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Excerpted from "The Man Who Forgets Nothing" by Mark Singer, pages 101-103 Two consecutive evenings a while back, Scorsese and I met at his home in a warmly furnished parlor-floor living room, surrounded by neatly ordered bookshelves and framed posters of Jean Renoir's "Grand Illusion" (the only other significant wall hanging being a sixteenth- century crucifix) -- where we covered, among other diverting topics, anger, guilt, pain, suffering, and violence. Our second conversation preceded dinner with Helen Morris, a fine-boned blond woman with finishing-school manners and Old New York bloodlines. She and Scorsese met in 1995, when she was an editor at Random House and was working on the second volume of Michael Powell's memoirs. Four years ago, they started living together, and last summer they married. Their infant daughter, Francesca, escorted by a nanny, made a couple of appearances while we talked, and Helen's deaf but excitable West Highland White terrier, Silas, also dropped by. The joys of new fatherhood and domestic tranquillity notwithstanding, Scorsese had had, by his reckoning, "a rough fall." In late October, "Bringing Out the Dead" opened, accompanied by mixed but generally positive reviews. However, its grosses the first four weeks totalled only sixteen million dollars; by Thanksgiving it was fading fast, and by the time the Christmas-holiday movies turned up at the cineplexes it had all but disappeared. Like "Kundun," his previous and more lavishly praised endeavor, it never really found an audience. Inevitably, this box-office disappointment did nothing to leaven the atmosphere during discussions with the studios that had provisionally agreed to finance his next film, "Gangs of New York." The budget for "Gangs" -- eighty-three and a half million dollars -- would make it his most expensive picture. News items in the trade papers announced that Disney and Miramax would put up the money, Leonardo DiCaprio would star, and production would start in mid-winter. During 1999, Scorsese and Jay Cocks wrote and revised nine drafts of the screenplay. Each time they were done, they assumed they'd solved whatever problems had nagged them. But as the New Year arrived nothing was firmly resolved, including the question of whether the movie would get made. To bring "Gangs of New York" to the screen would fulfill a vision of the city Scorsese had ruminated upon since childhood. On Prince Street, between Mott and Mulberry, next to Old St. Patrick's Cathedral, the parish where he attended parochial school and served as an altar boy, stood a cemetery whose aged stones bore mainly Anglo, rather than familiar Italian, surnames. Who were these people? What had this corner of the world looked and sounded and smelled like when they were its inhabitants? Scorsese had absorbed fragments of century-and-a-half-old oral history -- suggestive accounts of harrowing turf battles between mobs of nativist Protestants and recent-immigrant Irish Catholics --and in 1970 he happened upon the Herbert Asbury book, which gave a context to these inchoate emanations of the old neighborhood. He and Cocks wrote their first draft of "Gangs of New York" in 1976, and though the project lay dormant for more than two decades, it has withstood the vicissitudes of Scorsese's career and refused to die. What's in it, ultimately, for the auteur? Nothing more, really, than a chance to portray a city that millions of people think they know in a manner that no one has previously imagined imagining. "If I get to make 'Gangs of New York,'" he said, "I will have gotten to make every picture that I really, really wanted to make. If I don't get to make it, I'll move on to something else." But not so fast ... "Once I know that we're moving forward with 'Gangs,' there are certain things I have to come to grips with in the script. The violence is the main thing. The violence is tricky, but that's the way those characters behaved. I have to figure out how to shoot it. At the end, when everyone's covered in dust and ashes, that's got to be very stylized." Stylized violence. I thought, Well, Father Principe would be pleased. Father Principe was the priest from Old St. Pat's who, when asked what he thought of his former acolyte's interpretation of redemptive blood sacrifice exemplified by the famous shootout at the end of "Taxi Driver" -- said, "Too much Good Friday and not enough Easter Sunday." When the words "Scorsese" and "violence" are linked in my mind, I advert to the scene in "Casino" where a psychopathic gangster named Nicky Santoro, played to the hilt by Joe Pesci, puts a guy's head in a vise after torturing him for two days because he refuses to give up some information. Before tightening the vise and slitting the victim's throat, he implores him, "Please don't make me do this!" By which we're led to understand that Nicky's just a working guy trying to keep his own head out of the vise. Earlier, we've seen Nicky the loving father cooking breakfast for his young son in his suburban kitchen. Later, we see him and his brother get beaten bloody with baseball bats and buried alive in the desert. "I'm not interested in violence that way anymore," Scorsese said, convincingly. "A lot of these guys" -- in "Gangs of New York" -- "don't even have guns, they use bats. Well, I did that in 'Casino.' I don't want to do violence like that again. I can't even watch that scene. It's upsetting, because I like those characters. And as far as the head in the vise is concerned -- I should have played the whole thing on Joe's face and the other actors' faces but never shown the bulging eye in the vise. It has to do with the humanity of it. What it did to them mattered as much as what it did to the guy whose head was in the vise. If you can't show the humanity -- lets say, the battle scene at the beginning of 'Gangs of New York' -- then you have to find a way to do the violence in a non-graphic way, so that it doesn't become literally just scene after scene of people smashing each other across the head. Because that's what they did. Fighting was a pastime. What you have to understand about these gangs is that they relate directly to Anglo- Saxon tribes and Irish Celtic tribes. The fact that one is Protestant and the other's Catholic, that's just a place you come from. You're not arguing over the tenets of religion. These were warriors, and their gods were war gods. I'm dealing with making a film about barbarians. If I were younger, there's no doubt that I'd be out there to shock. Here I don't necessarily want to portray violence anymore in such a way that you lose half your audience halfway into the picture. Why should I?" Implicit in all this is the question that "Gangs of New York," like every new venture, evokes for Scorsese: How do I muster whatever it takes to keep making these movies, telling these stories, when the process itself is steeped in pain and suffering? "It comes out of a very Catholic point of view," he said. "I think it's very delicate. People say, 'What do you have to complain about? You make these movies, you do pretty much what you want.' And I think the problem is that talking about quote suffering unquote makes me sound like someone who takes himself way too seriously. But there's no other way I know to do the work. On a personal level, things are O.K. But the work alone is extremely painful. On the set, I'll look like I'm having a great time, but in the trailer, in the preproduction phase, in the editing room, it's painful to pull it all together. Maybe 'suffering' is a bad word -- but I don't really celebrate anything. I stopped, like, in the mid-seventies, celebrating..... 'Goodfellas' felt good because a lot of people liked it, but just because a lot of people liked it doesn't mean it's really a good picture. And that's the other issue: How do I feel about myself and my own work ultimately? Something I'll probably never know is whether a picture's really good or not. I only know if it's right. In other words, I know that what I did was the way it should have been done." "Why isn't 'right' synonymous with 'good'?" "I'm not sure." "Then what do you mean by 'good'?" "I don't know.' A three-beat pause. "O.K Will it communicate to other people? Will it communicate to other people in the future, when the culture's changed? Will it speak to a different culture?" So it wasn't very complicated. Scorsese merely desired what any artist desires: universal recognition and immortality. On another occasion, Helen Morris said, "In the Catholic catechism there are all these absolute 'no's. Once you see how the world works, you get over these things. Marty never really has. You think of him as a child looking out the window and seeing people behaving badly. He could recognize it as a normal human instinct, but he understood that they have to get punished. He developed a sympathy for people doing bad things, studied the gangsters in the neighborhood, some of whom were good people. That dichotomy between Joe Pesci's character in 'Casino' being very good to his children and being a horrible person otherwise-- guilt and sin and what you can do and can't do -- it always comes down to the fact that you're going to get punished." |