| Labor of Love |
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0105/02/entertainment/entertain2.html Paul Daley was invited onto the Italian set of Martin Scorsese's keenly anticipated labour of love, Gangs of New York, for an exclusive sneak preview. You are walking through Paradise Square, the centre of New York's slum district, in the late-1850s. The old brewery, home to dozens of Irish peasant immigrants, has been bombed. The dead and piles of other war detritus - clothing, broken wagons, torn roofing, pots and pans and ripped bedding -litter the cobblestone streets. Up ahead in the middle of the street, one of this district's greatest Irish characters, "Hellcat Maggie", lies dying, impaled on a huge splinter of lumber. As a one-armed priest comforts Maggie in her last moments, another explosion sounds and a shower of rock and earth rains down. They can no longer be seen through the mist of smoke and burning gunpowder. Somebody yells "cut". Peter-Hugo Daly's priest and Cara Seymour's Maggie carefully wipe the dust from their eyes while the technicians come in to set up again before Martin Scorsese's camera operators shoot yet another take. Scorsese, the acclaimed director of Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence and Casino (among other movies), has wanted to make this movie, Gangs of New York, for at least 30 years. And already those associated with the film, which has been shot at Rome's legendary Cinecittą studios for the past seven months at a cost of $210 million (give or take a few), are talking Oscars for the cast, which includes Daniel Day-Lewis, Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz and Liam Neeson. They also say it's Scorsese's biggest, most ambitious movie to date: a "character-driven historical epic" set in New York's Irish slums at the time of the great anti-draft riots of the American Civil War. Based on the book of the same name by Herbert Asbury, the plot revolves around Bill "The Butcher" Poole, played by Day-Lewis, and DiCaprio's Amsterdam Vallon, a young Irishman set on avenging the murder of his father, played by Neeson. Cameron Diaz plays a fiery, red-haired pickpocket and love interest for Amsterdam. After 128 days and many nights of shooting, the cast and crew of Gangs (as they like to call it) are dog-tired. Many have been ill. They are also sick of stories in the Italian press that maintain Scorsese and DiCaprio have brawled on the set and that shooting time and costs have blown out massively. When the Herald was given exclusive access to the set a couple of weeks ago, publicist, Larry Kaplan insisted: "It's lies, all lies. They just made that all up because it's been a totally closed set - no media has been allowed on set. Don't believe what you read in the Italian press, let me tell you that ... It's been long, but it's been long because it's been big." On set, the enigmatic New York-based director is called "Mr Scorsese". In their less guarded moments, one or two people casually refer to the director as "Marty" - but, when they know they're going to be quoted, all but his closest associates invariably use the honorific. "This is a realisation of Mr Scorsese's vision," Kaplan says. "And most people round here, the principal actors and even the extras, would tell you what a wonderful human being, what a wonderful man to work for, he really is." Well, they would, wouldn't they? If they could. So far none of the principals has given interviews. Neither has Scorsese. Nonetheless, Scorsese's vision, meticulous eye for detail and insistence on shooting takes again and again until the result is as close to perfect as possible, leave his colleagues in awe. "You know, we'll be shooting this absolutely huge scene - the boats are landing and Irish immigrants are getting off them in the port while the soldiers are going up the gangplanks the other way - there will be so much noise and so much action going on in the frame and Mr Scorsese will focus in on one little thing - it might be a button on one uniform - that's out of place," says a worker on Gangs. "Nobody else would see it, perhaps ever. But he'll shoot it again and again to get it exactly the way he wants it." Kaplan describes part of the movie's opening scene where two gangs meet each other across Paradise Square. One of the buildings in this scene is covered in ice - an image that Scorsese's mind has held since he first thought about making the movie. The man given the task of making that happen is Dante Ferretti, a native of Rome, who has worked extensively with Scorsese in the past on films including The Age of Innocence, Casino and Bringing Out the Dead. The softly spoken Ferretti, an architect by trade, was given six months to design all the sets and to configure everything non-human on them. Besides Paradise Square and the squalor of the brewery, this included re-creation of the facade, many interiors of Broadway (Bill the Butcher's nightmarish underground lair) and, perhaps most impressively, Sparrow's Pagoda - an alluringly evil, Chinese, lantern-lit building where prostitutes hang in cages from the ceiling. A place where strong drink, murder and plotting can be found at any time of day, the pagoda's grisly gargoyles and giant Buddha are critical to Scorsese's plot. "Yes, this movie is so very big - it's New York filmed in Roma," says Ferretti. "Now, with Martin, this is my fifth movie. I know him very well so he trusts me a lot. With every movie we talk for one day, two days, at the beginning, and he tells me exactly what he wants and then he gives me a lot of freedom. So then I make sketches, drawings and models and then I show him everything and he says OK or not OK. Normally he says OK, so I'm happy. Then I go and build it all." For Gangs, Ferretti was also required to build two massive, true-to-scale transport ships so the nautical and port scenes could be filmed in Cinecittą's giant water tank, one of the main reasons the Rome studio was chosen to shoot the movie. Perhaps it is fitting that it was also used in two other epics, Ben-Hur and Cleopatra - movies against which the entertainment media is already, nine months ahead of its scheduled US release, measuring Gangs of New York. "If you compare it in size to recent movies you have to talk about The English Patient," Kaplan says. "It's bigger than that ... we're talking about more than 120 speaking roles." Several thousand extras (no-one is sure of the exact number) were also used. Costume designer Sandy Powell, who won an Academy Award for her work on Shakespeare In Love, had not worked with Scorsese previously. When she initially read the script she had reservations about whether she wanted to be involved. "It was very violent, which was, in a way, to be expected," she says. It was also quite overwhelming. "It was, like, men fighting each other. It was all about men. But, then, as we got into it and I did my own research and he [Scorsese] told me his side of things, I got more interested. My first impression was that it seems like a lot of men fighting and I wouldn't particularly want to do a war film. I thought that for a moment. But then I thought, 'It's Martin Scorsese, it's going to be huge,' and, 'How could I say no?' " The British-born Powell, who knew little about the period depicted in Gangs, had a daunting research assignment. But her task was aided considerably by Scorsese, who offered her piles of photographs and movies. Sometimes he wanted her to look at one particular item of clothing in another movie. "I've watched films just to look at one collar he wanted me to see," she says. Shooting for the movie has just wrapped at Cinecittą. Most of Ferretti's sets (with the possible exception of the pagoda) will be demolished. There is already talk that thousands of Powell's costumes will be archived to record the transformation of Scorsese's vision to celluloid. As post-production begins, the expectations are already massive. But this, according to those who know Scorsese, is unlikely to faze the director. "Other people are talking Oscars already. You don't hear Mr Scorsese doing that," says someone working on the film. "He is just singularly focused on transforming this." Gangs of New York is due for release later this year. MARTIN SCORSESE Born November 17, 1942 Where Queens, New York Wives 5 Movies as director 22 Movies as assistant director 1 (Woodstock) CV entry we're not inclined to let him forget Michael Jackson's Bad video |
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