At 62, Scorsese Gets `The Aviator' Off the Ground
BY STEPHEN WHITTY
c.2004 Newhouse News Service
"I don't know how much longer I can deal with films on this scale," Martin Scorsese says wearily. "The amount of money, the amount of risk, the amount of time they take out of your life -- I just don't know how many more I have in me."
The man isn't talking about retiring, not at all. ("What else could I do?" he asks. "There's nothing else I can do.") But, on this rainy Friday night--and during an interview sandwiched in between a day of meetings and a dinner party at his New York home--he sounds exhausted.
He has a right.
First there was the bruising struggle to get Gangs of New York made and edited and finally released. Then there was the multipart public TV documentary he oversaw, on the blues. There was even a brief break to do a voiceover for the cartoon Shark Tale.
But during all that was the careful work on yet another epic: The Aviator, a biography of Howard Hughes.
And although it's finished and in theaters, the increased attention and obligatory interviews -- spurred along by a recent Turner Classic Movies documentary and a retrospective DVD set from Warner Home Video -- has the 62-year-old filmmaker moving even faster than usual.
"Oh my, there's the door again," he says. "Can I ask you to hold for a second?"
When he comes back on the line, a moment later, I ask him if his own life -- the enormous gambles on personal visions, the dozen different projects always kept in play, even the intense devotion to detail -- doesn't remind him a bit of Hughes' own manic days.
He laughs and confesses he hadn't thought about it, but, well, yes.
"I just wish I had my own money to make movies, the way Hughes did," he says. "That would have been helpful on The Last Temptation of Christ. And Gangs of New York, Raging Bull, Mean Streets-- we never really had the money we needed for `Mean Streets."'
It has always been an uphill climb.
In fact, for more than 40 years of filmmaking -- his first short was finished in 1963 -- Scorsese has had to fight studio executives, religious groups and an occasionally indifferent public. And yet he has always, stubbornly, persevered. Not unlike Hughes, who -- budgets be damned -- insisted on building the world's biggest plane, even if it got into the air only once.
Considering the men's other similarities -- like Scorsese, Hughes was a sickly child, with a devoted mother and a lifelong ambition to make films -- it's almost surprising The Aviator wasn't made earlier.
"There were always a number of Howard Hughes projects going around," Scorsese admits. "Warren Beatty, of course, a director who developed a whole new narrative style for Reds, he was interested for a long time. Spielberg had his vision. De Palma even started designing sets once. So I kept away from it. I didn't really know much about him."
Leonardo DiCaprio did, though. Fascinated by the reclusive tycoon, he teamed with Scorsese after Gangs of New York. The two began to work from a script by John Logan (Gladiator) that covered Hughes' years in Hollywood, starting when he arrived with his immense inherited wealth and ending before he departed for his paranoid exile in Las Vegas.
"It's like a Greek tragedy," Scorsese says. "Or, if you're Catholic, you can think of it as original sin. A character is given a burden by fate, or chance, or his genes or whatever, and it puts him in terrible situations. That attracted me. ... That and the fact that the way the script is done, you don't tell the whole story. You tell a piece of it, and so the scenes that do figure in it have more resonance."
There's a sense of struggle that resonates throughout Scorsese's career. He was born in Queens, but when his parents' finances hit a rough patch, the family moved to a small apartment in Little Italy; Scorsese grew up frail and asthmatic, and lost in the movies.
"As successful and lauded and legendary as he is, he's still that guy from Elizabeth Street in Little Italy," says John C. Reilly, who played a corrupt cop in Gangs and a Hughes confidant in Aviator. "He's a fine artist, and subtle and nuanced and civilized. But he still has that working-class background. ... He's still an outlaw voice."
Scorsese went to New York University, where he studied and later taught film. Later, he started picking up jobs as a cameraman and editor. (Hired as an assistant director for Woodstock, he proudly showed up in a suit and tie, and promptly lost his cuff links in the mud). He's made more than 20 features since.
But never without a fight.
Mean Streets was made on the cheap. Taxi Driver was vilified by the censors. New York, New York was assailed by the critics. Each of his movies has taken its toll, and by the late '70s the filmmaker was adding to it with a fast-lane life of druggy excess.
"His lifestyle back in those days, and the punishment he gave his own body, I think he touched bottom," says historian Richard Schickel, director of the TCM film Scorsese on Scorsese. "I mean, he implies without saying that he came pretty close to dying."
It was around then that longtime collaborator Robert De Niro urged Scorsese -- again -- to make the biography of self-destructive boxer Jake La Motta. Scorsese, who'd passed before, now felt a connection, and the movie became one of his signature films, marked by a striking sense of movement, attention to detail and fascination with guilt, duty and rage.
And it was almost never made at all.
"Raging Bull, when I was making it, (producer) Irwin Winkler came to me and said `Marty, the well is dry, I can't go back.' `What do you mean the well is dry?' `The studio won't give us any more money.' While we were in the editing room, the studio tried to sell the picture, and nobody would buy it. Nobody! `You want this picture?' `No, thank you. Next?"'
Even with the success of that film, says Scorsese, it's been "a roller-coaster ride" ever since.
"In the '80s I was almost ostracized," he says. "I had wanted to do Last Temptation first, and that fell through, and I did King of Comedy and, you know, after that I basically was seen as washed-up. Pauline Kael called `After Hours a `flyspeck' of a film. And that was a good review! I wasn't even invited to anything anymore. It was really quite painful."
Scorsese finally managed to get The Last Temptation of Christ made in 1988. Production was difficult, though, and its release was dogged by protests. The experience left Scorsese -- a former altar boy who once considered the priesthood -- deeply shaken.
What did he think of the very different The Passion of the Christ, and its huge success?
"Well, that gets into a whole other issue that I'd rather not go into," Scorsese says carefully. "I feel that Mel Gibson is a man of conviction. And so am I. But, you know ..."
He breaks off, sounding pained.
"Catholicism was a huge element in the formation of his sensibility," says Schickel. "I think he's moved away from the official nature of the church, but you can see it as far back as Mean Streets, or even Who's That Knocking at My Door? There's that tension between the peace the church offers and, at the same time, the oppressive elements within it."
It's tension -- between the sacred and the profane, between repression and release -- that drives many of Scorsese's films. It just saddens him that the tension he tried to address in Temptation-- primarily, he says, "between faith and reason, and why it would be wonderful to have both"-- no longer seems up for discussion.
"When I went to high school, at Cardinal Hayes, there were teachers you could debate with," Scorsese says again, after a pause. "When I was working on Temptation with Paul Schrader, who's a Calvinist, we would argue certain points. When the film came out, it was condemned by the church, but there were cardinals and priests who wrote articles about it, and were at least positive about the idea of the film. You could, at least, talk about it. But it's a different time now."
His roller-coaster career took another turn in 1990 with GoodFellas, one of his best reviewed films, followed the next year by Cape Fear" a for-hire project that turned out to be one of his most successful.
Since then, Scorsese -- and his career -- have remained unpredictable. He has made The Age of Innocence, an adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel, and Casino, the story of the corporate takeover of Vegas ("and a metaphor for Hollywood, definitely," he admits). He has made Kundun, a Tibetan epic that drew the wrath of the Chinese government, and Gangs of New York" a history that brought constant, toe-to-toe fights with Miramax head Harvey Weinstein.
"It was agonizing," Scorsese says of the long forced march toward a final, manageable cut. "I could still be shooting that film, I could have taken it right up to the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. It would have been a great 10-hour movie."
Has he fallen in love with the size of his own canvas? Is the man who once made an entire movie about a loner in a taxicab -- or Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, about a struggling waitress -- finding himself less engaged by the small details of daily life?
"Well, my next film (The Departed, a remake of the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs) is going to be dealing with the Boston underworld, so the film doesn't have to have a big canvas," he says. "It's going to be a challenge, though, dealing with the modern world (onscreen). I was a part of it once, not very much, but aware of it, anyway. I don't feel part of it anymore. I watch old films on TV. I watch documentaries."
In fact, he says, he's calling from his den -- and while his 5-year-old daughter is playing down the hall, and his fifth wife, Helen Morris, is already greeting his guests, it's the Technicolor ghosts of old Hollywood who look down on him from the posters on the walls. Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven." Claude Rains in The Phantom of the Opera". Lionel Atwill in Dr. X.
It's a town that Scorsese remains a part of, even though he hasn't lived there in more than 20 years.
"It's all changing so rapidly," he says of the industry. "You go in, everybody wants to do the best, but you're all speaking different languages. And if you go over budget or you get behind schedule, you're in the ring with these people."
And yet -- like La Motta, pummeled by Sugar Ray Robinson -- he's still going. Like Hughes -- who spectacularly crashed one plane in the middle of L.A. -- he's still survived. And even as other contemporaries -- Friedkin and Bogdanovich, De Palma and Coppola -- have dissipated their talents, he continues to push forward.
Scorsese has never won an Oscar. Although there are plenty of people upset on his behalf -- and hoping The Aviator breaks the streak -- Scorsese says he's too busy trying to make "at least a few more films" to waste time worrying about it.
"I mean in no way to denigrate the award but, you know, I'm only interested in the film," he says. "And the chance to make the next one. In the end, you make the movies you want to make and you're just glad you've been able to make them. And I am. Because I still love the image. I still find a real joy in creating images that move."
Dec. 21, 2004
(Stephen Whitty is film critic for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. He can be contacted at swhitty@starledger.com.)
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