January 15 2000 METRO FILM
The chaotic, brutal streetlife of New York's Little Italy proved inspiration for some of Martin Scorsese's greatest films. Now the director has revisited his old neighbourhood for his new film, reports Martyn Palmer.
Back on the streets
From the 51st floor of this plush Manhattan hotel you could probably see Martin Scorsese's old neighbourhood just a few blocks away (if there weren't a few other skyscrapers in the way). But then Scorsese doesn't need to see it. He knows it's there; he wears it in much the same way that he's wearing the razor-sharp black suit he has on today.
The city he loves - and fears - has moulded him as much as the parents who tried to protect him from the rougher side of streetlife as he grew up surrounded by characters who would later appear in his films in one form or another: the hoods, the bums, the crazies, the drunks, the hookers and the rest who frequented Elizabeth Street on the fringes of Little Italy.
His latest movie, Bringing Out the Dead, a surreal ride through the underbelly of the Big Apple, was filmed on those very streets. Its narrative, set in a twilight world of drugs, poverty and death, could almost be a companion to one of his most celebrated films, Taxi Driver.
"I know the area where we made Bringing Out the Dead really well," he says. "I grew up Downtown, in a gritty area with the derelicts dying in the streets. And you saw everything as a child. You saw all the bodily functions, you saw sex, you saw fighting, robbery, you saw a bum falling asleep in the street while someone was stealing his shoes, everything.
"It was an Italian-American neighbourhood," Scorsese continues, "and dealing with organised crime is one thing. It's pretty obvious - if you are part of it you are part of it and if you are not, you are not and never will be. But the Skid Row derelicts were right on the corner and watching men and women destroy themselves, ending their lives, dying right in front of you, and then going to the church and hearing the priest talk about compassion, that stays with you."
The young Scorsese, a sickly child who suffered from asthma, took refuge from the real world at the local picture house where he was taken with his older brother Frank by his parents, Charles and Catherine. "During the first five or six years of my life I was mainly in the movie theatre," he recalls. "I wasn't able to participate in children's sports or games so it became a place to dream, to fantasise, to feel at home."
For the frail child, often confined to his family's tiny apartment, the cacophony of life on the streets, combined with the powerful images he soaked up at the picture house, proved to be a heady cocktail. A gifted artist, he would spend hours drawing his own comic book-style stories inspired by the war films, biblical epics and westerns he had seen with his father. And at night, unable to sleep, he would watch the streets below.
"When I was a boy I had terrible asthma attacks and I was incapacitated," Scorsese says. "I couldn't play so I used my imagination. I was also awake at night a lot because of the asthma and I became used to being up at night and it was a bit disturbing. We lived on the Lower East Side and it was always alive. We had three grocery stores on the block, two butchers, a funeral parlour, there were trucking companies, people yelling in the streets like you see in Italian movies - Neapolitans and Sicilians yelling at each other." He shifts his small frame in the chair and continues. "And when you are living in two and a half rooms with your parents and older brother it gets really claustrophobic. So I'd relish time alone. And I still live mostly at night. That's when I do most of my thinking."
Scorsese's love of movies was already competing with the other great influence on his life. His parents, whose families had both emigrated to America from Polizzi Gererosa, a small town in Sicily, were devout Catholics and Scorsese became an altar boy. "I loved the ritual, the chance to be close to that special moment when God came down to the altar," he says, smiling. "For me Holy Week was always a very powerful time. It was even more dramatic than Christmas. The rituals were dramatic, the liturgies were beautiful."
Scorsese once said that he grew up raised by "gangsters and priests". He had friends whom he later discovered had become involved in organised crime. He chose instead to become a priest. "I guess the passion I had for religion wound up mixed with film, and now, as an artist, in a way I'm both gangster and priest," he chuckles.
In 1956, aged 14, he enrolled at the Cathedral College on the Upper West Side planning to study in the junior seminary and then go on to take his vows. He lasted just one year before he was thrown out.
The twin distractions of girls and the blossoming rock'n'roll scene were, he said later, mostly to blame for his lack of concentration. He subsequently won a place at New York University. His parents thought he was reading English and hoped he would become a teacher; in fact he had chosen the university for its film course.
It was at NYU that Scorsese finally gave up all notions of the priesthood and immersed himself in exploring the work of directors that he loved - Orson Welles, British directors Alexander Korda and Michael Powell, "new" American directors such as John Cassavetes and the French new wave, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.
His first proper film, which he made in 1963 while still at college, was a nine-minute short called What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? based on a story by Algernon Blackwood about a man who becomes obsessed with a painting. By 1966 he had graduated and made several other shorts and a feature, Who's That Knocking at my Door? starring Harvey Keitel, which was released two years later.
By 1969 he was teaching at NYU and helping his friend, Michael Wadleigh, edit the rock documentary Woodstock. The next few years saw Scorsese embark on some of his best work. He moved to Hollywood and it was while working as a film editor that Roger Corman approached him to make Boxcar Bertha in 1972 and then, a year later, Mean Streets, where he began to address some of the themes - friendship, betrayal, sin and redemption - which he would return to again and again. This violent story of a group of young gangsters living and dying on the streets of New York starred Keitel and a young actor with whom he would forge one of the most enduring and creative partnerships in cinema - Robert De Niro. Scorsese and De Niro had grown up a few blocks apart and knew of each other before they met during the pre-production stages of Mean Streets. According to Scorsese: "When we met, we kind of realised we already knew each other. He's been my friend ever since."
In 1976 Scorsese directed De Niro in Taxi Driver. Written by Paul Schrader (who also scripted Bringing Out the Dead), De Niro played Vietnam war veteran turned cab-driving psychotic vigilante Travis Bickle. Many believed that both Scorsese and his star were wrongly denied Oscars (Rocky won best picture and Peter Finch won best actor for Network).
The Seventies were, arguably, Scorsese's most creative period. It was also his most self-destructive time. In common with many of his peers, Scorsese had taken to using cocaine. And the awkward, fragile child who never had much luck with girls was making up for lost time in that department, too.
He was already on his second marriage when, in 1977, he made New York, New York, and according to his then wife, Julia Cameron, had an affair with one of its stars, Liza Minnelli, and was into coke in a big way.
Schrader, who had become a close friend since Taxi Driver, was also in self-destructive mode. When I ask Scorsese about that time, his normal rapid-fire mode of conversation slows somewhat. "Whatever happened I survived it." He pauses, then adds: "And I was lucky to survive it.
"When Schrader wrote Taxi Driver he was suicidal," Scorsese continues. "He had a gun on the table. He had written it in a few weeks and there was this terrible loneliness and alienation and this terrible rage. Travis Bickle is that anger and rage, he is on a spiritual path but he is an avenging angel - the wrong kind. On the other hand I put all of my negative energy into Raging Bull."
Once again written by Schrader, Raging Bull, in 1980, was a masterpiece. Shot in black and white, the film charts the rise and fall of middle-weight boxer Jake La Motta with a powerhouse performance by De Niro, which won him the best actor Oscar.
These days, says Scorsese, he has mellowed. He may still be an outsider, but the alienation and loneliness felt by that sickly kid have been channelled and the 57-year-old sitting here today is more at ease with himself and the world. A father again, his fourth child (they were all girls), Francesca, was born last November. He met his fifth wife, Random House book editor Helen Morris, in 1993 and they married last July (college sweetheart Laraine Brennan, actress Isabella Rossellini and producer Barbara De Fina were respectively wives one, three and four).
"Paul [Schrader] says we have mellowed and I guess we have. He has two nice kids, a wife. I have a new kid, a wife and I think as you get older you have to choose the fights you have. When you're young you fight everybody. As you get older you think, 'Hold on, the energy shouldn't be spent there.'"
In the Eighties, he was still out there taking on the world like a prize fighter. The King of Comedy (1983) featured De Niro as an obsessed fan and would-be comic, After Hours (1985) was a nightmarish black comedy set during one night in New York. The Color of Money (1986), a big box-office success starring Paul Newman and Tom Cruise, was Scorsese's proof that he could direct a moneyspinner. And then there was perhaps his most controversial movie, The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which portrayed Christ as a social outcast, who wavers between good and evil before choosing the path to redemption. Not surprisingly, it caused an uproar.
For Scorsese the Nineties began magnificently with 1990's GoodFellas - with superb performances from De Niro, Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta - which captures the excitement as well as the tawdry detail of life as a wiseguy.
However, it was followed by a disappointing brace of movies: Cape Fear (1991), and The Age of Innocence (1993). It wasn't until 1995's Casino that Scorsese hit his stride again with a film - featuring De Niro again, Pesci and Sharon Stone - that marked the end of an era. Dubbed "GoodFellas goes to Vegas", it shows how the mob won control of the gambling city through the story of Sam "Ace" Rothstein, a high roller installed by the Mafia to run a casino for them. As in many Scorsese films, the violence is graphic and, at times, bordering on the sickening.
"You do find that the violence is a dead end," he says now. "It's destructive and there's no coming back from it." Is he saying, I wonder, that he would approach the violence in his movies differently now? "Totally differently," he nods emphatically. "When I was making Casino I was angry at the extraordinary place that Vegas was. All that greed seemed like a reflection of Hollywood at the time, a reflection of American culture. And believe me, I saw the results of it. I saw how greed came in [to the film industry] and I saw how things changed, how the value and quality of things changed.
"At the end of Casino we shot on my birthday. And I'm watching Joe Pesci and his brother, their characters, get beaten to death with baseball bats. I just shot it straight, no camera moves or nothing. Just reportage. Because that's where it leads and that's the end of it, that's the end of life. That's the end of that way of thinking and that's the end of violence for me. I don't think I could do it any more."
In the past - notably with GoodFellas - he had to be told that perhaps he was going a little too far. "Yeah, maybe I should have handled the violence a little differently," he admits. "For example, when we shot the bread knife going into this body it was like 20 times or something. I mean, I knew it was a fake knife and fake blood so I leave in the 20. And they look at me and go 'Marty, what are you doing?' And I'm like 'What?' And my editor goes 'Well, how many times does he have to stab him?' So I'm like 'Yeah, OK. You're right. Ten times.' And he's still going 'Marty, how about three times?'"
Bringing Out the Dead bears many comparisons with Taxi Driver. Set in the early Nineties, Nicolas Cage plays an ambulance-driving paramedic, Frank Pierce, a man trying to do his best to help the injured and the dying.
"As soon as I gave the book to Schrader he said 'Marty, they are going to say it's Taxi Driver.' On the surface it has similarities. It's night time, it's the same area, it's a man driving a vehicle that deals with the public. But in Taxi Driver Travis is a man full of rage, just like we were at the time, but Frank is not an avenging angel and instead of killing people, our protagonist is trying to save people. We were all about 30 years old when we made Taxi Driver and now we're in our mid to late fifties. It's a different world and we're different too."
With a strong supporting cast provided by John Goodman, Ving Rhames, Tom Sizemore (who all play paramedics) and Patricia Arquette (who plays the daughter of a heart attack victim Pierce resuscitates) Bringing Out the Dead is bleak, at times gruelling, but also very funny and moving and packed with religious imagery.
The film was influenced by the recent deaths of Scorsese's parents. "I don't think I could have done this picture nine years ago," he says quietly. "It had to come out of the experience of going into emergency rooms in the middle of the night for my mother, for my father, taking care of my father, taking care of my mother. My father's death, my mother's death." Bringing Out the Dead - just like Scorsese's previous film, Kundun (1997), an underrated study of the life of the Dalai Lama - is unlikely to clock up blockbusting ticket sales.
"Quite honestly, if you hear about the subject matter of Bringing Out the Dead, about emergency rooms and paramedics dealing with the dying, well, people may not want to see that. But we try and tell people that it's very funny and there is an audience for it."
His next venture, however, could very well provide the kind of boxoffice success that many of his films have been denied. And that's because The Gangs of New York will star Leonardo DiCaprio. Set in the 1850s, it will tell the story of how rival ethnic and religious mobs fought to win sections of the city.
"The nature of this picture is huge, there's no doubt about it. I don't know if it will be a blockbuster but I guess in a way it has to try to be. But I don't think I can ever do a blockbuster like a Spielberg or a Lucas." And yes, it will be violent but this time around, he insists, the approach will be different. "There's nothing but violence," he laughs.
"These gangs fought all the time and in a way it was how they expressed themselves. So violence is in the film but it will be treated in a certain way. You have to know that the violence is needed for them to get food. It's a very interesting situation because I'm not quite sure how I'm going to cover it."
He'll find a way, of course. And even if it doesn't become smash-hit material, that will not, you suspect, trouble him unduly. Scorsese has never been a film-maker to compromise. And even the older, mellower version of today wouldn't go down that road. "I got to make the movies I more or less wanted to make," he says. "And hopefully I'll get to make a few more."
Bringing Out the Dead is on general release.
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