It’s impossible to imagine a world without Martin Scorsese, a world without Mean Streets, Taxi Driver or Raging Bull. One of cinema’s greatest directors, Scorsese has changed the way we look at film and Chris Sullivan was lucky enough to meet the maestro at the New York’s Director’s Guild of America and talk about his past, future and the release of an anthology that everyone should own – The Martin Scorsese DVD collection.
On his influences...
“For me it’s all about the European cinema, Italian mainly. Every Friday night when I was four or five years old, my parents and my grandmother and grandfather and all my uncles would come over to our tenement and watch Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief and Roberto Rosselini’s Paisa – all these great subtitled pictures. TV was where I learnt about film, where I saw the greats, all with commercials cut up and different reels out of order but, boy, when I saw them on the big screen that was a revelation. The next thing that had a similar effect to that was the church, particularly Saint Patrick's Old Cathedral on Mott Street [in New York]. For me, it’s the cinema and the church.”
Who's That Knocking At My Door...
“After I graduated from Washington Square College in ’64, I had this idea of making a feature about myself and my friends growing up downtown. I shot [Harvey] Keitel and the others in 1965 in my old neighborhood of Elizabeth Street [Little Italy]. It took about three years to complete because I didn't want to tell the story in a straight way. Eventually the film was shown at The Chicago Film Festival but, because the anti-pornography laws had just been abolished, every film had to have a nude scene, so I wrote one, shot it in Amsterdam in ’68 and cut the scene right in the center of the movie. The film was eventually released in September ’69 at The Carnegie Hall Cinema.”
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore...
“I had just done Mean Streets and people were saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's only guys in the street, you need subtitles to understand what they're saying, every other word is a four-letter word…’ So we were completely ignored by The Academy but, Ellen Burstyn had just done The Exorcist and was looking for a young director for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. So Francis Coppola showed her my film and [Catch 22 producer] John Calley gave me the script and said, ‘This is what you should do. If you can show you can direct women, it might be a good thing for you.’”
Goodfellas...“The Godfather I and II are the Gone With The Wind of mob cinema, Mean Streets is a street corner, stealing a quarter to get a pack of cigarettes, while Henry Hill [Goodfellas' subject and narrator] took us to a different level, then went even further. A lot of people said there's too much pointless violence in Goodfellas but to me there is no such thing as pointless violence. [Brazilian crime epic] City Of God, is that pointless violence? It's the life. It is what you're in and that's the reality. I actually thought the film was very humorous. It's almost satirical. Henry Hill is a great storyteller in the tradition of great Italian orators, he has that ironic sense of humour. Joe Pesci’s famous ‘How am I funny?’ scene was hilarious and totally improvised by Joe based on what happened to him with a guy he knew. Joe was laughing and the guy says: ‘Yeah, yeah, real funny. Funny guy. What a way to become funny’, and then Joe had to use his own wits to get out of the situation. There was a guy who turned states evidence in Sicily against the head of Mafia in Sicily and the Italian newspapers asked this guy: ‘What film do you think accurately portrays this lifestyle?’ And this man said Goodfellas, just because of that scene. He said that's the life: it could turn like that on a dime… and you're dead. And that is what you have to know.”
After Hours...
“We had a script but no ending for After Hours. I remember saying,’Oh, well, let's do it anyway!’ Now I think back, I must have been out of my mind, but I wanted to get back to a smaller shooting schedule. New York, New York, Raging Bull and King Of Comedy all were 100 days each and I wanted to see if I could still do something in 40 days or, in this case, 40 nights. I showed the first cut to Terry Gilliam, Steven Spielberg and Michael Powell to get ideas. We said he could take off in a balloon, he could break through the screen and run down the audience. We got ourselves into a real jam but in the end Michael Powell said, quite quietly, that he should wind up back at work. And he walked away. I said ‘Oh, that's not gonna work,’ but it worked beautifully. It took almost two years to make that film, so much for a smaller schedule.”
Mean Streets...
“The film was written for Harvey Keitel whose character Charlie I’ve realised, as years have gone by, is based on my father who was also named Charlie. Johnny Boy is based on my father’s brother Joe who lived underneath us on the second floor. My father came from a family of eight or nine and Uncle Joe was the youngest and was constantly getting in trouble and my father was the one who, out of respect for the family name, had to go and have what we call a ‘sit down’ to make peace with all the people Joe had upset. Every other night I would hear these violent arguments about what’s right and what's wrong. We loved my uncle but he was really something, a bit like De Niro in Mean Streets.”
The Martin Scorsese Collection (comprising After Hours, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Goodfellas, Mean Streets and Who's That Knocking At My Door) is available to buy now.
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