place
that we all stood, as they say.
You mean actually stood, or that's--
No, no, that's an expression.
- Okay.
- "We stood there."
We used to play double-deck pinochle.
- And we'd blast the jukebox
- Yeah.
We used to shoot pool
I remember, we hung there
for a couple of years.
Yeah, a long time.
But, you got into that,
with the pool hall with Frank Pisano.
- It was a fight we had in Kingston
- Yeah
- And you was
- In the pool hall.
And like a thousand guys
came out of the woodwork.
We said, "Bobby, forget about it.
There's like a thousand guys over here."
There were bats and everything,
and I said, "Let's go."
I hung out a block or two away from Marty.
And Robert was a go-between.
He hung out with us and he hung out
with Marty's crew, if you will, so
And I knew Marty.
I mean, walk by and you'd wave.
So, he knew all the people
- Yeah.
- that I made the films about.
Marty told me when he was doing the movie,
it's based on Sally Gaga.
My God. Jesus.
Was that Robert Uricola's brother?
Yeah.
- Your brother, Sally
- Yes.
was a famous character.
Yeah, he was an important character
in Mean Streets.
Johnny Boy is based on him.
Sarah, Sarah Klein right?
Sarah Klein, this is Tony.
- And this is what? What's your name?
- Heather.
Heather, Heather Weintraub, right?
The Johnny Boy character
was a combination of my uncle
and this other young boy
that we were friends with.
But he was remarkable.
He was remarkable
in his attitude towards life.
If you don't mind, young lady,
I would like to check these.
But I'm keeping my
He's a young, kind of,
adolescent rebel, in a way.
Got a new tie, got this shirt.
You like the shirt?
What are ya comin' out going shoppin'
when you owe somebody money, Johnny?
That ain't right.
- What are you talkin'
- How much you got there?
Charlie, I'm gonna pay him next week.
I'm gonna pay him!
What are you worrying?
Almost like a satiric comic, in a way.
- What's this?
- What's what?
- This?
- What?
That, what does this look like?
What?
- Where'd you get this?
- What?
- Where'd you get this?
- Where?
- This?
- What?
Because he was like a cowboy, in a sense.
You didn't know what he was gonna do.
Was he gonna obey the rules, you know?
You know, there are rules and,
you know, so, he wasn't
exactly the kind of guy
that would obey the rules.
And he had his own direction in life
- Johnny!
- that he wanted to take.
It's me, Charlie!
Hey, watch this. I'm gonna shoot
the light on the Empire State Building.
Hey, cut it out, stupid. It's me!
We appreciated the rebelliousness.
We were locked in. I couldn't say a word.
Best thing I could do
is go hide out in a church.
- He got away with things that
- Yes.
I don't know how anybody could,
in that world.
- Come on.
- Hey, don't fucking touch me, scumbag.
I love Sally. One time,
we had a pigeon coop on Elizabeth Street.
This guy had a pigeon coop on Mott Street.
You know, a wise guy, I should say.
Sally Gaga got a cherry bomb
and taped it to the pigeon,
lit it and threw it up in the air,
and the bird blew up in the air.
Get the fuck
How did he not get killed?
That's right, that's true,
this really happened.
- I wish we could meet him.
- Well, you know, I'll call him.
Oh, is he still alive?
- Salvatore?
- Yeah, what's up?
We're gonna make you a star.
They'd like to meet you, Salvatore.
The director, Rebecca Miller,
would love to meet you.
What do you wanna meet me for?
I'm sorry?
What does she want to meet me for?
What does she want to meet you for?
Because she's heard a lot
about you from Marty,
and she'd like to take a look
at you, physically.
Shouldn't we wanna
talk about anything
before we get into this conversation?
About what kind of questions
you're gonna ask me?
- Salvatore, she's not a cop.
- No!
I'm not saying that, but
I'm not prepared for this.
What did Marty tell you about me?
What did Marty tell you?
First of all, he said
that the character, Johnny Boy,
- was based on you.
- Yeah.
Partly based on you, partly on his uncle.
- Yeah.
- So, I just wanted to meet you and
'cause you're kind of a mythic character.
There's so much I could tell you,
and so much is off the record
I can't tell you.
Yeah, yeah.
I just, you know
My brother will know
what I'm talking about, you understand?
But as far as, you know, anything else
But you could There are certain things
you could talk about
- because these people are
- Ask me the questions.
Did you blow up a mailbox?
- Excuse me?
- Did you blow up a mailbox?
Yeah.
Do you remember why?
No.
We used to make bombs back then.
It blew up on Prince Street
because it was near St. Patrick
That's a federal offense, by the way.
Let them arrest me now.
- Hey, officer, can I get my hat?
- No.
Can I call my wife?
In Mean Streets, Johnny Boy,
he's not paying his debts.
Yeah, loan sharking.
A lot of guys borrowed money
and didn't pay.
Because maybe they felt the guy
giving the money out was an asshole.
You know what I mean?
I borrow money from you, because you're
the only jerk-off around here
that I can borrow money from
without paying back.
Right? Right?
Because, you know, that's what you are.
That's what I think of you. A jerk-off.
He's smiling, look,
because you're a jerk-off.
You're a fucking jerk-off.
You know? That's
We ain't gotta pay them.
You know what I mean?
He's making light of it,
but it's not light.
He always put himself in a bad position.
Hey, asshole! This is for you, asshole!
Fucking asshole!
You stupid bastard.
Were you gonna use that?
Were you gonna use that?
I'll fucking I'll fucking kill you,
Johnny! That is fucking it!
Was there ever a time
where your brother
had to rescue you from some situations?
Oh, numerous times, my brother was there.
I was always
in and out of trouble, you know?
In and out.
I still love him.
You know what I mean? It's
Well, then, here, take take twenty.
The world of intense
male relationships. That was
just, naturally,
the nature where we were.
Take it, stupid. I'm doing it for you.
Come on! Come on!
- Carrying on, huh? Cut it out, will ya?
- Come on.
The whole idea of responsibility
A brother's keeper.
The whole idea, based also on, as I said,
my father and his younger brother.
My father's youngest brother, Joey.
He was called Joe "The Bug."
He half raised me.
He got into so much trouble!
What are you doing?
It's Joe Black.
Joe Black, I owe him money.
My father was always the one
who had to go and straighten it out.
My uncle, he depended on my father, a lot.
How did your father straighten it out?
- Like, not with money, but it was just
- Talk.
Talk.
So he didn't get killed.
So they didn't kill him.
This one day, somebody almost did,
and he came up to our apartment.
That was in the '60s, too.
I'd just gotten back from
I had finished at NYU and he came up
and he told what happened.
My father said, "Okay, get out.
I'll get so-and-so. I'll talk to them.
You, move out. And don't come back."
And that's what he did.
So what are we gonna do?
What are you gonna do?
- Hide me, or what?
- That's right.
Cassavetes finally saw
a last cut of the picture
and he said, "Don't touch it."
And we didn't.
It was shown
at the New York Film Festival.
My family was with me
and they were aghast.
I couldn't believe my eyes.
And my ears.
And I-- When I got hold of him,
I says to him,
"Did you ever hear language like that,
in our house?"
"Mrs. Scorsese what do you think
of your son's film?" And she said,
"I just want you to know,
we never use that word in the house.
I don't know where he picked it up."
That's the way they spoke.
When I went outside,
I spoke the same way.
- Wait a minute, Charlie.
- But not in the house.
That's the first film
that used street language
thinking that this would be accurate.
I don't have the guts?
Come on, asshole, come over here.
Come over here.
I'll put this up your ass.
I went by ear.
I went by Kazan, in terms of actors.
- I thought they was gonna talk to him.
- That's the idea.
I thought they was gonna talk to him,
and get him to dummy up.
Maybe he gave 'em an argument.
Those films sounded right to me
here in my head.
But then, it was Kazan slash Cassavetes
because I was open to improvisation.
The particularly long scene
with De Niro talking to Harvey.
De Niro came up with it.
Blah, blah, bing, bing.
Coming home, I ran into Jimmy Sparks.
I owe Jimmy Sparks 700,
like, for four months.
I gotta pay the guy. He lives in
my building, hangs out across the street.
- I gotta pay the guy, right?
- Yeah.
So what happened?
He was surprised, I think,
that I came up with all that stuff.
And God bless him, he used it.
I was friendly with Henry Hill
and all those gangsters,
who later turned out to be in Goodfellas.
Then, they heard that this movie
was opening, and that it was about them.
Look, I said, "Tell me
what's the Mob's favorite mob movie?"
And he said,
"Well, everybody loves The Godfather,
but Mean Streets is the best mob movie."
To them, it was a home movie.
It was dead-out honest.
As honest as you could be with yourself.
And No, we knew something was special.
We knew it.
I didn't go around bragging
to people that the movie was about me.
And I walked out on the movie.
You walked out of the movie?
I seen a little bit of it
and I just, you know
I just walked out
went across the street
and seen Doctor Zhivago.
Why'd you walk out?
Maybe my childhood?
Maybe it brought back a lot of
I can't explain.
You were offended?
You weren't offended?
No, I wasn't offended.
Far from offended, no.
Then, why wouldn't you watch the movie?
I just, you know,
maybe it brought back memories.
You know what I mean?
Like this was me.
A cop hit me on the head
with one of those.
You remember that time
I caught that beating from those cops?
Yeah, you never recovered
from that one, did ya?
I never recovered?
Marty had begun to bust out.
He was moving out of that world.
Then he made a movie about these people
and I don't think
they were very happy about it.
You believe in what you want to say.
One has to take a chance.
Take a chance.
A lot of people may disagree with you.
It may hurt a lot of people.
But at that time,
and that's what you felt,
had to be genuine and real.
It sometimes hurts people.
One begins to realize, well,
you know, artistry involves cruelty.
You have to be cruel enough
to be an artist.
The people in Mean Streets,
those are the guys Marty grew up with.
But it was almost
his goodbye to that world,
because he had made the movie of them.
What you do is,
you store it in the back of your head.
And then you bring it out
later on in life.
That's what Marty, I think, did.
Because it was around him
and he did a good job.
Marty did a good job.
Marty did. Yeah.
I remember the New York Film Festival.
And at the end of the night,
we went back to our hotel room,
and there was, like, a stack
of messages, from Hollywood producers
and famous actors.
He had offers for several films.
Before Mean Streets,
there were a lot of people, who,
I gotta tell you,
wouldn't look at you twice.
Suddenly, it's okay.
Ellen Burstyn,
after shooting The Exorcist,
was looking for a young director,
to direct her in this film
that was, kind of,
written for her, in a way.
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.
I was just awakening
to the women's movement
and so I said to Warner Bros.,
"I would really like to do a film
about a woman
as I understand women to be right now."
There are parts of the picture
that are really
very real. Very, very, real.
So I called Francis Coppola,
I said, "I need a director
who's new and exciting."
He said, "Why don't you look
at a film called Mean Streets?"
So, we went to work.
I don't think it was
what he really wanted to do,
but, you know, Marty wanted to have
a long career, and I kept saying,
"Do Alice, do Alice,
so you don't get pegged
into doing just gangster movies."
"Many people responded
to Mean Streets", he said,
but what they're saying is that
he can't direct women or he
let me put it that way,
they didn't say it definitively.
What they said is, in a sense,
"He can't, can he?"
He was very nervous about it.
He kept saying, "I don't understand women,
I don't know women,
I don't know that I can do it."
This film is about a woman who
takes a very, very small step,
in self-awareness about herself.
Without ever screaming
"women's liberation"
or "I wanna be free."
I remember reading
that you'd gotten more women
in the crew than normal
Yeah! Yeah.
Majority on the key positions
were made up of women.
- What's your name?
- Tom.
Well, mine's Audrey. It's really not,
it's Doris, but I like Audrey better.
I had done
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
with Marty.
It's a very different film for him.
It's not something that you would ever
associate with his work, and
it was, um, there was something
very true about it and small.
God bless you.
It's about a single mom,
travelling across the country
with her son.
Dreaming that somehow
she's going to get to California,
and she's gonna have,
like, a singing career.
Are we there yet?
I was trying to find
another way to tell a story
that isn't stuck in a sense
of what we term as "masculinity,"
and really to look at life
from another point of view.
Well, now,
would you mind turning around for me?
- Turn around for you? Why?
- I wanna look at you.
Well, look at my face,
I don't sing with my ass.
Lenny, what's with this broad?
The script was really excellent,
but the last third,
we did some improvisation.
We'd work it out in rehearsal
and then shoot it as best we can.
Like the bit of improvisation
we did the other day
in the kitchen,
with her and Kristofferson.
Most of that stuff is related
from her own experiences.
Your brother taught you how to kiss?
Well, I don't mean he demonstrated.
He told me that the worst thing
that can happen
is if a boy feels like he's put
his lips in a bowl of wet oatmeal.
At least he said "lips".
It was really a good working experience.
And it was deep.
We felt it deep in our hearts,
that picture.
You hit him?
You spoil him rotten!
How dare you tell me how to raise my kid?
- Where are your kids?
- Cut.
He hadn't really made a big hit.
Mean Streets was not a hit.
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore was a hit.
Best performance by an actress
Ellen Burstyn,
in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.
Ellen is in a play tonight in New York,
she can't be here.
She asked me to
thank everyone concerned with the voting.
And she also asked me to thank myself.
Thank you.
By that point,
now this is my point of view
I had been living with someone,
who, when I first met him,
was just a great guy,
and now, all of a sudden,
this is a guy who everybody
is telling him is a genius.
What was the last time you saw what you
thought was a great American film?
Martin Scorsese,
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.
Which I think is a great American film.
And I just went, "Oh, that's it."
I think the drugs were starting.
The ego was blossoming.
And also, you know,
there's a thing of reinventing yourself.
And so, for me,
it was really inventing myself as a
a filmmaker.
Describe Taxi Driver.
Like, for example, when you were
writing it, if somebody said,
"What's your film about?",
what would you have said?
I don't know.
Let's see, um
I think it's important
that it's a movie set in the '70s.
There's the president, waving goodbye.
You know, we're living
in a time of disappointment
and grievance. We lost in Vietnam.
And the era of the '70s
burst our image of ourselves.
We can see this crisis.
In the growing doubt
about the meaning of our own lives.
And in the loss of a unity of purpose.
America was falling apart.
And our worst feelings about ourselves,
were boiling up.
That being said, it's about a guy.
He drives a cab at night,
and he really is
sort of like Arthur Bremer.
You know the character of Arthur Bremer?
The guy who shot George Wallace?
Governor George Wallace,
shot and wounded today
while campaigning in Laurel, Maryland.
It has to do with a fellow
who becomes obsessed
with something he can't have.
Which is a woman. A blonde-haired,
blue-eyed beautiful woman.
Schrader gave me
the script of Taxi Driver.
But at the time,
I needed something commercial.
I said, "I can't get involved with this.
And who wants to see this? This is crazy."
I really believed in it.
And I said, "My God, it's almost
as if I've written it myself."
What, of you, in that moment,
do you feel is in that film most?
It's
I can-- There's a
There's an urge to answer immediately
but I have to be very careful,
because it's taken the wrong way.
And that has to do
with the Underground Man.
He has the resentment, the anger,
the self-loathing, the loneliness.
No way of really connecting
with people. Even though,
I may have been very, you know, social.
It was very difficult
to connect other ways.
You're kind of an outsider.
And I remember, when I was at NYU,
all the students, they lived in Riverdale.
They lived in beautiful places.
Their families
were all doctors and lawyers.
I couldn't explain to these people
where I came from.
Marty said that he was so stunned
when he read Taxi Driver
that it almost felt like,
he could've written it himself.
Why do you think that is?
You know, that's isolation.
And loneliness that's pent up.
Anger, displacement.
This Madonna-whore problem.
That taxi driver has been staring at us.
In my original script of Taxi Driver,
there is a line
that Travis Bickle watches
the campaign headquarters
like a wolf watching
campfires in the distance.
And I think that was an image
that struck Marty.
You know, he was always one of those kids
at the edge of the playground.
He's short, he's asthmatic.
That idea of being a wolf
and seeing the fires of civilization
and not being able to be fully accepted.
And so, I just felt,
how do we express the
the meaning of it?
How do we express that?
I would draw the shots
on the side of the script.
To isolate him from other people.
With everybody around him
completely soft focus like a sea.
He's floating through a sea.
So we always try to kind of,
psychologically, try to keep him
separate from everybody else.
That was the key thing
in that film. Who is in whose frame?
And so, I was trying always
to keep him in a single frame.
Nobody in his frame.
And then, when I cut to the other person.
he's in their frame.
But they're not in his.
You know you have beautiful eyes.
I remember watching
Taxi Driver for the first time
and what he and De Niro
had captured up on screen
was this incredible sense of
feeling uncomfortable
for the lead character.
He took his date
to Times Square to a porno film.
And I just remember feeling embarrassed
for somebody so much that it affects you.
I don't like these movies.
Well, I mean, I didn't know that
you'd feel that way about this movie.
I don't know much about movies,
- but if I had known
- These the only kind of movies you go to?
Well, yeah. I mean, I come and--
This is not so bad.
Taking me to a place like this is about
as exciting to me as saying, "Let's fuck."
There are other places I can take you.
Plenty other movies I can take you to.
I don't know much about them.
- But I can take you other places.
- We're just different.
There's such a link between
humiliation and violence in the film.
Yeah.
And it's so true of all these
guys who shoot up everything.
Well, yeah, they are humiliated
by people, yeah.
Yeah.
There are people like that,
and they are real.
And how do you depict them
without becoming caricature?
We started improvising and
it was about doing the characters,
as honestly as you could.
That to me was always on the--
Marty was never afraid to do that.
Yeah.
Faster than you.
The script says,
"He looks into the mirror,
he plays with his guns
and talks to himself."
And Bob
transformed it.
I'm standing here, you make the move.
You make the move.
It's your move.
I was sitting here.
Don't try it
Marty was here in his chair.
And Bob was standing there,
in front of a mirror,
and Bob starts talking to himself.
You talking to me?
You talking to me?
Marty heard that one phrase,
and he looked over at me and went
Who the fuck do you think
you're talking to?
Oh, yeah?
Okay.
Listen you fuckers, you screwheads.
Here is a man
who would not take it anymore.
Feels like there's a lot of
Travis Bickles, especially right now.
That are all talking
to each other on the internet.
When I first wrote about him,
he was talking to nobody.
He really was at that point,
the Underground Man.
Now he's the "Internet Man".
Come on, man.
Just get me out of here, all right?
I play Iris, who's a prostitute.
She's twelve.
And found herself with a pimp,
played by Harvey Keitel.
Wanna get busted?
Now bitch, be cool!
Marty called up and said, you know,
"I'd like Jodie to play
a prostitute in this movie."
He was very nervous in the beginning
about taking me on,
because he always felt like
some cop is gonna come up
and bang handcuffs on him,
because I was so young.
Scorsese kind of handed me off to De Niro
and we went to these
kind of dive coffee shops.
He didn't speak to me,
obviously, as Robert De Niro,
he was in character the whole time.
And he was awkward and kind of difficult,
and sort of annoying to be around.
And I guess I got comfortable
with his awkwardness,
and with him in character.
You should be dressed up,
you should be going out with boys.
You should be going to school.
You know, that kind of stuff.
God, are you square.
I'd been making movies for a long time,
but as a very different character.
I was so against type
of who you would cast for this.
And I think Marty saw something in that.
I think he was interested in that,
you know.
"I want a strong character
who isn't overly sexualized
in this very sexualized job."
He's trying to get some pictures.
When it came time
for us to do our scenes together,
Marty would allow for us to come up
with things and to improvise.
We did improvisations and
we did throw her off a little, on purpose.
But she held her own and came back.
Meaning that she fought back.
She stayed there, she didn't get rattled.
I don't think Scorsese
could've been more gleeful
during that shoot.
He was just happy to be making films.
He was happy to be with his friends
that wanted to make movies.
I remember his mom visiting on set and
him putting her in the director's chair.
They had a little
comedy routine going, you know?
They just really felt very close
and he was just so excited
about making movies.
He was excited about
how the blood got made,
and, when he was gonna
blow the guy's head off,
how they put little pieces
of Styrofoam in the blood
so that would attach to the wall
and stick there.
We had a great time.
But the studio got very angry at us
because of the violence, the language.
And shooting seedy parts of New York
that were disturbing to them.
All the animals come out at night.
Whores, skunk-pussies, buggers,
queens, fairies, dopers, junkies
sick, venal.
He's in his own universe,
with his eyes in the mirror.
He's flying above it.
You could say,
he's sort of like an angel above it.
The angel of
The angel of vengeance, you know?
In a way, he takes it on himself
to clean it up.
De Niro's character, Travis Bickle,
decides he that wants to save Iris
from her fate.
Hey, Sport, how you doing?
Okay, okay, my man.
Would you say that Travis is a good guy
or a bad guy in your book?
He's basically good.
Except that
he goes about some things the wrong way.
Suck on this.
All of his various emotions boil up.
Anger and savior complex.
He will save the girl
and he will kill the bad people.
And then, he will be a hero.
And people will look to him and say,
"Hey, you're that cool guy," you know?
That's That's a male fantasy for you.
No! Don't shoot him!
We showed it to the MPAA.
They gave us an "X" for violence.
And then, they looked at us and said,
"Make it an 'R', or we cut it.
Get out of the room."
Okay.
That's when I lost it.
What did you do?
- Huh?
- What did you do?
Lost it.
I
Marty was very upset.
I get a call at the office
and he said, "Steve. It's Marty.
It's Marty, Steve.
Yeah, can you come over to the house?
They want me to cut
all the blood spurting.
They want me to cut the guy
who loses his hand."
And he was going crazy, I mean,
the story is he wanted to kill
the head of the studio.
You had a gun?
I was gonna get one.
- So, you said you were gonna get a gun?
- Yeah, but I wasn't gonna get it.
Really?
And you said you were gonna do
what with the gun?
I was gonna I don't know, I was angry.
I said, "I'm gonna threaten them."
Or maybe just shoot or something.
I had no idea. I mean, I was threatening.
What I wanted to do, and not with a gun,
I would go in,
find out where the rough cut is
and break the windows and take it away.
They're gonna destroy the film anyway.
You know? So, let me destroy it.
I'll destroy it.
But before destroying it,
I'm gonna steal it.
Spielberg and a number of others said,
"Marty, stop that.
Marty, you can't do that."
The more they said no,
the more I said I was gonna
I didn't know what to do, and I don't know
who it was that had this idea,
that mollified the MPAA,
but it might have been Marty.
"What if we took that
whole sequence and toned the color down?
And make it feel more like a tabloid."
You know?
"And make it grainy."
It saved the movie, because he didn't
have to cut any of the violence.
He just had to take the color red
down to a kind of brown.
I had killed myself on that film
and I devoted my life to that film.
And I don't want it destroyed.
The violence in my movies,
that's where they really
claim irresponsibility.
Violence is scary, in yourself.
- You know?
- Yeah.
Are you capable of it? Yeah.
Do I consider presenting violence
on a screen to a world audience
as something that is commendable?
If it's truthful violence, yeah, I do.
I don't wanna name any names,
but there's a lot of filmmakers that,
I don't know if you wanna use
"gratuitous," but
they think it's fun.
That's not what he does.
That's not what Marty does.
He's a filmmaker who's after the truth.
And there's violence in this world.
How did you feel
at the end of Taxi Driver?
Did you feel more balanced?
No, I felt like somebody
who had been in a war,
and standing there, bloodied,
and still breathing.
Somehow we placed into Cannes.
And the head of the jury
was Tennessee Williams.
He had come out and said he didn't like
the film. It was too violent.
In hindsight, it's hard to believe
but at the time it was, you know,
one of the most violent movies,
that America had put out.
Aside from the press conference
Marty and Bobby, basically,
never came out of their hotel room.
I think they were just plagued by worry
that the film
wasn't going to be well-received,
and that people were going to hate it.
They basically didn't do any press at all.
So, there I was.
And I ended up taking,
kind of, all the press for the movie
because I spoke French.
He becomes a taxi driver
because he can't sleep at night.
And we flew home.
Flew back to LA.
My publicist called me in the morning
and said, "You got the Palme d'Or."
And then, I was surprised
when it was a hit.
I didn't think that was gonna happen.
The film opened
at the Coronet Theater on Third Avenue.
Paul Schrader called me.
He said, "Marty, go and take a look.
There's lines around the block."
What was the reception like
for Taxi Driver?
Well, it was astonishing, I mean,
once it won the Golden Palm at Cannes
and once Pauline had chimed in,
that was it.
At that time, the critics
on that level had that power.
They could make or break people.
They were star critics.
Kael was a star, Roger Ebert.
What Scorsese is doing is looking,
not so much at the violence in the city,
as on the violence that's bottled up
inside this person.
And it's the kind of violence
we've seen in America.
In assassins, in snipers and so forth.
People understood
how important a film it was.
And maybe,
without it being 100% conscious,
Scorsese and Paul Schrader
hit upon some kind of
collective American truth.
Mr. Scorsese's film,
Taxi Driver, is a film
about violence
on the highest artistic level.
I went to see it with some mates.
And I think I saw it
maybe five or six times
the first week it came out.
And we were all just mesmerized by it.
It had this mystery,
this allure of something that was
that was from another world.
It was the first time
I'd seen Bob's work, as well, which was
That was That was a big moment.
And of course, from that moment on,
I was a captive.
I just wanted I just waited for
I waited for Martin's work,
and I waited for Bob's work.
Do you ever get that feeling
like you and Marty might
really spend your whole lives
working together?
We come together in a certain way
and then
I can be very honest with him
about stuff that we talk about
and the connection to the scene
that we're gonna do.
"Reminds me of this that I went through."
I'm telling only him.
'Cause Just so we get an idea
of what I was thinking
and maybe what details
of that particular anecdote,
that experience,
we could put in the scene.
It's a sense of trust
and belonging with each other, as a unit.
And from a time where
the actors and the studio
would take the film away from you.
And so, that's one thing,
and that became an issue with De Niro,
in the sense that
We found a trust that I knew he--
And the bottom line: he wouldn't do that.
I really trusted that and it came true.
So it was safe to experiment.
For the next film, New York, New York,
that's what we did.
And I started working with Irwin Winkler.
I had been in Hollywood for ten years.
I was more experienced
in the studio system and all that.
Rocky, Irwin
I had just gotten
an Academy award for Rocky.
I had a script written called
New York, New York, a musical.
I was talking to Gene Kelly
about directing it.
But it was the '70s, things were changing.
I want it to have a modern touch,
so I need somebody like Marty Scorsese.
And there he was.
The auteur cinema,
that was reaching its zenith, so to speak.
Francis Coppola was doing Apocalypse Now.
Cimino was doing Heaven's Gate.
This was the moment to experiment.
It was like, "Watch this.
Watch what we're gonna do."
My idea was to make a homage to
the musicals of the late '40s, early '50s.
And the idea was kind of
taking the look, the feel, the sense
of an old film made in 1945-46,
when I was a kid going to see movies.
- And then taking the fantasy
- Yeah.
and putting a realistic situation
against that.
All right, you're upset,
because I didn't come to you in person
- and say goodbye, right?
- Right.
Which brings up another thing,
you don't say goodbye to me,
I say goodbye to you.
I wanted to show the fake sets
and put a kind of truthful relationship
and a truthful acting out
of these characters
and these people against these fake sets.
Bob's character in New York, New York
is deeply personal of Marty.
Honey, you're making it
very hard on me, baby.
You want me to take this,
and I'm gonna throw it against the wall.
I'm gonna smash it into a million pieces,
that what you want me to do?
Because that's
what you're telling me to do.
Music is what mattered to him.
This is the most important thing to me
besides you, do you understand?
And if I can't do this,
then I'm not good for you
and I'm not good for anybody, baby.
He wanted other things to matter to him,
but he found out nothing else did, really.
And it had a lot to do with
two creative people living together.
That's why. And I said, "We were
all going through that at the time."
And I said, "Well, this
is what it's about then."
My mom started out as a journalist,
met my dad on an interview
right before Dad
was about to do Taxi Driver.
He, I guess,
showed her the project,
and she was like, "Oh, yes, yes"
And then she started doing,
you know, "But what about this?"
This is Julia,
soon to be the bride of Marty.
Marty Scorsese.
But the seating arrangements are off.
Seating arrangements,
because she smokes and it goes in my thing
and I cough a lot and I have tissues.
Okay, this is Bill
Speeding along very happily,
I came along with New York, New York.
This is actually very special.
This is one of the only ones I have of me
with my mom and dad when I was a baby.
Mom took me
straight from the hospital to the set.
The film clearly made parallels
to art imitating life
and life imitating art.
And the blur in between of
a marriage falling apart
in the middle of success.
Did I tell you to have that baby?
Did I tell you to have that goddamn baby?
No, I didn't tell you!
You had it. Now you have it, now keep it!
That's it. Go ahead, keep hitting.
That's right.
Go ahead hit me. That's right.
It was kind of a wild time.
Needless to say, I was a product
of two incredible artists
in the '70s in Hollywood
with a lot of
sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll.
It was 22 weeks of sheer madness.
These were the cocaine years.
New York, New York was a very cokie set.
There was some drugs
going on at that time.
I didn't like anything
that would slow me down.
Take it easy. Okay, bye-bye.
De Niro and myself and Marty
were like three whirlwinds, just
"Let's try this, and let's do this,
and let's get this done
Oh, what a good idea."
The only film I've ever done in my life
where I can't remember sitting down.
Marty gets your energy level going
to a point where you're just going,
"Jesus, this is great.
Let's keep going, you know"
You used a huge amount
of improvisation during that?
Yeah, but not the right way.
Want a grenade?
Will you put those things away?
What?
Proper form of improvisation
is working it out in rehearsal,
recording it with the actors
working it out and saying
"This is the scene now." Taking
And at some point I just stopped that
and started just improvising.
We, at times,
improvised ourselves out of the set
onto another set which wasn't built yet.
We were shooting a scene
Bob knocked on the window
It broke.
So Marty says, "That's what real life is.
You're trying to get married,
and you knock on a window
and it breaks. That's life."
I said, "Why not? Why shouldn't he
break it? Let's just-- What the hell?"
And so he said,
"Don't you think it's too much?"
I said, "No, let's try it anyway."
So now the prop man
has to go out and get breakaway windows.
And every time the window breaks
somebody's gotta clean up
all the glass around the window,
and replace the window
and put putty around it.
And the next day,
we were so screwed up as far as shooting.
But yes, that's the way we made the movie.
We went a little nuts on that one,
but, you know It happens.
Was it fun?
I was bouncing back and forth.
Frantic about creative excitement.
And I was so wound up
I couldn't wind down.
And I said,
"Okay, let's shoot another picture."
I first met Marty because
my former road manager
produced Mean Streets.
He said, "You gotta check this out.
This guy, this filmmaker,
I'm telling you, you need to see this."
So they set up a private screening
for me at Warner Bros.
I remember it starts out
with "Be My Baby," which is
That's when I said,
"Wait a minute. Wait a minute."
Just seeing that
And Harvey, you know
Yeah.
And I thought,
"This guy has got the inside scoop
on something going on
with film and music."
It just touched me.
A couple years later,
I wanted to do this project
with The Band called The Last Waltz.
The Band has been together 16 years,
together, on the road.
I wanted to make this film
of The Band's final concert.
We wanted it to be more than a concert.
We wanted it to be a celebration.
A celebration of a beginning, or an end?
Beginning of the beginning of the end
of the beginning.
And doing it with all these people
that we were all musically connected.
Everybody from, you know,
Neil Young to Van Morrison.
To Joni Mitchell.
You know, on and on and on.
Everybody was representing
a different spoke in the wheel of music.
I told Marty about this idea
and you could just see it
running through him.
And the wheels turning.
He said,
"I'm in the middle of shooting a movie.
And the studio,
the one thing they don't like
is when you're in the middle of shooting
a big Hollywood movie,
that you go off and shoot another movie
at the same time.
They really don't like that."
So he was like "I"
And all of a sudden he says
"I don't care.
They can fire me, they can kill me.
I don't care, I gotta do this."
And I couldn't stop.
I just wanted to shoot more.
So, we decided to do this
over the Thanksgiving weekend.
And instead of him taking a break,
he would come up and shoot the concert.
And everybody's whispering
and putting this together.
Seven 35mm cameras in certain positions.
- Seven?
- Yeah, seven.
And cameramen basically
memorized their positions,
and whenever they'd run out of film,
they'd sort of run back to the script.
Which was about 200 pages.
Marty wrote a full script.
Song by song, word by word,
of what needs to happen.
In one column,
you had who was singing what part.
Another column you had
what instruments were important.
And there's another column for lighting
and another column for camera.
And what was Marty physically
doing, when all of this was happening?
He was on a headset and
he's telling everybody what's coming next
and what you need to catch.
And in the meantime,
they're reloading film and batteries
and hoping the cameras don't die.
It was an experiment in terror.
And when it was over, I told Marty,
"You know what,
we missed a couple of things."
And we shot that on the stage
like one of the old musicals.
I pulled in to Nazareth
Just feeling 'bout half past dead
I just need to find a place
Where I can lay my head
"Mister, can you tell me
Where a man might find a bed?"
And with that, Marty could move the camera
in the way that he does, too.
Which is very, very musical.
The rhythm, the move-- everything.
It's like, wow.
I'm telling you, he's a man of rhythm.
And
It was one camera
for the first four bars of the music.
This was the shot,
then it cut and this is the shot and
there were drawings made for those shots.
I picked up my bags
And went looking for a place to hide
When I saw ol' Carmen and the Devil
Walking side-by-side
Music, I think, is the purest art form.
I said, "Hey Carmen
Come on, let's go downtown"
She said, "I gotta go
But my friend can stick around"
I made The Last Waltz
for no money. Nothing.
My agent wanted to kill me.
He said, "Something."
I just I said,
"Yes, but I made the film."
Take a load off, Fanny
No amount of money
could have compensated me
for the beauty of that
continuing beauty of
experiencing the work of that film.
You put the load right on me
It's like a gift.
Oh, Fanny
Take a load off, Fanny
Beautiful.
And this is all while
he's on vacation from the other film?
This is while he's working
on New York, New York.
We finished New York, New York, but
I had to live with the picture
in the editing.
And it was a gruesome time for me.
The editing was all day and all night.
I would have a crew on all day
and then I would work all night.
- What's the problem, huh?
- What's the problem?
- Yeah, what's the problem?
- What's
There were many, many screenings
during the editing process.
It was a very long process
because a lot of it had been improvised.
- Goodbye.
- Goodbye.
Goodbye! I say it last.
I think I saw the four-
or five-hour version.
And I said, "Oh, my God."
I mean, it was brilliant but I said,
"Marty
You gotta cut this down."
The first time I saw it,
it was four and a half hours long.
And the balance was terrific.
You have to get it down
to a certain amount of time.
The balance has changed.
It's like if you have a pyramid
and you take one block out,
the whole thing can collapse.
In the cutting and the editing
he lost part of the brilliance
of it, I'm afraid.
And right around that time
I wanted to make
Gangs of New York
and Last Temptation of Christ.
But the failure, financial and critical,
of New York, New York made that
Not even-- The word "remote,"
doesn't even come to mind.
You can't even think about
the possibilities of making
those two films as remote.
They were dead. They were dead.
Dead. Gone.
And I felt a responsibility
for all these people,
all this money, all this work
You know?
And where the hell was I gonna go?
I lost the muse.
Gone.
Watching my dad direct,
he's like the centerpiece
that holds the swirling storm.
He was walking through a period
where he couldn't hold that storm.
And you also had,
- well, a divorce from Julia Cameron.
- Yeah.
Yeah, I think that ended
about a year in, I think.
What would you say is the recipe for
a happy or a successful marriage?
I guess you're asking the wrong fella.
Well, no, I mean
Gee, I don't know.
I made two mistakes already there, so
And I haven't learned yet, so I
Let's see, how would I go about that?
Let me put it this way,
there's a lot of temptation.
There's temptation
on either side of the road, you know?
You mean, as an artist or as a man or?
Both. Because there's no difference.
There's no difference.
Marriages are breaking up.
You have children you can't raise.
Don't forget, I used to only see him
once or twice a year during that period.
Did you get to see
your dad very much or?
Not as much at that point.
I was spending a lot of time
with Robbie Robertson from The Band.
Our personal lives were
kind of crumbling, so he invited me
to come and move into his house with him.
Everybody we knew was living
in a dimension of madness.
We were deep in, like everybody else.
Well, he and Robbie
used to go up to the house
and screen movies 24-hours a day.
There was a drug scene which, of course,
I had no interest in.
It was, "Jeez, I'm kind of tired."
You know?
"If we have a little bump
or something it'll just perk us up."
Some people have an espresso
We were trying to find something,
find the muse again, I guess.
The joke is always
"It makes me work better."
In the meantime, you're dead.
You see, that problem is
that you enjoy the sin.
That's the problem
I've always had, I enjoy it.
I enjoyed when I was bad.
I enjoyed a lot of it.
- It's dawn.
- Is it dawn?
We gotta pack.
We gotta go.
It was a period of destructive
behavior, so you know, that's it.
It was a rocky period and there wasn't
that tap on the shoulder to say,
"Whoa, this is kind of wild.
This is crazy.
This is not good for you.
This is not healthy."
That never came up.
At the house,
it was Marty and me, and Steven Prince.
Steve was Marty's assistant.
Steve, why don't you run over there,
because it might be important?
Steve Prince, what about him?
He's an interesting person.
Yeah, I mean, he was
Interesting enough for me
to try to make a film on him.
- Not bad.
- Not at all.
Could you go over to that side, please?
It's a documentary and
I got it for that one night.
We shot it in one night.
Michael Chapman shot it and
I turned around and the guy was
just coming through the door.
Just coming through the door, the doorway.
And just as he was coming
through the door,
I fired.
There was something about
the stories and the way
he told the stories that was fascinating.
Particularly, the person who OD's.
And this girl once OD'd on us.
She was out, man.
- Tarantino then used
- Apparently.
He never told me. Quentin never
told me he got it from there.
But you tell me. Other people tell me.
Okay, I think it's ready.
And he says, "Well, you're gonna
have to give her an adrenaline shot."
I said, "What are you talkin' about?"
He-- I said, "You give it to her."
He says, "I can't."
No, man, I ain't--
You're gonna give her the shot.
- No, you're gonna give her the shot.
- I ain't giving her the shot.
- I ain't giving her the shot.
- I never done this before.
I ain't never done it before either,
all right. I ain't starting now.
You know how you give an adrenaline shot?
Okay, the adrenaline needle's
like about that big,
and you gotta give it into the heart.
And you have to put it in
in a stabbing motion.
You gotta pierce through that
so what you're gonna do is
you gotta bring the needle down
in a stabbing motion.
A magic marker where her heart was.
And I went Ha!
And it
And she came back like that.
Steve is a great storyteller,
a great raconteur.
But the raconteur
of the dispossessed again.
The ones on the edges.
Marty has a fascination
with the dark side
because the dark side is frequently
where the honesty is, right?
And part of exploring,
I guess, is experiencing.
- Yes, you do.
- Now, just a second.
Why he had to get
that close to the edge?
Over the edge and into the abyss?
I can't say.
- Are we rolling now?
- We have been for some time.
We have been rolling for some time.
As I suspected.
You thought I didn't know.
There's a wonderful quote in Peeping Tom.
"All this filming isn't healthy."
All this filming isn't healthy.
"All this filming isn't healthy."
And it wasn't.
But
That's what we were doing.
American Boy,
the drugs are involved, of course.
That's what it became in LA for me.
- Did you get addicted?
- It was
- Really addicted?
- Yeah, sure.
How did you get out of it?
Well, that's the point.
The point was that I didn't.
The point was that it took me out.
The point was that I didn't stop
until finally, I collapsed.