MARTY SPIELIN’

AT ONE point, I swear the world’s most admired living director said to me, “bladedededa.” It wasn’t baby talk either. Listening back repeatedly to the tape, I finally deciphered the phrase “cause they didn’t have any, whatever the reasons,” but he was talking so fast, with such urgency, that his words started to blur together until he was making a sound like someone blowing bubbles, his lips apparently running out of all control, unable to keep up the overheated workings of his mind.

Martin Scorsese comes at you like a whirlwind, a one-man phenomenon of nature. He doesn’t just talk, he spews out chunks of dialogue in a staccato frenzy, as if there wasn’t enough time for him to get out all his ideas. Ask him a question and – BANG! – he’s off, laughing dissecting, considering and confessing, always courteous and apparently completely focused on the task in hand: explaining himself. Although clean shaven and Armani suited, the very image of respectability, his sheer energy constantly threatens to spill out and explode all over the place, leaving a mess all over his expensive tie.

He cheerfully confesses to being an “obsessive compulsive,” whatever that means. I had only asked him an innocent question about his film-making routine when he suddenly shot off on a tangent concerning his particular neuroses. “I’m getting better. It’s getting better,” he assures me, “But I’m not kidding, there was a time when I got in all kinds of strange . . . it’s a matter of insecurity, I think, and combining, I guess, taking certain elements of being very religious at one point in my life and then the decaying of that, you wind up with the superstition and that’s not right, it certainly isn’t right. It is true I have certain routines I do so I don’t have to think in the morning. I’m not really a morning person, I have to go for a certain shirt, I put my hand in and take a certain pair of socks. I don’t have to think about what shirt am I going to wear today? ’Cause that takes about 20 minutes of energy before you get to the set. Seriously. ‘Where did I put that thing?’ It’s a matter of putting everything away in a certain manner so that the minute I open up the medicine chest I can take out the shaving brush, I know exactly where it is. Otherwise you start to wonder, ‘what have I done?’ and it wastes a lot of energy and time. But I’m getting better.”

Well, that’s a weight off my mind. But how the hell did we get onto the topic in the first place? If you didn’t know better you’d swear Scorsese actually enjoyed this interview process. But how could he? I must have been the 100th journalist to put these questions to him, as he rushed through a series of promotional interviews for his new film The Age Of Innocence. I grabbed a few minutes with him in a London hotel, and then he was gone, on to the next one, and I hadn’t even begun to ask all I wanted to ask. This, after all, is the man who made the urgently contemporary masterpieces Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas, as well as flawed but vital works like New York, New York, The King Of Comedy, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Cape Fear. In his collaborations with Robert De Niro he has helped push screen acting to its outer limits, and in collaboration with Robbie Robertson of The Band he made the landmark rock documentary The Last Waltz.

Not that you will find much about any of that in the ensuing conversation. There was just so much to talk about . . . and so little time, even with a man who can pack a paragraph into a space most people would have trouble fitting a sentence in.

What attracted you to this story – a period piece and a tale of inaction rather than action?

I think it’s pretty obvious I was attracted to the relationship between Archer and Ellen, the passion they felt for each other and the erotic tension, which may appear to be inactive but is very active. A sense of bittersweet romance I think is what I really wanted to try and explore, particularly. How do you interpret that visually? What size of frame do you use when the lovers look at each other; should there be intercuts between them or should it be a two-shot? The challenge was also for me to direct a film where the people behaved very, very differently, on the surface that is, very differently from the type of people and the societies that I usually work with. There’s no aristocracy in America but in a way these people wanted to emulate aristocracy and in a sense became more English than the English. I was interested in the manner in which they acted out very strong emotional violence by very subtle strategies. People’s hearts are torn out and they do it so politely and they smile while they’re doing it, and you never know it’s happening until after you walk out the door and say “What have they done to me?” I’m interested in the barbarity of the civilised.

It’s a very luxurious looking film. Was it a luxury to make?

It was a luxury in that we had nice locations and we could sit down without worrying . . . Usually locations I’m usually at, like Cape Fear there were some rough ones and Taxi Driver, they were terrible, really bad location, dirty places, but we had great houses to sit down in, we felt luxurious that way. It kept us in the mood being in places like that but the luxury was very carefully portioned out because of economic reasons. I had to work out all the details of the paintings and the food and the costuming and the decor sometimes as far back as two years. While I was doing the editing of Cape Fear for example we had meetings once a month with the research associates and I would choose the plates for the Van Der Luyden dinner and the cups for the oysters and then choose the cuisine, which course to show at the Van Der Luyden dinner as opposed to which one to show at Archers and that kind of thing. So that when we got there we didn’t fool around with “alright, where’s the centrepiece?” “OK listen you got ten centrepieces to choose from . . “ No I chose the centrepiece at Van Der Luyden’s a year in advance. That’s a way of trying to save as much money as possible cause we wanted it to look good. We were able to put the money where we thought it would be most useful.

There’s certainly a lot of delicious looking food on display. Did you actually eat it?

Of course we did. I’m not kidding.

I’m surprised you didn’t have to let the costumes out as the film went on.

They had a hard time, the women in corsets, they couldn’t eat anything. But we did. (Big laugh)

Is that kind of New York life still there?

Certainly not in my circles! (Hearty laughter)

Do you see a strong affinity between New York society then and the societies you portrayed in films like Mean Streets and Goodfellas?

Well yes, because I think it gives you instant conflict. You have a character that you kind of care about, whether you like them or not, and they have a different idea than the society that they’re in, it gives you very strong conflict. In Mean Streets when his uncle tells him (Harvey Keitel’s central, unnamed character) not to hang around with Johnny and Theresa and he does, and at the end – gunshots! He’s ruined. He’s not killed but he’s worse than killed, he’s ostracised, he’s no place to go.

Do you think turn of the century New York society was more ruthless than the criminal societies of your contemporary films?

Absolutely. It appeared to me that way reading the book.

What do you make of Quentin Tarantino and Abel Ferrara and other new film-makers who are often compared to you, and in a sense are plundering your past?

Plundering? Well I plundered everything else. No, I don’t think they’re plundering! (laughs). By the way I haven’t seen all of Abel’s film but I’m certainly aware of his work. Bad Lieutenant with Harvey is wonderful and he’s a pretty tough film-maker. Quentin Tarantino has a formal quality which is extraordinary. What remains to be seen is, and this is a delicate issue, is how that develops in terms of content, in terms of what he wants to say. But the formal construction of Reservoir Dogs is Jean Pierre Melville, it’s Kubrick’s The Killing. I don’t mean that as a rip off, I mean that as inspired by. Use of the wide screen and one location, this is very, very well constructed, well thought out stuff. Ultimately it’s what they want to say. And I don’t know what they want to say, I can’t tell from just one film, and how it develops, I think it’s kind of exciting. And Abel Ferrara, he just keeps making the pictures and he’s building that body of work I think. And as with everyone’s body of work there’s some weaker elements in certain films and some stronger ones. There’s no doubt that violence plays a very strong part but that’s part of what it is out there and they’re right on top of it. I know Abel is. He sees it everyday and that’s his way of looking at the truth.

Those film-makers are working outside of the mainstream, as you yourself have done for most of your career.

If you want freedom in the film business you have to take many risks, and you have to give up lifestyles that are really very comfortable, to say the least, and you can make a lot of money . . . the thing I always tell these kids who are starting out to be film-makers and everything and they’re talking about getting a few picture deals, I say, “Take it easy. Don’t panic. Make the picture you wanna make. And you know what? If you don’t get paid for it, good! Just do it.” The Last Waltz for example there was no contract, ’cause we started making the film very quickly like a concert reportage for archives. And we decided to use 35mm cameras, it was the first time it was done on a rock documentary. And it was just an experiment but when we saw the rushes we realised it looked pretty beautiful, the impressions on the faces, the men and women singing and dancing, and so we realised we had a movie, but I never had a contract on it, never had a contract. And that took two years to finish and when it was all over it was a film I was very pleased with. And my representative at the time tried to get some money for me and they wouldn’t give me any, ’cause they didn’t have any, whatever the reasons, there’s always reasons with studios and stuff, and he said, “Now you see that? You didn’t get paid. You’re not getting paid anything. I told you not to do it. You had no contract, you didn’t sign a contract, what’s the matter with you? You got nothing!” And I kind of looked and I said to myself ‘what’s he talking about, I made the movie!’ But you can’t do that all the time. You gotta get paid sometimes!

It’s been quite well noted that you’ve never received an Oscar. You’re nominated again this year, how much would the Oscar mean to you?

It’s interesting. When I was a kid I remember the Oscar ceremonies being broadcast in black and white, and there was beautiful gold statues and all this sort of thing . . . But, ehm, it’s been 21 years or so and I had lots of chances, but if I didn’t get it for those pictures God knows, what am I going to get it for? You know what I’m saying? What more do they wanna know? Is it something I said, maybe? In any event it’s taken me a long time to realise no prize can give you self worth, that you have to feel good yourself really in the work you do and as much as possible the person I am. There’s no prize gonna make me feel better about myself, I learned that . . .