Mr. Scorsese (2025) s01e05 Episode Script
Method Director
1
Hollywood measures success
by box office and Academy Awards.
How do you measure success?
All right, so you're not
box office and you've never
I don't know what to say.
Never got an Academy Award.
How do you measure success?
The value of the work.
Action!
By the time 1998 came around,
again, I was at a low ebb.
I was on the outside of the American
film industry, so to speak.
The last film that
had got any real recognition,
and that made some money
at least, was Casino.
Yeah, and give him a couple of kicks.
They weren't considering me for anything
and there were certain projects
I wanted to make.
Marty and I had just done
Bringing Out The Dead.
Marty, at that time, was looking to do
bigger and bigger budget films.
He saw himself as,
he said, a fresco painter,
doing bigger and bigger canvases.
But I had to find some money.
And to get the financing to do that,
I needed a lifesaver.
And that's when Mike Ovitz came in.
And he had started his new company
and he came to me and said,
"We have this young actor in it,
Leo DiCaprio. You should meet him,"
and I knew him through Bob De Niro.
I said, "Watch this kid.
He's interesting."
- Leonardo, right here, please!
- Leonardo!
How do you feel about being
a sex symbol, as it were?
Am I sex symbol?
The nominees for
Actor in a Supporting Role are
Leonardo DiCaprio in
What's Eating Gilbert Grape?
When did you first see
one of Marty's films?
I had done This Boy's Life
with Robert De Niro,
and I decided to watch
Marty's entire catalogue of movies.
Certainly, all the ones De Niro was in.
I was kicking back on my couch
watching VHS tapes
Believe me, Jerry, I'm very good.
I'm really good. I'm dynamite.
These films
affected me profoundly, at a young age.
And then after Titanic,
I was no longer
this indie, sort of, actor.
I then became somebody
that could finance my own projects.
So it was, "Okay, what do you wanna do?"
I said, "I wanna work with
Martin Scorsese. What does he have?"
We put Leo and Marty together.
I'd met Marty, but "Hi" and "Bye", right?
But an official meeting.
He said he always wanted
to do Gangs of New York, right?
I was like, "Tell him I'll do it.
I don't care what the script is.
Let's do it."
- First time you found the book?
- January 1st, 1970.
This was before you made Mean Streets.
When I finished Raging Bull,
I tried to get it financed
and we almost did, but couldn't
get it financed. It was too expensive.
He wanted to make the film
for such a long time.
I mean, it's the origin story, isn't it?
The history of the city
was fascinating to me,
and the stories of the gangs.
My father would talk about the 40 Thieves.
In effect, the society was being
worked out in the streets.
Particularly, the Five Points,
which was termed
the worst slum in the world,
at the time, in the 1850s.
I thought I wanted to create that world
that nobody's really
ever seen before in film.
In my neighborhood, I'd heard stories
about all of this, for years.
I always thought
what a great film it would make,
and then I found out
more and more about it.
It wasn't really a city.
It was a warring state.
On my challenge
by the ancient laws of combat
I remember meeting with Daniel,
and I had these images of the period.
And as I opened the book,
there's Bill the Butcher
and it looks just like him.
I said, "Look at that.
How could you not do this?
All you need is the mustache,
look, it's a classic."
The historical figure was regarded
as a genuine hero in the community.
Bill "The Butcher" Poole
lived in the Five Points
and had a running battle
with every Irishman he could find.
who holds sway over the Five Points.
Us natives, born right-wise
to this fine land?
Or the foreign hordes defiling it?
It was so prophetic, in a way,
the telling of that story,
because this ludicrous notion of nativism.
You mother whoring Irish nigger,
whose man are you?
We speak English in this country.
Whose man are you? You see this knife?
I'm going to teach you to speak English
with this fucking knife.
I come from an immigrant group.
I learned more and more about the
the welcome
that the immigrants received
Go back to Ireland, you dumb mick.
starting with the Irish, you know.
The Irish learned how to handle all this.
They dealt with it,
but they had to fight back.
Fighting against
the Know-Nothings and the Wide-Awakes.
Which are names like now The Proud Boys.
The Irish had to fight for their place.
Archbishop Hughes, the firebrand,
he said, "You burn one Catholic church,
we're gonna burn the Protestant churches."
They had to fight back.
They fought along the brick wall
between Mulberry and Mott.
Growing up, we were
hanging out on their gravestones.
So, this was the ancient world to us.
It looks like New York. It's great.
It was like science fiction in reverse.
- This is Five Points.
- This is it. The Five Points.
Our vision was to create all
of downtown New York at Cinecittà Studios,
because of the Fellini films and
Pasolini films that were made there.
That meant so much to me. And I remember
George Lucas coming down to see me.
And he said, "No one will ever
make a picture like this again.
This set will never be built
like this again. These sets."
You know, this was
a multi-million-dollar epic
where they recreated
turn-of-the-century New York.
The sheer responsibility of that
is like, "Oh my God.
Be careful what you wish for.
This is an intimidating experience."
This is the liver.
The kidneys.
The heart.
Daniel and Marty had
worked together beforehand.
I remember walking
in the first day on set
and they were discussing
how to cut the meat.
And Daniel had a real butcher with him,
and they spent quite a few hours
while the whole set was sitting there,
talking about whether
it would be chop or loin.
This is a kill.
This is a kill.
Main artery. This is a kill.
You try.
That actor/director intense collaboration,
I had never seen
to that degree before in my life.
Martin is searching.
And if you want to go further,
he will always encourage you
to go further.
He's just so full of glee,
so full of encouragement,
just to see how far you can take a thing.
Whoopsie daisy!
And didn't you Isn't that
the time you broke your nose?
Yeah.
There was so much blood all over my face
that you couldn't really tell
that most of it was mine.
It was all my idea. It was my own fault.
So I paid the price for it, I suppose.
What'll it be then?
Rib or chop? Loin or shank?
- The liver!
- The spleen!
I had been so obsessed
with that project for so many years,
that I put everything into it.
And that meant going toe-to-toe
with Harvey Weinstein.
Harvey was a salesman
and a thug. He's not an artist.
But he wanted
to be invited to the artists' table,
and this was his way in.
But Marty,
he is so committed to getting it done,
he's been able to work
with these very difficult producers.
And that's a great talent.
Because you can't make these big movies
unless you have that kind of financing.
He loved cinema,
and he wanted to make it spectacular
in the style of the '50s and '60s
in terms of David Lean or Metzger.
So did I, to a certain extent,
but I do it my own way.
And he goes out of frame.
I wanted to make something
that had as much authenticity as possible
from what I could understand
and what I had been studying
over the years and researching.
He also needed to sell a picture.
And the worst thing for him were the hats.
He didn't want anybody wearing hats.
I said, "Everybody wore hats.
Everybody wore hats.
What do you want from me?
Everybody wore hats."
I just want to see your face, son.
No harm intended.
But at the same time,
he didn't want to turn off the audience
to something that looked alien.
- Or not beautiful?
- Yeah. Exactly.
You've got a beautiful man,
you've got beautiful women in there.
You want people to see them.
You have to work with it.
You're making a film together.
And also,
they're going to give you the money.
It's bartering. It's bartering.
Because it's either that
or not get the film made.
When you go into this work,
you give birth to yourself
into a world of conflict and corruption.
There will always be that opposition
between money, where the power is,
and the creative people
who are trying to tell stories
with that money.
I was shooting it a certain way,
according to the way I made my drawings,
so it took me a little longer.
So, Harvey got furious.
Said, "It's costing too much."
And the studio,
they didn't want to pay for some of it.
So I had to really focus on
what I wanted to shoot,
what I thought was important,
in order to get control of what
was remaining of the production.
The pressure was so strong.
But Martin's a cage fighter.
He'll be the last one standing.
I fought to get what I needed,
but I had a weakness.
Which was I kept changing the script.
To this day, I don't have the story down.
There was a lot of discussion
about the screenplay.
It definitely continued to evolve.
In some cases,
making it up as we went along.
In which case, that meant, you know
People in charge would come in
and say, "What are you doing?"
There were a few writers
drifting around.
One of them was a spy
for the Weinstein camp.
And he was spying.
Reporting back all our, sort of,
misdemeanors and everything and
But, anyhow, Martin lost it at one point,
and threw his desk out of the window.
It was on the third floor,
as I remember it.
I go in, I see these desks
and there was the producer
and I took the desk and tossed it over.
And it was my
The other associate with me,
he said, "That's not his desk."
It was just volatile.
You know, everybody was
It was tough.
Martin Scorsese's long-anticipated epic,
Gangs of New York,
opens all across the country.
- Hello.
- Hello.
The film went way over budget.
I did have everything on the line.
So, I really did everything I could
to get the publicity out there.
Now, of course,
the real reason Marty's here
is to try and make
some of that precious money back.
Now, I don't even know
what really sells a film.
Apparently, being on television,
talking about the picture,
seeing that you're, you know, friendly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Gangs of New York opens next Friday.
Please welcome Martin Scorsese.
Luckily, it did very well.
This was a big movie,
in terms of box office.
And the critics, they loved it.
But Gangs was something
It was an obsession.
And it was something that,
even if I got it done,
it's never done.
It just isn't done. It still isn't done.
So, as far as I'm concerned,
you know what, let's
I got it out, as best I could
under these circumstances.
Put it to rest, take a deep breath.
And that's what I finally was able to do.
Because at that point in time, in my life,
I found a kind of steadiness,
and that was Helen.
Helen made contact with me,
before we ever met.
She gave me this sent me this book,
this prayer book.
There's a letter in it.
I didn't know her. It was sort of a fan.
And I was I said, "Isn't that amazing?"
Because a year later, we met, you know?
And then a year after that,
we met even more.
I met Helen working on a book
about the great British director
Michael Powell.
I knew Helen
when she was an editor at Random House.
Helen was one of the great
Random House editors.
a young poet who lives in a society
that's been totally taken over
by money and technology.
And Helen is, you know,
worlds away from where Marty grew up.
Her great, great, great grandfather signed
the Declaration of Independence.
She's from that world.
So, it was a different world
and it was sort of a fabulous union.
- There you go, good girl.
- Hitchcock angle.
Out of that came Francesca
on November 16th, 1999.
She was quite early.
Like, I think five weeks early.
- Oh, my gosh.
- Yeah. Yeah.
Well, we almost lost both of them
at four in the morning.
She had me at, like, 52.
It was a very difficult pregnancy.
And so I was, sort of like
They called me their miracle baby.
What a big girl.
What a big, grumpy girl.
Everything changed.
My dad was just
always, like, there for me.
I remember him reading all of these books
to me when I was younger.
He read me the Bible.
Every night, we'd go up,
and read more and more.
When he was younger,
I think that he was just very impulsive.
He was just trying to find his way,
and I think he found that with my mom,
but it took him a minute.
After going through
the purgatory of Gangs of New York,
I said, "I want to make a movie now."
I wanna do something and feel free
and make something spectacular, in a way.
Start 'em up!
And that's when the script
of Aviator landed in my lap.
Leo had read this Howard Hughes book.
We had a really good script.
It was about filmmaking and the aviation,
and a love story between
Katharine Hepburn and him.
And I thought, "Wow, Hollywood
of the '20s and '30s, my God."
The airplane sequences, action filmmaking.
God damn it!
The Aviator would be like,
if I could be a director
who just came in and did something,
but it has all these elements that I like
and that I could identify with.
Why the hell do they look so slow?
This isn't what it was like.
They look like a bunch of goddamn models.
You could feel an affinity
that Marty had
with the character of Howard Hughes.
Son of a bitch.
He deeply understood
the scale of his ambition.
- Don't tell me it can't be done.
- The gyro forces are too much.
You send these planes into barrel rolls,
they won't make it.
It's the goddamn climax of the picture,
Frank. You make it work.
The feeling of when he opened the script
and there's the movie Hell's Angels
that Howard is directing,
it says, "Year three." I think he said,
"Wow, this is my kind of guy."
He would not stop
until he got everything perfect.
Howard Hughes is now editing
some 25 miles of film.
He's as obsessive as Howard Hughes.
Marty is incredibly obsessive.
Very meticulous.
Not enough. Not enough.
These rivets have to be completely flush.
I want every screw and joint countersunk.
He has these storyboards in his mind.
Sometimes they're insanely elaborate
where there's a certain scene
that he is attached to shooting
from every possible angle.
I remember on The Aviator, flying
the Spruce Goose for the first time.
Hand on lever, face.
Then hand on lever, right eyeball.
Hand on lever, left eyeball.
Acute close-up on my eyeballs.
Above the head, wide shot.
And it'd just be "power
coming up" for two days.
To the point where
I almost felt like I was losing my mind.
Oh, God. I'm going crazy.
Howard Hughes is a megalomaniac,
and also a genius at what he did.
And he has this little flaw in him,
which takes him down.
It was a lot to do with control.
Right there, Bob.
And in controlling
You missed it. Right there.
how far do you go with control?
Can you control everything?
Do you get a sense that you might
make more movies with Leo yet?
Yeah, because we went through
a long journey on that one.
You learn how to work with each other.
On Gangs of New York,
I just remember there was like,
"Okay, this is our first time
working together."
At that age, I think I was really
possibly annoying with my questioning.
I was asking about the ending,
what my character's motivation was.
Or we can kind just go bump
instead of like a boom to the floor.
There was this point and
this look in his eye where he's like,
"Oh, okay. I got it. I got it."
Then it took me a while
after Gangs to realize
he's letting you
find these things for yourself.
I
I like the desert.
I remember one specific scene.
My character, who has OCD,
is locked away in his screening room.
People want to get him out
of the screening room
and they send Katharine Hepburn
to talk to him.
Howard, unlock this door immediately.
But he can't see her,
he can't let her in, because of these
imaginary germs that exist.
I can't, sweetie.
I remember I'd done
ten, twenty, maybe thirty takes.
Something was dreadfully wrong.
I don't know what it was.
He just had this look on his face.
He didn't want to tell me
what to do, but it was
He basically said, "Something's wrong
here, and this is not working."
He kept playing on,
"Oh, please, I need you.
Oh, please, I'm suffering so much."
"Do you want her to come in?" "No."
I said, "Then don't" you know?
I can hear you, Katie.
I could always hear you,
even in the cockpit with the engines on.
Well, that's because I'm so goddamn loud.
And I realized, "Oh.
Right, this is about becoming a man."
I'm glad for you. Kate.
Go away now. Would you do that?
"I do care about you, I do love
you, but just not right now, sweetheart."
Go away, just for now. I'll see you soon.
I was like,
"Wow, that had never occurred to me."
But it wasn't something
that he told me to do.
It was something that
he knew instinctively was wrong.
But he didn't want to tell me
how to play it.
He wanted me to find it for myself.
It was a good shoot
and people really liked it.
It was nominated for these
for the Oscars.
- We got 11 Academy Award nominations.
- Yeah, it doesn't beat that.
It's amazing.
We got a gaudy number
of nominations.
And there was a light shined on
the fact that Marty never won.
Martin Scorsese
is an American master
who has never won
an Oscar for Best Director.
Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas,
the list goes on and on, and no Oscar.
I noticed that, yeah.
Mean Streets,
it was completely ignored by Hollywood.
Taxi Driver was even worse.
It was very, very nasty.
Schrader wasn't nominated, nor was I.
Raging Bull was different.
Everyone thought Marty
was going to win for Raging Bull,
so that's why they had King Vidor
come out to give it to him,
because they knew
he was like a mentor to Marty.
And the winner is Robert Redford
He should have had
a bundle of Best Director awards.
He got quite a few nominations.
Barry Levinson for Rain Man.
Kevin Costner for Dances With Wolves.
Gangs was wonderful because we had
11 nominations. We lost all of them.
goes to Roman Polanski.
With Aviator, I thought, "Maybe
this time, they'll give me an Oscar."
Are you looking forward to the Oscars?
You know,
looking forward to it, with trepidation.
Let's face it, this is a big picture.
It's the kind of picture that the Academy
hopefully will recognize.
There's no doubt about that.
If it were to come now that would be
really something very special.
It was the first
Academy Awards I'd ever gone to,
and I was sitting right behind him.
I remember it was, like
Cate Blanchett wins.
Cate Blanchett in The Aviator.
Thelma Schoonmaker wins.
This is really as much yours
as it is mine, Marty.
Costume wins, right?
Everything's winning, winning, winning.
And the Oscar goes to
Clint Eastwood for Million Dollar Baby.
How badly do you want
to get an Oscar for director?
Me, personally
The time has gone, I think.
I think it's partially
because of violence,
but also because he's very much
against hitting anything on the nose.
He doesn't want to tell you what to think,
which a lot of movies do.
A lot of movies tell you what to think.
He doesn't want to do that.
He wants you to feel it.
Lack of moral closure
is his signature as a filmmaker.
He's not really interested in
telling you the moral of the story.
His movies are about
the stuff, without analysis,
that we will never understand
about ourselves,
but he puts it out there.
He just says, "This is how I feel.
This is what I'm feeling right now."
And he puts these characters out there,
and we get to sort it out.
We get to make sense of it.
It's like, I remember
with New York, New York
when I was doing the ending,
I had them walk away from each other.
George Lucas said,
"There's another $10 million
at the box office if they're together."
He's right.
He's dead right.
But I can't say that, "I'll give you
a happy ending." I don't know.
And so, you know, Hollywood,
I don't belong there.
I don't have that mindset.
As much as I admire it, there's so much
a part of me that wanted to be that,
but I don't come from that sort of thing.
I don't know what the hell I you know.
I do what I do.
Yeah, go ahead, anytime.
Ready and action.
That's good, kids. That's very good, kids.
Okay.
That's good, that's good.
All right, good, okay.
I got this script, and it really got me.
It was this crazy gangster thing,
The Departed.
And it's about It's about informers
based in the world of Boston police
and Boston underworld.
Jack Nicholson plays the head gangster.
And it's I guess it's like
the other movies I've made.
And Jack, I knew him over the years,
but we never worked together.
When I gave him the script,
he called me back, he said
First thing he said was,
"Give me something to play."
And I realized, of course,
the character, the way it was written
was pretty much, "I'm the boss."
First thing it would say,
"Oh, he'd be elegantly dressed."
Well, not. Let's not go there.
Let's make him bearish.
A man could look at anything
and make somethin' out of it.
Departed has a lot to do
with moral conflicts,
and sense of trust and who you can trust.
Because by that point, we had gone
to war on the basis of trumped up charges.
The Iraqi regime
has plotted to develop anthrax
I call it a moral ground zero.
and nuclear weapons.
And Departed reflects that.
Everybody's informing on each other.
He is giving information to the FBI.
Of course I talked to the FBI.
Do they know who I am?
Casino, I think they have enough morality
to know they're immoral.
In Departed
it's even beyond amoral.
We had the test screening in Chicago.
It couldn't have gone better.
It was like a rock concert.
Laughing in the right places,
screaming in the right places.
It was one of the great experiences
of my life, that one night.
But then the studio came in.
They didn't like it.
They really wanted one of them to live.
Yeah.
They felt that Billy,
Leo's character, should live.
Marty was adamant that could not happen.
I said, "Why would they want one to live?"
He said, "They have a franchise."
That didn't go well. That didn't go well.
Marty just said
"You don't want them to die at the end.
Well, you know, when I read this script,
that's what I really loved most about it.
They all die. I thought that was great.
And I thought, 'I want to make
this movie.' Me, Marty, Marty Scorsese.
Are you sure that you want
Marty Scorsese to make this movie?"
Everybody was laughing by that time.
Point won, and he got his ending.
Just fucking kill me.
It isn't like, "Oh, we won. We beat you."
It wasn't that. I was just sad.
I am killing you.
The studio just
didn't like the picture at all.
They wanted the franchise.
I get it. I get it.
And I couldn't give it to them,
and I wouldn't give it to them
and they really were mad at me,
and I felt terrible about all that.
I realized, "Look, there's no way
I can make films with studios anymore."
But we were nominated for the Oscars.
I was surprised because
it's a tough, crazy, nasty movie.
The three of us are here because
we know what a great feeling it is
to win an Academy Award for directing.
Oscar night of The Departed, you know
You have Francis and
Steven and George Lucas,
who he grew up with in the business,
presenting the award.
I'm like, "What's going on?"
And the Oscar goes to
Martin Scorsese.
Thank you!
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Please. Please.
Thank you. Thank you.
Could you double-check the envelope?
Thank you, so--
I mean, I'm overwhelmed
with this honor with the Academy
I was totally surprised
by the acceptance of that particular film.
But the problem was I kept showing up.
And Where's the wood around here?
They kept looking around saying,
"He's here again."
So many people over the years
have been wishing this for me.
Strangers, you know, I go walking
in the street, people say something.
I go in a doctor's office, whatever,
elevators, people saying,
"You should win."
I go for an X-ray, "You should win one."
And I'm saying thank you.
I don't know what happened,
quite honestly. I really don't know.
But it happened.
When your name was called,
was the word "finally"
what popped into your mind?
It's a good question.
In a funny way, I thank God
I hadn't received it earlier
because I think my own weakness of hubris
would've kicked in.
I don't know if I was strong enough
if I had gotten it before, quite honestly.
And I'm glad that it went this way.
And when I saw that smile on his face,
Steven's face,
I said, "Oh, you know Something's up."
You know, but I'm glad
it's taken this long. It's been worth it.
Formally, with The Departed,
the movie business,
in a sense, came to him.
He's making these movies
that keep him going,
and Leo has
this lucky confluence
of talent and commercial viability
that gave Marty a commercial foothold
that he'd never really had.
It's a rare thing, to have
somebody who's this popular and this good.
He wasn't afraid. He just kept going
into these areas, you know?
And he had no limit that way.
The emotional nature of what developed
in Departed, that was a key.
And having done that, we decided we wanted
to do one more picture together.
It was a tough screenplay to crack
because it was existential
and it had to do with dreams.
It's okay.
And one's own nightmares
entering the mind of somebody
that was clinically insane,
but the audience didn't know it.
It was this insane collage
of different things that were happening
and different characters
coming in and out.
Tell me how they got you here.
They knew!
Don't you get it?
Everything you were up to,
your whole plan.
This is a game. All of this is for you.
You're not investigating anything.
You're a fucking rat in a maze.
It was a very disturbing movie to make.
We didn't know whether we were telling
the truth of the story,
or was it imagination?
Was it a fantasy?
Was it an illusion of his?
We didn't know anymore.
As the actors went through their dialogue
and we realized,
"Wait a minute, this line can mean
three different things."
It just made me
I had a
I had a kind of a prolonged panic attack.
Come on.
I could not take a shirt
off a hanger to put it on.
I'd start to feel
as if I was gonna get a heart attack.
And then I sat down
and you feel you're gonna--
You can't breathe and you can't--
And it would happen
many times during the day,
and you weren't able to work.
It was like a semi-breakdown of some kind
because of the world it put me in.
I wanted to get out of there.
I do remember his mood
shifting dramatically.
It was almost
like one of those Peanuts characters
where they have a rain cloud over them.
I understand it very well. It's a very
isolating experience making a movie.
You're in your own head,
thinking about, you know,
one single project, day in and day out.
That's why he's such a good director.
Because he's living it.
He's feeling the pain,
and very intensely.
You can tell that he gets
so wrapped up in these movies.
You know, you can see he's almost like
a method director in that regard.
I've seen pictures of him
on the set of Goodfellas or Casino
where he's dressed up like a gangster.
You know, I've seen pictures of him
on the set of Alice,
and he's dressed in a cowboy shirt.
You see that in almost every movie.
He's aligning himself with the work,
and it's dangerous to do that.
It's totally dangerous.
When we did Shutter,
that one went deeper for some reason.
I don't know if it's a good or bad movie.
I'm just saying it went deeper.
And maybe things in my personal life
were working a certain way, too.
You know, people are sick.
Your child is growing.
You're getting older.
There's responsibilities now of a certain
kind that you hadn't thought about.
All of this coming together at that--
You know
A fear takes over and grabs at you.
And so that really did something.
Finally, got out of it.
I finally got out of it.
- How did you get out of it?
- We finished it.
Working with him
on a number of different films,
I don't take any of it personally.
But yeah, he was in
He was in the worst mood
doing that movie,
and then the best mood
doing Wolf of Wall Street.
One, two
three.
My name is Jordan Belfort.
Not him.
Me. That's right.
For the first time,
we were given the opportunity
to do a large-scale film
about debauchery and excess.
This time period, the late eighties,
early nineties, Wall Street,
it was like a Roman Empire gone awry.
It was almost like a modern-day Caligula.
It's about these types of people
that are completely focused
on capitalism and making more money.
Money doesn't just buy you a better life,
better food, better cars, better pussy.
It also makes you a better person.
And it was real, a real person.
He's showing you his house
and he comes out, he has
a glass of orange juice or whatever.
I take Quaaludes
10 to 15 times a day for my "back pain".
He asked, "What do I do
with the orange juice?"
I said, "Toss it away."
"You don't care about the orange juice."
We pitched it to every studio.
No one could agree on the version
that Leo and Marty wanted to make.
They were passing on it,
for whatever reason.
I think it had something to do with the
you know, some of the content,
but everyone looked at us like
we were crazy.
But Leo was able
to get it financed independently.
And so we were unencumbered
by major studio issues,
executives that just don't like what
you're doing, from the very beginning.
I said, "They're giving us
this opportunity to do whatever we want.
Let's go for it."
He's like, "Absolutely, kid. Let's do it.
Let's roll the dice."
- Can you give one example?
- I mean
Yeah, I mean, the opening sequence.
It's, you know
It's a woman's buttocks and
I have cocaine and I'm
- Oh, yeah. You like it?
- Yeah.
We wanted to push the boundaries almost
to the point of being absurd at times.
You would come into work
and there would be
a monkey on roller skates
or there would be a naked marching band,
just insanity all around you.
It was crazy and chaotic and
fun and debaucherous.
Oh, God.
Fuck off, Rocky.
Definitely amongst the cast,
the feeling of
everyone was trying to one-up each other.
Someone would be like, "I heard
Jonah just ate a goldfish in his scene."
Then you'd see someone be like, "He did?"
You could see their brain ticking over.
"I'm gonna do something crazier."
Scalp! Scalp!
It was that sense of anything goes.
Once, Leo comes in and he tells Marty,
"Hey, remember one time
Jordan Belfort told me
a prostitute stuck a candle up his ass."
And I'm like, "Oh, that's funny.
Very funny. Wow. Yeah."
And then I realize
he's actually proposing to do this.
There's Leo and I'm lining up a shot
of Leo's butt with a candle.
All you'd hear is this
off camera, all day long.
Wait, where are you eating sushi?
He was 70 when we did Wolf of Wall Street,
and we were doing
sometimes, like, 20-hour days.
He just goes and goes and goes,
and he's laughing, and he's so free.
If you're passionate about a way
to play a scene
or a different direction
in which the movie should go.
I'm like,
"Let's change this entire scene."
He's like, "Okay, let's give it a try."
He and Leo are just
incredible collaborators,
but I never felt excluded from it.
I remember this big sequence,
we rewrote it the night before.
Leo, Marty and me went into a room and
you know,
"We're shooting that scene tomorrow
where my character comes in
and asks for a divorce and, like
it feels a bit It doesn't feel right
now, that she just comes in,
asks for a divorce and
then disappears from the movie."
We pulled the books out and
all that kind of stuff. And
"Okay, what if this happened?"
We did that till 3:00 in the morning.
What happened
in the script originally, I think,
I came in, put down divorce papers
and said, "I want a divorce."
And then that was kind of it.
And what it ended up being
is that we
Oh, God. Oh, God.
Oh, God.
Jordan and Naomi are on the bed.
They end up having this, like,
really strange sex.
Oh, baby.
That was so fucking great. Oh, God.
They finish,
and she's just, like, hating him.
That was the last time.
What do you mean, baby?
I mean, that was the last time
we ever have sex. I'm
She's like, "I want a divorce."
And he's like, "What?"
And they get into a massive fight.
I got news for you.
You're not fucking taking my children
- Yes, I am, Jordan.
- you vicious fucking cunt.
Fuck you, you fucking bitch!
We were not afraid to do certain things
in that film, including domestic violence.
Which everyone said, "Don't do it."
No, we're gonna go all the way
with this guy.
It's what happens.
She gets in the way, he punches her.
Don't you fucking touch me!
Sweetheart, you're coming on a trip
with Daddy, all right?
He's now in a coke rage.
He runs out, goes to grab our daughter.
Grabs her, I'm chasing after.
Get the fuck--
I'm banging down the door
and then he starts the car.
I get a crowbar, smash that.
Oh, my.
Oh, my. Help. Get the baby.
Skylar!
And so, yeah, slightly different
than what it was originally gonna be.
And that was the night before.
It's just Yeah, it was crazy.
Is she all right?
The way he was able
to portray these characters
and be so honest about
the dark side of the human condition.
Marty thinks that there's
those parts to all of us.
And I don't think he judges them.
And he has no fear when it comes
to exploring that dark side.
It's meant to be provocative. I'm sorry,
it just is. It's meant to be provocative.
Because all we care about
is getting fucking rich.
Because that's who we are.
That is who we really could be.
We have to accept
that part of human nature
is to take what the other person has
instead of sharing.
Name of the game, move the money from
your client's pocket into your pocket.
Right. But if you can make
the clients money at the same time,
it's advantageous to everyone. Correct?
No.
The problem is the glamour
of being able to do anything you want
because you know
how to screw people over for money.
But it's not about money.
It's not about sex.
And it isn't about what the woman wants.
It's what the man wants and his power.
It's about power. It's always about power.
The Wolf of Wall Street
controversy happened
in the social media era.
It was argued out minute by minute online.
But by the time the movie came out
and played its run,
a lot of people went.
There's such an indecency
about the way they behaved about money
and what they've done to people.
The film should be that way.
It should reflect that state of mind.
- We wanted to make
- Leo! Leo!
- make a portrait of
- Leo! Leo!
you know, our culture today.
But Wolf of Wall Street
was a huge hit.
Yes, it was. Yeah.
Somehow we understood
how screwed up everything was.
We were just watching this unfold.
A lot of these people who decimated our
economy ultimately got bonuses, you know.
Into the fucking stratosphere!
Shortly after it came out,
Leo and I had to go to Paris.
These young kids are walking by him
doing the McConaughey.
We were so blown away.
That movie did so well in France.
It was Leo's biggest movie ever in France.
So think about that. Bigger than Titanic
and bigger than Inception,
which were massive commercial movies.
To this day, box office-wise,
it's Marty's most successful movie.
Wolf of Wall Street is something
like, people in my generation
will literally have no idea who he is,
but if you're, like,
"He directed Wolf of Wall Street."
"Oh, he's the director
of Wolf of Wall Street."
Like, that sort of thing.
Then was when it got a bit crazier.
Please welcome Martin Scorsese.
Enjoy yourself.
He doesn't like to get noticed, usually.
Like, we stopped going out to dinners
'cause people would just come up to us
in the middle of dinner.
But there was one time
when he came out with me
and we just walked across the street
and got pizza
and I've never forgotten it,
and it was the highlight of my life.
And I will always remember
just sitting there.
Eating our pizza. Nobody bothered us.
And I took a picture of him
with his little hat and it was great.
But yeah, there was really no privacy,
and so, I think sort of like home
or the office or work.
He's always doing something.
He's never not doing something.
Even when he says he's doing nothing,
that's not true.
- We have to talk later.
- I need three minutes with you to just
So this is the first draft
of the boards, very rough.
Get any revisions, and then we'll
polish it and then turn them around.
He's producing an enormous
amount of things.
Filmmakers that he's found and likes
and wants to help, friends of his.
We've got anywhere from 20 to 40 projects
that Marty is also producing,
exec producing.
That's interesting.
And then there's the Film Foundation.
There was never a time that Marty
wasn't advocating for film.
He will always be thinking about
what films need to be restored
and it's not like work for him.
It's just, you know, a second nature.
Marty saved Powell Pressburger films
from extinction.
Dedicated himself to it.
He's still doing it today.
Film Foundation has been
a part of at least 900 films so far.
There's also the World Cinema Project
which is a similar thing, only for films
made in countries around the world
that don't have access or have the ability
to restore, preserve,
and that sort of thing.
It's like imagining
lost paintings that just disappear
that nobody kept.
Nobody put up on the wall.
They just disappear for all time.
And his life's work, as well as
making movies, is about
making the next generation
truly understand
what an important art form cinema is.
We also need to coordinate
with George Lucas' office.
We've got the Film Foundation.
There's feature films,
there's documentaries.
We're now working on commercials.
There's travel.
And that dentist.
- You love the dentist.
- I know. I like him. He's a nice man.
It's the only place I get some rest.
Give me a root canal, will you please?
Seriously, you can't do anything.
Root canal, you're in a chair and they
Well, they numb it and everything.
That's a pain in the neck. But
You're just,
for an hour and a half, it's like
That's it. I'm out of here.
When I first started
working for Marty as his assistant,
I mean, he had a temper, right?
I mean, he would get really frustrated.
You used to get so angry
in the making of a movie
- that you would smash telephones.
- It's kind of satisfying.
What do you do? Just smash them?
Years ago,
I used to do it a lot, because--
But then it was ridiculous
because I needed to use the phone.
Quite honestly.
It was not a happy place sometimes,
especially mornings, when the car
didn't show up and he was late, and
You know, I mean, it was kind of
It could be very tense.
But the evolution
was when we were working on
Living in the Material World.
People always say
I'm the Beatle who changed the most.
But really
that's what I see life is about.
The point is
unless you're God-conscious,
then you have to change, because
I learned about meditation when
we were doing the George Harrison film.
Pulling back and quieting the anger.
Quieting it.
The anger is still gonna be there,
but keep the shouting down
in the back of your head.
Say, "Okay. We're going to do this."
You know?
And of course,
through love, that's the key.
- Look at this little chicken.
- It's definitely a gecko.
Cathy, Francesca and I,
we each had a different dad.
Just based in terms
of where he was in his life.
When I was little, he had this beard.
The big scary beard, and the inten--
And he would roll his eyebrows,
sort of the angry, like, "Here I am."
And he's still got that.
You know, anger feeds the work.
But now there's more
he's more here.
Get those hearts away from my head.
So I've only
- Yeah.
- There you go. You're good.
You know he tries, during family dinner,
he tries to just, like, be more present
and, you know, family dinner
for us is really important.
Mom! We have to hide you, quick.
- No, no don't hide her, give it to her.
- Get in the closet.
And then we'd go in our family room.
Like, for a couple of hours after that,
maybe watch a movie or just talk
and spend time together.
Yeah.
Would you wanna be a vampire?
It may be that I am doomed
to be one of them.
You hear that?
Ow!
The anger could consume you,
and it had, over the years. It has.
It has. Some miracle I came out
of it. You can't live with yourself.
So the thing is, you're gonna to have
to live with yourself if you want to live.
He's gotten a lot calmer
as he's gotten older.
But
he worries a lot about me,
and I think that he also is
just prone to worrying a bit
because of my mom.
I'm gonna go to bed. Night, hon.
Not many people know
that my mom is sick.
She did get Parkinson's
when she was 30, I think.
So she had early onset Parkinson's.
That was before she met my dad.
You would be around that office, right?
And then at one point you, I think,
told me that you had sent sort of a
I won't say a fan letter
But, come on. It's obviously what it is.
You were
chasing me around your office.
I was not chasing you around, damn it.
No, no. It's true.
You were, like, in the way, man.
I was trying to make a film.
We're making films here.
People see
I mean, they look at him
and they see, like, his films
and they see awards and whatever, but
my mom's a big part of his life.
One more.
When I was younger,
it wasn't really progressed.
And then as I got older,
it just got a lot worse,
and like, you know,
she couldn't really walk.
I mean, there's been moments
where he was on set and, like
she'd fall and he would have to stop
shooting and go to the hospital.
He would get so hopeless.
They're so close.
What do you need?
I wanted the
What is that?
The ca--
The calendar?
The catalogue.
The catalogue.
- Oh, the catalogue.
- Yeah.
But do you have it here in this room?
That goddamn disease
is so hard, you know?
But he doesn't act like it's hard.
He seems to take it in stride.
I think it would be fair to say
that if Marty hadn't gone
through all that, back in the day,
he wouldn't be able to be present
in this way and so fully.
And he learned that an artist
can be selfish about his art,
but doesn't have to be selfish
necessarily in his life.
After I had done Last Temptation
of Christ, I had to go deeper.
I read Silence in September of '89,
I said, "I've got to make this."
Questions the whole idea of what is
the essence of this revolutionary
thinking, of Christianity.
It's a true story
about the 17th century in southern Japan.
Where there was a great
conflict between Catholic missionaries
and the Japanese government.
Resulting in maybe 35,000 martyrs,
people killed, ultimately.
What happens with Rodrigues,
a missionary, is something else.
And I was interested in the way
that some of the main missionaries
that went there originally apostatized.
Which meant that they
gave up their religion.
If you don't apostatize,
the prisoners will be hung over the pit
until you do.
Their lives bleeding away, drop by drop.
Silence, more than
just about, like, any film
wrestles with the question of what it
truly means to be Christian.
As long as you don't apostatize
they cannot be saved.
Our main character, who's very arrogant,
insisted that he would never apostatize.
But he did it to save other people.
The only Christ-like gesture
that character makes in the entire film,
is to apostatize.
I think he realizes the depth
of what Jesus is asking for.
Asking him to do
to be, who he's gonna be.
Here's a story where a guy
by the end of the story
denies the Christianity he is preaching.
And in so doing,
he finds the real Christianity.
So what is that?
It's also the loss of his pride, isn't it?
Oh, the whole key is ultimately humility.
- That's-- The learning of humility.
- Yes.
That's the beauty of that story.
One thing that I think is really
notable about the film is the epilogue.
The film ends as this, like, love story
between the priest and Kichijiro,
who's this wretch.
He does terrible things.
He's a traitor, right? And selfish.
This guy keeps doing the same thing
over and over again, you know.
Keeps wanting to be out there
and to be a Christian
and then rats on everybody,
including the priest.
And it's also the Johnny Boy,
kind of, character, right?
Yeah. Well, that's Judas, too,
the Johnny Boy.
You know, Kichijiro, Johnny Boy.
- He's the sinner.
- Yeah.
I am sorry for being so weak.
I think Marty identifies with Kichijiro
more than with the other characters
in the film.
Help me, Padre. Take away the sin.
Jesus said,
"Why should I be hanging out with the high
priests and everybody? They're all fine.
The ones who really need the help
are the sinners."
You see it in Mean Streets.
You see it in Raging Bull.
You see it in Goodfellas.
And I think it reaches
a sort of apogee with Silence
of extending that kind of sympathy
on such a wretched person.
Kichijiro, he's the one who teaches.
Because by the end
it's almost as if Jesus works through him
to teach Rodrigues of what love really is
and forgiveness and compassion.
Do you still think of yourself
as a Christian?
Yes, I think so.
I really believe so, yeah.
I had to reject it, find it,
reject it again, try to find it,
and then finally find
some kind of comfort with it.
I think we will all have doubt, fear
But by the time you understand your faith,
you'll be dead.
So really, it's
It's moving around a room and touching
and trying to find-- In the dark.
The only thing is
you keep making progress.
More and more,
his films feel really haunted to me.
I mean, especially The Irishman.
I hadn't worked with De Niro from Casino
to The Irishman, it's a long time.
But Casino was the last of that type
of thing, 'cause Irishman is different.
Even if the milieu is similar.
Fuck. Shit.
It's a different thing.
Marty looks for material that
allows him to bring all of himself to it,
and you could see it with The Irishman
as the this outsider,
retiring and about to die.
The most memorable stuff
is Bob seeing his kids abandon him.
Peggy, Peggy. I just want to talk. Pe--
I mean, the price you pay
for that idiotic vainglorious life
that he thought he was living.
And there, you see the toll.
Bob De Niro all by himself,
alone in an old age home.
Doesn't even know
when Christmas is. He's alone.
And he's paid for it.
- His mercy endures forever.
- His mercy endures forever.
All right, Frank.
I'm going to be back to visit. Okay?
Very soon,
probably after the Christmas holiday.
- Oh, okay.
- Frank, God bless you.
You too. Thank you.
It's Christmas?
Almost.
Oh, I ain't going nowhere.
When Bob first gave me the book,
he sort of broke down and cried.
People getting older.
That's what the book had in it.
I said, you know
That all this, all they went through,
ultimately we all have to face
the same thing.
We have to face our extinction.
The Irishman was working on me
in sort of a parallel theme
the whole time.
You see these wonderful people
after all these years
doing this work together.
The things we've done together,
I'm so grateful that we happened to be
When you think about it,
we were two kids who kind of were aware
of each other downtown.
And all of a sudden,
this whole thing happened.
It's kind of amazing.
I think Marty just has a real commitment
to that to what he's doing.
It's not going to change for him.
God bless him.
There's a lot
of great filmmakers out there
but I think he would do it for free,
you know?
I think he would
be a filmmaker no matter what.
Cinema consumed him at such an early age
and it never left him.
Do you feel like,
now, that each film has a different
You know, you can't give all
of yourself to every film,
in the same way, or you would probably
- Well, that's what my doctor told me.
- die.
Dr. Klein, yeah.
He told me that 20 years ago.
He said, "Marty, you can't do that
every time. You won't survive it."
We're going to move it
according to the drone, the whole unit.
I found it very difficult to be
without directing
or without creating
a movie for long periods of time.
Three, then two, one,
and then two, we got it all.
Yeah, yeah. No, that was great.
Where are we going? From the same place?
Do you want to go from
"Ernest Burkhart"?
Sure. Yeah, yeah. Okay.
What's happening?
- You ready?
- Cameras are set.
Okay, and action!
Hollywood measures success
by box office and Academy Awards.
How do you measure success?
All right, so you're not
box office and you've never
I don't know what to say.
Never got an Academy Award.
How do you measure success?
The value of the work.
Action!
By the time 1998 came around,
again, I was at a low ebb.
I was on the outside of the American
film industry, so to speak.
The last film that
had got any real recognition,
and that made some money
at least, was Casino.
Yeah, and give him a couple of kicks.
They weren't considering me for anything
and there were certain projects
I wanted to make.
Marty and I had just done
Bringing Out The Dead.
Marty, at that time, was looking to do
bigger and bigger budget films.
He saw himself as,
he said, a fresco painter,
doing bigger and bigger canvases.
But I had to find some money.
And to get the financing to do that,
I needed a lifesaver.
And that's when Mike Ovitz came in.
And he had started his new company
and he came to me and said,
"We have this young actor in it,
Leo DiCaprio. You should meet him,"
and I knew him through Bob De Niro.
I said, "Watch this kid.
He's interesting."
- Leonardo, right here, please!
- Leonardo!
How do you feel about being
a sex symbol, as it were?
Am I sex symbol?
The nominees for
Actor in a Supporting Role are
Leonardo DiCaprio in
What's Eating Gilbert Grape?
When did you first see
one of Marty's films?
I had done This Boy's Life
with Robert De Niro,
and I decided to watch
Marty's entire catalogue of movies.
Certainly, all the ones De Niro was in.
I was kicking back on my couch
watching VHS tapes
Believe me, Jerry, I'm very good.
I'm really good. I'm dynamite.
These films
affected me profoundly, at a young age.
And then after Titanic,
I was no longer
this indie, sort of, actor.
I then became somebody
that could finance my own projects.
So it was, "Okay, what do you wanna do?"
I said, "I wanna work with
Martin Scorsese. What does he have?"
We put Leo and Marty together.
I'd met Marty, but "Hi" and "Bye", right?
But an official meeting.
He said he always wanted
to do Gangs of New York, right?
I was like, "Tell him I'll do it.
I don't care what the script is.
Let's do it."
- First time you found the book?
- January 1st, 1970.
This was before you made Mean Streets.
When I finished Raging Bull,
I tried to get it financed
and we almost did, but couldn't
get it financed. It was too expensive.
He wanted to make the film
for such a long time.
I mean, it's the origin story, isn't it?
The history of the city
was fascinating to me,
and the stories of the gangs.
My father would talk about the 40 Thieves.
In effect, the society was being
worked out in the streets.
Particularly, the Five Points,
which was termed
the worst slum in the world,
at the time, in the 1850s.
I thought I wanted to create that world
that nobody's really
ever seen before in film.
In my neighborhood, I'd heard stories
about all of this, for years.
I always thought
what a great film it would make,
and then I found out
more and more about it.
It wasn't really a city.
It was a warring state.
On my challenge
by the ancient laws of combat
I remember meeting with Daniel,
and I had these images of the period.
And as I opened the book,
there's Bill the Butcher
and it looks just like him.
I said, "Look at that.
How could you not do this?
All you need is the mustache,
look, it's a classic."
The historical figure was regarded
as a genuine hero in the community.
Bill "The Butcher" Poole
lived in the Five Points
and had a running battle
with every Irishman he could find.
who holds sway over the Five Points.
Us natives, born right-wise
to this fine land?
Or the foreign hordes defiling it?
It was so prophetic, in a way,
the telling of that story,
because this ludicrous notion of nativism.
You mother whoring Irish nigger,
whose man are you?
We speak English in this country.
Whose man are you? You see this knife?
I'm going to teach you to speak English
with this fucking knife.
I come from an immigrant group.
I learned more and more about the
the welcome
that the immigrants received
Go back to Ireland, you dumb mick.
starting with the Irish, you know.
The Irish learned how to handle all this.
They dealt with it,
but they had to fight back.
Fighting against
the Know-Nothings and the Wide-Awakes.
Which are names like now The Proud Boys.
The Irish had to fight for their place.
Archbishop Hughes, the firebrand,
he said, "You burn one Catholic church,
we're gonna burn the Protestant churches."
They had to fight back.
They fought along the brick wall
between Mulberry and Mott.
Growing up, we were
hanging out on their gravestones.
So, this was the ancient world to us.
It looks like New York. It's great.
It was like science fiction in reverse.
- This is Five Points.
- This is it. The Five Points.
Our vision was to create all
of downtown New York at Cinecittà Studios,
because of the Fellini films and
Pasolini films that were made there.
That meant so much to me. And I remember
George Lucas coming down to see me.
And he said, "No one will ever
make a picture like this again.
This set will never be built
like this again. These sets."
You know, this was
a multi-million-dollar epic
where they recreated
turn-of-the-century New York.
The sheer responsibility of that
is like, "Oh my God.
Be careful what you wish for.
This is an intimidating experience."
This is the liver.
The kidneys.
The heart.
Daniel and Marty had
worked together beforehand.
I remember walking
in the first day on set
and they were discussing
how to cut the meat.
And Daniel had a real butcher with him,
and they spent quite a few hours
while the whole set was sitting there,
talking about whether
it would be chop or loin.
This is a kill.
This is a kill.
Main artery. This is a kill.
You try.
That actor/director intense collaboration,
I had never seen
to that degree before in my life.
Martin is searching.
And if you want to go further,
he will always encourage you
to go further.
He's just so full of glee,
so full of encouragement,
just to see how far you can take a thing.
Whoopsie daisy!
And didn't you Isn't that
the time you broke your nose?
Yeah.
There was so much blood all over my face
that you couldn't really tell
that most of it was mine.
It was all my idea. It was my own fault.
So I paid the price for it, I suppose.
What'll it be then?
Rib or chop? Loin or shank?
- The liver!
- The spleen!
I had been so obsessed
with that project for so many years,
that I put everything into it.
And that meant going toe-to-toe
with Harvey Weinstein.
Harvey was a salesman
and a thug. He's not an artist.
But he wanted
to be invited to the artists' table,
and this was his way in.
But Marty,
he is so committed to getting it done,
he's been able to work
with these very difficult producers.
And that's a great talent.
Because you can't make these big movies
unless you have that kind of financing.
He loved cinema,
and he wanted to make it spectacular
in the style of the '50s and '60s
in terms of David Lean or Metzger.
So did I, to a certain extent,
but I do it my own way.
And he goes out of frame.
I wanted to make something
that had as much authenticity as possible
from what I could understand
and what I had been studying
over the years and researching.
He also needed to sell a picture.
And the worst thing for him were the hats.
He didn't want anybody wearing hats.
I said, "Everybody wore hats.
Everybody wore hats.
What do you want from me?
Everybody wore hats."
I just want to see your face, son.
No harm intended.
But at the same time,
he didn't want to turn off the audience
to something that looked alien.
- Or not beautiful?
- Yeah. Exactly.
You've got a beautiful man,
you've got beautiful women in there.
You want people to see them.
You have to work with it.
You're making a film together.
And also,
they're going to give you the money.
It's bartering. It's bartering.
Because it's either that
or not get the film made.
When you go into this work,
you give birth to yourself
into a world of conflict and corruption.
There will always be that opposition
between money, where the power is,
and the creative people
who are trying to tell stories
with that money.
I was shooting it a certain way,
according to the way I made my drawings,
so it took me a little longer.
So, Harvey got furious.
Said, "It's costing too much."
And the studio,
they didn't want to pay for some of it.
So I had to really focus on
what I wanted to shoot,
what I thought was important,
in order to get control of what
was remaining of the production.
The pressure was so strong.
But Martin's a cage fighter.
He'll be the last one standing.
I fought to get what I needed,
but I had a weakness.
Which was I kept changing the script.
To this day, I don't have the story down.
There was a lot of discussion
about the screenplay.
It definitely continued to evolve.
In some cases,
making it up as we went along.
In which case, that meant, you know
People in charge would come in
and say, "What are you doing?"
There were a few writers
drifting around.
One of them was a spy
for the Weinstein camp.
And he was spying.
Reporting back all our, sort of,
misdemeanors and everything and
But, anyhow, Martin lost it at one point,
and threw his desk out of the window.
It was on the third floor,
as I remember it.
I go in, I see these desks
and there was the producer
and I took the desk and tossed it over.
And it was my
The other associate with me,
he said, "That's not his desk."
It was just volatile.
You know, everybody was
It was tough.
Martin Scorsese's long-anticipated epic,
Gangs of New York,
opens all across the country.
- Hello.
- Hello.
The film went way over budget.
I did have everything on the line.
So, I really did everything I could
to get the publicity out there.
Now, of course,
the real reason Marty's here
is to try and make
some of that precious money back.
Now, I don't even know
what really sells a film.
Apparently, being on television,
talking about the picture,
seeing that you're, you know, friendly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Gangs of New York opens next Friday.
Please welcome Martin Scorsese.
Luckily, it did very well.
This was a big movie,
in terms of box office.
And the critics, they loved it.
But Gangs was something
It was an obsession.
And it was something that,
even if I got it done,
it's never done.
It just isn't done. It still isn't done.
So, as far as I'm concerned,
you know what, let's
I got it out, as best I could
under these circumstances.
Put it to rest, take a deep breath.
And that's what I finally was able to do.
Because at that point in time, in my life,
I found a kind of steadiness,
and that was Helen.
Helen made contact with me,
before we ever met.
She gave me this sent me this book,
this prayer book.
There's a letter in it.
I didn't know her. It was sort of a fan.
And I was I said, "Isn't that amazing?"
Because a year later, we met, you know?
And then a year after that,
we met even more.
I met Helen working on a book
about the great British director
Michael Powell.
I knew Helen
when she was an editor at Random House.
Helen was one of the great
Random House editors.
a young poet who lives in a society
that's been totally taken over
by money and technology.
And Helen is, you know,
worlds away from where Marty grew up.
Her great, great, great grandfather signed
the Declaration of Independence.
She's from that world.
So, it was a different world
and it was sort of a fabulous union.
- There you go, good girl.
- Hitchcock angle.
Out of that came Francesca
on November 16th, 1999.
She was quite early.
Like, I think five weeks early.
- Oh, my gosh.
- Yeah. Yeah.
Well, we almost lost both of them
at four in the morning.
She had me at, like, 52.
It was a very difficult pregnancy.
And so I was, sort of like
They called me their miracle baby.
What a big girl.
What a big, grumpy girl.
Everything changed.
My dad was just
always, like, there for me.
I remember him reading all of these books
to me when I was younger.
He read me the Bible.
Every night, we'd go up,
and read more and more.
When he was younger,
I think that he was just very impulsive.
He was just trying to find his way,
and I think he found that with my mom,
but it took him a minute.
After going through
the purgatory of Gangs of New York,
I said, "I want to make a movie now."
I wanna do something and feel free
and make something spectacular, in a way.
Start 'em up!
And that's when the script
of Aviator landed in my lap.
Leo had read this Howard Hughes book.
We had a really good script.
It was about filmmaking and the aviation,
and a love story between
Katharine Hepburn and him.
And I thought, "Wow, Hollywood
of the '20s and '30s, my God."
The airplane sequences, action filmmaking.
God damn it!
The Aviator would be like,
if I could be a director
who just came in and did something,
but it has all these elements that I like
and that I could identify with.
Why the hell do they look so slow?
This isn't what it was like.
They look like a bunch of goddamn models.
You could feel an affinity
that Marty had
with the character of Howard Hughes.
Son of a bitch.
He deeply understood
the scale of his ambition.
- Don't tell me it can't be done.
- The gyro forces are too much.
You send these planes into barrel rolls,
they won't make it.
It's the goddamn climax of the picture,
Frank. You make it work.
The feeling of when he opened the script
and there's the movie Hell's Angels
that Howard is directing,
it says, "Year three." I think he said,
"Wow, this is my kind of guy."
He would not stop
until he got everything perfect.
Howard Hughes is now editing
some 25 miles of film.
He's as obsessive as Howard Hughes.
Marty is incredibly obsessive.
Very meticulous.
Not enough. Not enough.
These rivets have to be completely flush.
I want every screw and joint countersunk.
He has these storyboards in his mind.
Sometimes they're insanely elaborate
where there's a certain scene
that he is attached to shooting
from every possible angle.
I remember on The Aviator, flying
the Spruce Goose for the first time.
Hand on lever, face.
Then hand on lever, right eyeball.
Hand on lever, left eyeball.
Acute close-up on my eyeballs.
Above the head, wide shot.
And it'd just be "power
coming up" for two days.
To the point where
I almost felt like I was losing my mind.
Oh, God. I'm going crazy.
Howard Hughes is a megalomaniac,
and also a genius at what he did.
And he has this little flaw in him,
which takes him down.
It was a lot to do with control.
Right there, Bob.
And in controlling
You missed it. Right there.
how far do you go with control?
Can you control everything?
Do you get a sense that you might
make more movies with Leo yet?
Yeah, because we went through
a long journey on that one.
You learn how to work with each other.
On Gangs of New York,
I just remember there was like,
"Okay, this is our first time
working together."
At that age, I think I was really
possibly annoying with my questioning.
I was asking about the ending,
what my character's motivation was.
Or we can kind just go bump
instead of like a boom to the floor.
There was this point and
this look in his eye where he's like,
"Oh, okay. I got it. I got it."
Then it took me a while
after Gangs to realize
he's letting you
find these things for yourself.
I
I like the desert.
I remember one specific scene.
My character, who has OCD,
is locked away in his screening room.
People want to get him out
of the screening room
and they send Katharine Hepburn
to talk to him.
Howard, unlock this door immediately.
But he can't see her,
he can't let her in, because of these
imaginary germs that exist.
I can't, sweetie.
I remember I'd done
ten, twenty, maybe thirty takes.
Something was dreadfully wrong.
I don't know what it was.
He just had this look on his face.
He didn't want to tell me
what to do, but it was
He basically said, "Something's wrong
here, and this is not working."
He kept playing on,
"Oh, please, I need you.
Oh, please, I'm suffering so much."
"Do you want her to come in?" "No."
I said, "Then don't" you know?
I can hear you, Katie.
I could always hear you,
even in the cockpit with the engines on.
Well, that's because I'm so goddamn loud.
And I realized, "Oh.
Right, this is about becoming a man."
I'm glad for you. Kate.
Go away now. Would you do that?
"I do care about you, I do love
you, but just not right now, sweetheart."
Go away, just for now. I'll see you soon.
I was like,
"Wow, that had never occurred to me."
But it wasn't something
that he told me to do.
It was something that
he knew instinctively was wrong.
But he didn't want to tell me
how to play it.
He wanted me to find it for myself.
It was a good shoot
and people really liked it.
It was nominated for these
for the Oscars.
- We got 11 Academy Award nominations.
- Yeah, it doesn't beat that.
It's amazing.
We got a gaudy number
of nominations.
And there was a light shined on
the fact that Marty never won.
Martin Scorsese
is an American master
who has never won
an Oscar for Best Director.
Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas,
the list goes on and on, and no Oscar.
I noticed that, yeah.
Mean Streets,
it was completely ignored by Hollywood.
Taxi Driver was even worse.
It was very, very nasty.
Schrader wasn't nominated, nor was I.
Raging Bull was different.
Everyone thought Marty
was going to win for Raging Bull,
so that's why they had King Vidor
come out to give it to him,
because they knew
he was like a mentor to Marty.
And the winner is Robert Redford
He should have had
a bundle of Best Director awards.
He got quite a few nominations.
Barry Levinson for Rain Man.
Kevin Costner for Dances With Wolves.
Gangs was wonderful because we had
11 nominations. We lost all of them.
goes to Roman Polanski.
With Aviator, I thought, "Maybe
this time, they'll give me an Oscar."
Are you looking forward to the Oscars?
You know,
looking forward to it, with trepidation.
Let's face it, this is a big picture.
It's the kind of picture that the Academy
hopefully will recognize.
There's no doubt about that.
If it were to come now that would be
really something very special.
It was the first
Academy Awards I'd ever gone to,
and I was sitting right behind him.
I remember it was, like
Cate Blanchett wins.
Cate Blanchett in The Aviator.
Thelma Schoonmaker wins.
This is really as much yours
as it is mine, Marty.
Costume wins, right?
Everything's winning, winning, winning.
And the Oscar goes to
Clint Eastwood for Million Dollar Baby.
How badly do you want
to get an Oscar for director?
Me, personally
The time has gone, I think.
I think it's partially
because of violence,
but also because he's very much
against hitting anything on the nose.
He doesn't want to tell you what to think,
which a lot of movies do.
A lot of movies tell you what to think.
He doesn't want to do that.
He wants you to feel it.
Lack of moral closure
is his signature as a filmmaker.
He's not really interested in
telling you the moral of the story.
His movies are about
the stuff, without analysis,
that we will never understand
about ourselves,
but he puts it out there.
He just says, "This is how I feel.
This is what I'm feeling right now."
And he puts these characters out there,
and we get to sort it out.
We get to make sense of it.
It's like, I remember
with New York, New York
when I was doing the ending,
I had them walk away from each other.
George Lucas said,
"There's another $10 million
at the box office if they're together."
He's right.
He's dead right.
But I can't say that, "I'll give you
a happy ending." I don't know.
And so, you know, Hollywood,
I don't belong there.
I don't have that mindset.
As much as I admire it, there's so much
a part of me that wanted to be that,
but I don't come from that sort of thing.
I don't know what the hell I you know.
I do what I do.
Yeah, go ahead, anytime.
Ready and action.
That's good, kids. That's very good, kids.
Okay.
That's good, that's good.
All right, good, okay.
I got this script, and it really got me.
It was this crazy gangster thing,
The Departed.
And it's about It's about informers
based in the world of Boston police
and Boston underworld.
Jack Nicholson plays the head gangster.
And it's I guess it's like
the other movies I've made.
And Jack, I knew him over the years,
but we never worked together.
When I gave him the script,
he called me back, he said
First thing he said was,
"Give me something to play."
And I realized, of course,
the character, the way it was written
was pretty much, "I'm the boss."
First thing it would say,
"Oh, he'd be elegantly dressed."
Well, not. Let's not go there.
Let's make him bearish.
A man could look at anything
and make somethin' out of it.
Departed has a lot to do
with moral conflicts,
and sense of trust and who you can trust.
Because by that point, we had gone
to war on the basis of trumped up charges.
The Iraqi regime
has plotted to develop anthrax
I call it a moral ground zero.
and nuclear weapons.
And Departed reflects that.
Everybody's informing on each other.
He is giving information to the FBI.
Of course I talked to the FBI.
Do they know who I am?
Casino, I think they have enough morality
to know they're immoral.
In Departed
it's even beyond amoral.
We had the test screening in Chicago.
It couldn't have gone better.
It was like a rock concert.
Laughing in the right places,
screaming in the right places.
It was one of the great experiences
of my life, that one night.
But then the studio came in.
They didn't like it.
They really wanted one of them to live.
Yeah.
They felt that Billy,
Leo's character, should live.
Marty was adamant that could not happen.
I said, "Why would they want one to live?"
He said, "They have a franchise."
That didn't go well. That didn't go well.
Marty just said
"You don't want them to die at the end.
Well, you know, when I read this script,
that's what I really loved most about it.
They all die. I thought that was great.
And I thought, 'I want to make
this movie.' Me, Marty, Marty Scorsese.
Are you sure that you want
Marty Scorsese to make this movie?"
Everybody was laughing by that time.
Point won, and he got his ending.
Just fucking kill me.
It isn't like, "Oh, we won. We beat you."
It wasn't that. I was just sad.
I am killing you.
The studio just
didn't like the picture at all.
They wanted the franchise.
I get it. I get it.
And I couldn't give it to them,
and I wouldn't give it to them
and they really were mad at me,
and I felt terrible about all that.
I realized, "Look, there's no way
I can make films with studios anymore."
But we were nominated for the Oscars.
I was surprised because
it's a tough, crazy, nasty movie.
The three of us are here because
we know what a great feeling it is
to win an Academy Award for directing.
Oscar night of The Departed, you know
You have Francis and
Steven and George Lucas,
who he grew up with in the business,
presenting the award.
I'm like, "What's going on?"
And the Oscar goes to
Martin Scorsese.
Thank you!
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Please. Please.
Thank you. Thank you.
Could you double-check the envelope?
Thank you, so--
I mean, I'm overwhelmed
with this honor with the Academy
I was totally surprised
by the acceptance of that particular film.
But the problem was I kept showing up.
And Where's the wood around here?
They kept looking around saying,
"He's here again."
So many people over the years
have been wishing this for me.
Strangers, you know, I go walking
in the street, people say something.
I go in a doctor's office, whatever,
elevators, people saying,
"You should win."
I go for an X-ray, "You should win one."
And I'm saying thank you.
I don't know what happened,
quite honestly. I really don't know.
But it happened.
When your name was called,
was the word "finally"
what popped into your mind?
It's a good question.
In a funny way, I thank God
I hadn't received it earlier
because I think my own weakness of hubris
would've kicked in.
I don't know if I was strong enough
if I had gotten it before, quite honestly.
And I'm glad that it went this way.
And when I saw that smile on his face,
Steven's face,
I said, "Oh, you know Something's up."
You know, but I'm glad
it's taken this long. It's been worth it.
Formally, with The Departed,
the movie business,
in a sense, came to him.
He's making these movies
that keep him going,
and Leo has
this lucky confluence
of talent and commercial viability
that gave Marty a commercial foothold
that he'd never really had.
It's a rare thing, to have
somebody who's this popular and this good.
He wasn't afraid. He just kept going
into these areas, you know?
And he had no limit that way.
The emotional nature of what developed
in Departed, that was a key.
And having done that, we decided we wanted
to do one more picture together.
It was a tough screenplay to crack
because it was existential
and it had to do with dreams.
It's okay.
And one's own nightmares
entering the mind of somebody
that was clinically insane,
but the audience didn't know it.
It was this insane collage
of different things that were happening
and different characters
coming in and out.
Tell me how they got you here.
They knew!
Don't you get it?
Everything you were up to,
your whole plan.
This is a game. All of this is for you.
You're not investigating anything.
You're a fucking rat in a maze.
It was a very disturbing movie to make.
We didn't know whether we were telling
the truth of the story,
or was it imagination?
Was it a fantasy?
Was it an illusion of his?
We didn't know anymore.
As the actors went through their dialogue
and we realized,
"Wait a minute, this line can mean
three different things."
It just made me
I had a
I had a kind of a prolonged panic attack.
Come on.
I could not take a shirt
off a hanger to put it on.
I'd start to feel
as if I was gonna get a heart attack.
And then I sat down
and you feel you're gonna--
You can't breathe and you can't--
And it would happen
many times during the day,
and you weren't able to work.
It was like a semi-breakdown of some kind
because of the world it put me in.
I wanted to get out of there.
I do remember his mood
shifting dramatically.
It was almost
like one of those Peanuts characters
where they have a rain cloud over them.
I understand it very well. It's a very
isolating experience making a movie.
You're in your own head,
thinking about, you know,
one single project, day in and day out.
That's why he's such a good director.
Because he's living it.
He's feeling the pain,
and very intensely.
You can tell that he gets
so wrapped up in these movies.
You know, you can see he's almost like
a method director in that regard.
I've seen pictures of him
on the set of Goodfellas or Casino
where he's dressed up like a gangster.
You know, I've seen pictures of him
on the set of Alice,
and he's dressed in a cowboy shirt.
You see that in almost every movie.
He's aligning himself with the work,
and it's dangerous to do that.
It's totally dangerous.
When we did Shutter,
that one went deeper for some reason.
I don't know if it's a good or bad movie.
I'm just saying it went deeper.
And maybe things in my personal life
were working a certain way, too.
You know, people are sick.
Your child is growing.
You're getting older.
There's responsibilities now of a certain
kind that you hadn't thought about.
All of this coming together at that--
You know
A fear takes over and grabs at you.
And so that really did something.
Finally, got out of it.
I finally got out of it.
- How did you get out of it?
- We finished it.
Working with him
on a number of different films,
I don't take any of it personally.
But yeah, he was in
He was in the worst mood
doing that movie,
and then the best mood
doing Wolf of Wall Street.
One, two
three.
My name is Jordan Belfort.
Not him.
Me. That's right.
For the first time,
we were given the opportunity
to do a large-scale film
about debauchery and excess.
This time period, the late eighties,
early nineties, Wall Street,
it was like a Roman Empire gone awry.
It was almost like a modern-day Caligula.
It's about these types of people
that are completely focused
on capitalism and making more money.
Money doesn't just buy you a better life,
better food, better cars, better pussy.
It also makes you a better person.
And it was real, a real person.
He's showing you his house
and he comes out, he has
a glass of orange juice or whatever.
I take Quaaludes
10 to 15 times a day for my "back pain".
He asked, "What do I do
with the orange juice?"
I said, "Toss it away."
"You don't care about the orange juice."
We pitched it to every studio.
No one could agree on the version
that Leo and Marty wanted to make.
They were passing on it,
for whatever reason.
I think it had something to do with the
you know, some of the content,
but everyone looked at us like
we were crazy.
But Leo was able
to get it financed independently.
And so we were unencumbered
by major studio issues,
executives that just don't like what
you're doing, from the very beginning.
I said, "They're giving us
this opportunity to do whatever we want.
Let's go for it."
He's like, "Absolutely, kid. Let's do it.
Let's roll the dice."
- Can you give one example?
- I mean
Yeah, I mean, the opening sequence.
It's, you know
It's a woman's buttocks and
I have cocaine and I'm
- Oh, yeah. You like it?
- Yeah.
We wanted to push the boundaries almost
to the point of being absurd at times.
You would come into work
and there would be
a monkey on roller skates
or there would be a naked marching band,
just insanity all around you.
It was crazy and chaotic and
fun and debaucherous.
Oh, God.
Fuck off, Rocky.
Definitely amongst the cast,
the feeling of
everyone was trying to one-up each other.
Someone would be like, "I heard
Jonah just ate a goldfish in his scene."
Then you'd see someone be like, "He did?"
You could see their brain ticking over.
"I'm gonna do something crazier."
Scalp! Scalp!
It was that sense of anything goes.
Once, Leo comes in and he tells Marty,
"Hey, remember one time
Jordan Belfort told me
a prostitute stuck a candle up his ass."
And I'm like, "Oh, that's funny.
Very funny. Wow. Yeah."
And then I realize
he's actually proposing to do this.
There's Leo and I'm lining up a shot
of Leo's butt with a candle.
All you'd hear is this
off camera, all day long.
Wait, where are you eating sushi?
He was 70 when we did Wolf of Wall Street,
and we were doing
sometimes, like, 20-hour days.
He just goes and goes and goes,
and he's laughing, and he's so free.
If you're passionate about a way
to play a scene
or a different direction
in which the movie should go.
I'm like,
"Let's change this entire scene."
He's like, "Okay, let's give it a try."
He and Leo are just
incredible collaborators,
but I never felt excluded from it.
I remember this big sequence,
we rewrote it the night before.
Leo, Marty and me went into a room and
you know,
"We're shooting that scene tomorrow
where my character comes in
and asks for a divorce and, like
it feels a bit It doesn't feel right
now, that she just comes in,
asks for a divorce and
then disappears from the movie."
We pulled the books out and
all that kind of stuff. And
"Okay, what if this happened?"
We did that till 3:00 in the morning.
What happened
in the script originally, I think,
I came in, put down divorce papers
and said, "I want a divorce."
And then that was kind of it.
And what it ended up being
is that we
Oh, God. Oh, God.
Oh, God.
Jordan and Naomi are on the bed.
They end up having this, like,
really strange sex.
Oh, baby.
That was so fucking great. Oh, God.
They finish,
and she's just, like, hating him.
That was the last time.
What do you mean, baby?
I mean, that was the last time
we ever have sex. I'm
She's like, "I want a divorce."
And he's like, "What?"
And they get into a massive fight.
I got news for you.
You're not fucking taking my children
- Yes, I am, Jordan.
- you vicious fucking cunt.
Fuck you, you fucking bitch!
We were not afraid to do certain things
in that film, including domestic violence.
Which everyone said, "Don't do it."
No, we're gonna go all the way
with this guy.
It's what happens.
She gets in the way, he punches her.
Don't you fucking touch me!
Sweetheart, you're coming on a trip
with Daddy, all right?
He's now in a coke rage.
He runs out, goes to grab our daughter.
Grabs her, I'm chasing after.
Get the fuck--
I'm banging down the door
and then he starts the car.
I get a crowbar, smash that.
Oh, my.
Oh, my. Help. Get the baby.
Skylar!
And so, yeah, slightly different
than what it was originally gonna be.
And that was the night before.
It's just Yeah, it was crazy.
Is she all right?
The way he was able
to portray these characters
and be so honest about
the dark side of the human condition.
Marty thinks that there's
those parts to all of us.
And I don't think he judges them.
And he has no fear when it comes
to exploring that dark side.
It's meant to be provocative. I'm sorry,
it just is. It's meant to be provocative.
Because all we care about
is getting fucking rich.
Because that's who we are.
That is who we really could be.
We have to accept
that part of human nature
is to take what the other person has
instead of sharing.
Name of the game, move the money from
your client's pocket into your pocket.
Right. But if you can make
the clients money at the same time,
it's advantageous to everyone. Correct?
No.
The problem is the glamour
of being able to do anything you want
because you know
how to screw people over for money.
But it's not about money.
It's not about sex.
And it isn't about what the woman wants.
It's what the man wants and his power.
It's about power. It's always about power.
The Wolf of Wall Street
controversy happened
in the social media era.
It was argued out minute by minute online.
But by the time the movie came out
and played its run,
a lot of people went.
There's such an indecency
about the way they behaved about money
and what they've done to people.
The film should be that way.
It should reflect that state of mind.
- We wanted to make
- Leo! Leo!
- make a portrait of
- Leo! Leo!
you know, our culture today.
But Wolf of Wall Street
was a huge hit.
Yes, it was. Yeah.
Somehow we understood
how screwed up everything was.
We were just watching this unfold.
A lot of these people who decimated our
economy ultimately got bonuses, you know.
Into the fucking stratosphere!
Shortly after it came out,
Leo and I had to go to Paris.
These young kids are walking by him
doing the McConaughey.
We were so blown away.
That movie did so well in France.
It was Leo's biggest movie ever in France.
So think about that. Bigger than Titanic
and bigger than Inception,
which were massive commercial movies.
To this day, box office-wise,
it's Marty's most successful movie.
Wolf of Wall Street is something
like, people in my generation
will literally have no idea who he is,
but if you're, like,
"He directed Wolf of Wall Street."
"Oh, he's the director
of Wolf of Wall Street."
Like, that sort of thing.
Then was when it got a bit crazier.
Please welcome Martin Scorsese.
Enjoy yourself.
He doesn't like to get noticed, usually.
Like, we stopped going out to dinners
'cause people would just come up to us
in the middle of dinner.
But there was one time
when he came out with me
and we just walked across the street
and got pizza
and I've never forgotten it,
and it was the highlight of my life.
And I will always remember
just sitting there.
Eating our pizza. Nobody bothered us.
And I took a picture of him
with his little hat and it was great.
But yeah, there was really no privacy,
and so, I think sort of like home
or the office or work.
He's always doing something.
He's never not doing something.
Even when he says he's doing nothing,
that's not true.
- We have to talk later.
- I need three minutes with you to just
So this is the first draft
of the boards, very rough.
Get any revisions, and then we'll
polish it and then turn them around.
He's producing an enormous
amount of things.
Filmmakers that he's found and likes
and wants to help, friends of his.
We've got anywhere from 20 to 40 projects
that Marty is also producing,
exec producing.
That's interesting.
And then there's the Film Foundation.
There was never a time that Marty
wasn't advocating for film.
He will always be thinking about
what films need to be restored
and it's not like work for him.
It's just, you know, a second nature.
Marty saved Powell Pressburger films
from extinction.
Dedicated himself to it.
He's still doing it today.
Film Foundation has been
a part of at least 900 films so far.
There's also the World Cinema Project
which is a similar thing, only for films
made in countries around the world
that don't have access or have the ability
to restore, preserve,
and that sort of thing.
It's like imagining
lost paintings that just disappear
that nobody kept.
Nobody put up on the wall.
They just disappear for all time.
And his life's work, as well as
making movies, is about
making the next generation
truly understand
what an important art form cinema is.
We also need to coordinate
with George Lucas' office.
We've got the Film Foundation.
There's feature films,
there's documentaries.
We're now working on commercials.
There's travel.
And that dentist.
- You love the dentist.
- I know. I like him. He's a nice man.
It's the only place I get some rest.
Give me a root canal, will you please?
Seriously, you can't do anything.
Root canal, you're in a chair and they
Well, they numb it and everything.
That's a pain in the neck. But
You're just,
for an hour and a half, it's like
That's it. I'm out of here.
When I first started
working for Marty as his assistant,
I mean, he had a temper, right?
I mean, he would get really frustrated.
You used to get so angry
in the making of a movie
- that you would smash telephones.
- It's kind of satisfying.
What do you do? Just smash them?
Years ago,
I used to do it a lot, because--
But then it was ridiculous
because I needed to use the phone.
Quite honestly.
It was not a happy place sometimes,
especially mornings, when the car
didn't show up and he was late, and
You know, I mean, it was kind of
It could be very tense.
But the evolution
was when we were working on
Living in the Material World.
People always say
I'm the Beatle who changed the most.
But really
that's what I see life is about.
The point is
unless you're God-conscious,
then you have to change, because
I learned about meditation when
we were doing the George Harrison film.
Pulling back and quieting the anger.
Quieting it.
The anger is still gonna be there,
but keep the shouting down
in the back of your head.
Say, "Okay. We're going to do this."
You know?
And of course,
through love, that's the key.
- Look at this little chicken.
- It's definitely a gecko.
Cathy, Francesca and I,
we each had a different dad.
Just based in terms
of where he was in his life.
When I was little, he had this beard.
The big scary beard, and the inten--
And he would roll his eyebrows,
sort of the angry, like, "Here I am."
And he's still got that.
You know, anger feeds the work.
But now there's more
he's more here.
Get those hearts away from my head.
So I've only
- Yeah.
- There you go. You're good.
You know he tries, during family dinner,
he tries to just, like, be more present
and, you know, family dinner
for us is really important.
Mom! We have to hide you, quick.
- No, no don't hide her, give it to her.
- Get in the closet.
And then we'd go in our family room.
Like, for a couple of hours after that,
maybe watch a movie or just talk
and spend time together.
Yeah.
Would you wanna be a vampire?
It may be that I am doomed
to be one of them.
You hear that?
Ow!
The anger could consume you,
and it had, over the years. It has.
It has. Some miracle I came out
of it. You can't live with yourself.
So the thing is, you're gonna to have
to live with yourself if you want to live.
He's gotten a lot calmer
as he's gotten older.
But
he worries a lot about me,
and I think that he also is
just prone to worrying a bit
because of my mom.
I'm gonna go to bed. Night, hon.
Not many people know
that my mom is sick.
She did get Parkinson's
when she was 30, I think.
So she had early onset Parkinson's.
That was before she met my dad.
You would be around that office, right?
And then at one point you, I think,
told me that you had sent sort of a
I won't say a fan letter
But, come on. It's obviously what it is.
You were
chasing me around your office.
I was not chasing you around, damn it.
No, no. It's true.
You were, like, in the way, man.
I was trying to make a film.
We're making films here.
People see
I mean, they look at him
and they see, like, his films
and they see awards and whatever, but
my mom's a big part of his life.
One more.
When I was younger,
it wasn't really progressed.
And then as I got older,
it just got a lot worse,
and like, you know,
she couldn't really walk.
I mean, there's been moments
where he was on set and, like
she'd fall and he would have to stop
shooting and go to the hospital.
He would get so hopeless.
They're so close.
What do you need?
I wanted the
What is that?
The ca--
The calendar?
The catalogue.
The catalogue.
- Oh, the catalogue.
- Yeah.
But do you have it here in this room?
That goddamn disease
is so hard, you know?
But he doesn't act like it's hard.
He seems to take it in stride.
I think it would be fair to say
that if Marty hadn't gone
through all that, back in the day,
he wouldn't be able to be present
in this way and so fully.
And he learned that an artist
can be selfish about his art,
but doesn't have to be selfish
necessarily in his life.
After I had done Last Temptation
of Christ, I had to go deeper.
I read Silence in September of '89,
I said, "I've got to make this."
Questions the whole idea of what is
the essence of this revolutionary
thinking, of Christianity.
It's a true story
about the 17th century in southern Japan.
Where there was a great
conflict between Catholic missionaries
and the Japanese government.
Resulting in maybe 35,000 martyrs,
people killed, ultimately.
What happens with Rodrigues,
a missionary, is something else.
And I was interested in the way
that some of the main missionaries
that went there originally apostatized.
Which meant that they
gave up their religion.
If you don't apostatize,
the prisoners will be hung over the pit
until you do.
Their lives bleeding away, drop by drop.
Silence, more than
just about, like, any film
wrestles with the question of what it
truly means to be Christian.
As long as you don't apostatize
they cannot be saved.
Our main character, who's very arrogant,
insisted that he would never apostatize.
But he did it to save other people.
The only Christ-like gesture
that character makes in the entire film,
is to apostatize.
I think he realizes the depth
of what Jesus is asking for.
Asking him to do
to be, who he's gonna be.
Here's a story where a guy
by the end of the story
denies the Christianity he is preaching.
And in so doing,
he finds the real Christianity.
So what is that?
It's also the loss of his pride, isn't it?
Oh, the whole key is ultimately humility.
- That's-- The learning of humility.
- Yes.
That's the beauty of that story.
One thing that I think is really
notable about the film is the epilogue.
The film ends as this, like, love story
between the priest and Kichijiro,
who's this wretch.
He does terrible things.
He's a traitor, right? And selfish.
This guy keeps doing the same thing
over and over again, you know.
Keeps wanting to be out there
and to be a Christian
and then rats on everybody,
including the priest.
And it's also the Johnny Boy,
kind of, character, right?
Yeah. Well, that's Judas, too,
the Johnny Boy.
You know, Kichijiro, Johnny Boy.
- He's the sinner.
- Yeah.
I am sorry for being so weak.
I think Marty identifies with Kichijiro
more than with the other characters
in the film.
Help me, Padre. Take away the sin.
Jesus said,
"Why should I be hanging out with the high
priests and everybody? They're all fine.
The ones who really need the help
are the sinners."
You see it in Mean Streets.
You see it in Raging Bull.
You see it in Goodfellas.
And I think it reaches
a sort of apogee with Silence
of extending that kind of sympathy
on such a wretched person.
Kichijiro, he's the one who teaches.
Because by the end
it's almost as if Jesus works through him
to teach Rodrigues of what love really is
and forgiveness and compassion.
Do you still think of yourself
as a Christian?
Yes, I think so.
I really believe so, yeah.
I had to reject it, find it,
reject it again, try to find it,
and then finally find
some kind of comfort with it.
I think we will all have doubt, fear
But by the time you understand your faith,
you'll be dead.
So really, it's
It's moving around a room and touching
and trying to find-- In the dark.
The only thing is
you keep making progress.
More and more,
his films feel really haunted to me.
I mean, especially The Irishman.
I hadn't worked with De Niro from Casino
to The Irishman, it's a long time.
But Casino was the last of that type
of thing, 'cause Irishman is different.
Even if the milieu is similar.
Fuck. Shit.
It's a different thing.
Marty looks for material that
allows him to bring all of himself to it,
and you could see it with The Irishman
as the this outsider,
retiring and about to die.
The most memorable stuff
is Bob seeing his kids abandon him.
Peggy, Peggy. I just want to talk. Pe--
I mean, the price you pay
for that idiotic vainglorious life
that he thought he was living.
And there, you see the toll.
Bob De Niro all by himself,
alone in an old age home.
Doesn't even know
when Christmas is. He's alone.
And he's paid for it.
- His mercy endures forever.
- His mercy endures forever.
All right, Frank.
I'm going to be back to visit. Okay?
Very soon,
probably after the Christmas holiday.
- Oh, okay.
- Frank, God bless you.
You too. Thank you.
It's Christmas?
Almost.
Oh, I ain't going nowhere.
When Bob first gave me the book,
he sort of broke down and cried.
People getting older.
That's what the book had in it.
I said, you know
That all this, all they went through,
ultimately we all have to face
the same thing.
We have to face our extinction.
The Irishman was working on me
in sort of a parallel theme
the whole time.
You see these wonderful people
after all these years
doing this work together.
The things we've done together,
I'm so grateful that we happened to be
When you think about it,
we were two kids who kind of were aware
of each other downtown.
And all of a sudden,
this whole thing happened.
It's kind of amazing.
I think Marty just has a real commitment
to that to what he's doing.
It's not going to change for him.
God bless him.
There's a lot
of great filmmakers out there
but I think he would do it for free,
you know?
I think he would
be a filmmaker no matter what.
Cinema consumed him at such an early age
and it never left him.
Do you feel like,
now, that each film has a different
You know, you can't give all
of yourself to every film,
in the same way, or you would probably
- Well, that's what my doctor told me.
- die.
Dr. Klein, yeah.
He told me that 20 years ago.
He said, "Marty, you can't do that
every time. You won't survive it."
We're going to move it
according to the drone, the whole unit.
I found it very difficult to be
without directing
or without creating
a movie for long periods of time.
Three, then two, one,
and then two, we got it all.
Yeah, yeah. No, that was great.
Where are we going? From the same place?
Do you want to go from
"Ernest Burkhart"?
Sure. Yeah, yeah. Okay.
What's happening?
- You ready?
- Cameras are set.
Okay, and action!