A Life Framed By the Movies
Flickering Screens of Boyhood Drew Director Toward the Light

By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 2, 2007

NEW YORK -- Maybe you'd call it "the glow."

As light, it's artificial; as emotion, it's genuine.

The light is composed of studio bulbs and filters, the gymnastics of shadow and wattage, the physics of angle and placement, resulting in a kind of soft clarity close to but more nurturing than sunlight. It illuminates its subject with a kind of mythical radiance, larger, more perfect, more beautiful than life.

To be a frail, asthmatic 5-year-old from a bookless apartment, the only child of garment district workers, and to see that glow was to see a life, a possibility, a hope, a dream.

From the artifice came the emotion: When Martin Scorsese talks of them -- the movies -- it's as if he's lit from within, eyes fiery, attention rapt but trending toward reverie, enthusiasm furious.

He really loves them. Scorsese makes them (some call him our greatest director); saves them (he is a great preservationist); studies them (he is a walking, talking IMDb, who can track connections and linkages to the tiniest degree). They saved his life, and maybe he saved theirs, not the art but enough individual films along the way that might have disappeared without his intercession.

He's won an Oscar (finally!) and dozens of other trinkets, and this weekend he is receiving the Kennedy Center Honors. But if you want to see him really excited, cite the way John Wayne's hand flies to his elbow in the final frames of "The Searchers," when the Duke realizes that the civilization he has just restored, in some sense, will reject and exile him to wander among the winds forever. Wayne turns, majestic and tragic, the door closes, and Scorsese, 65, sitting in a plush office five floors above West 57th Street, goes, "Yeah, yeah, yeah!" -- his voice almost trembling with excitement. He's glowing.

The office is a kind of cathedral of movie love. Like devotional objects, classic posters (valuable originals) hang in frames, gigantic and serene. His office is muffled in books (hundreds, all movie-oriented). He himself looks dapper: no old-hippie affectations. He wears Lew Wasserman mogul glasses; his hair is thick, gray and immaculate; his sport coat a rich tweed from, no doubt, a fine Italian tailor, over a striped shirt open at the neck. Only in the first seconds of seeing him do you notice that he's short; then his dynamism, energy, enthusiasm and obsessional movie love mask that fact and make him seem gigantic.

Wasn't always the case. In a harsh and lonely childhood, one imagines, there wasn't much damned glowing going on. Born in Queens, he's now seven subway stops from Little Italy, where he grew up. Takes about 20 minutes. Maybe three miles, crow-style. A lifetime, Scorsese-style.

He is recalling his first real movie.

That is, not the first movie he saw physically, but the first time he brought it all together, realized that someone was consciously shaping a story, using the elements of screen to express emotion.

"I was 5 or 6, the movie was King Vidor's 'Duel in the Sun.' It was a very powerful experience. Having asthma, my parents didn't know what to do with me, so they took me to the movies all the time. My mother thought 'Duel in the Sun' was a western. That last scene was incredibly powerful for me. It was no longer the average western of the time. The emotions were way over the top. It was very frightening to me."

The climax of the 1946 Gregory Peck, Jennifer Jones film, produced by David Selznick, a psychosexual melodrama involving a "half-breed" as well as large quantities of male arrogance, is suffused in orange movie-glow, a replication of setting sun. Scorsese used just such a device in a scene in 1974's "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore." The revelation: "I began to realize there were so many other kinds of movies, not just the westerns they'd been taking me to."

"I began noting the different styles. Orson Welles, for example. I began noting what was possible with different lenses and camera placement. Jean Renoir was very important: My father took me to see 'The River.' "

Here the movie database tendency in Scorsese comes out. He can't stop himself pointing out a fact that can't be known to seven people on Earth: "Satyajit Ray was an associate director on that film." * * *

But the boy had to do something. He wasn't allowed to play ball or run in a gang (too fragile), there was nothing to read, TV was mostly fuzz and baloney.

"I started drawing pictures. I thought they were cartoons but they were movies. I ended up designing shots, even in different aspect ratios. I became obsessed with that. Once I started that and came up with stories, I discovered [that] drawing what should go in front of the camera is pleasurable. But once you do it, you have to do it again. It's ceaseless!"

Even as he was re-creating the movie process on paper, he noticed that the movies he was watching seemed to come from some strange world that had nothing to do with his own.

"I had a need to tell a story in pictures -- literature was not in the house. I had a need to tell stories that came from my world, stories that were very different than what was on screen, but just as dramatic. These stories moved me so much, I felt desperate. I saw a whole universe right there, very vivid. It took only a short while before I realized that such a universe could be expressed in film."

He was 13 when he saw "The Searchers," the great John Ford western of 1956, where Wayne plays the obsessive Ethan Edwards, hunting for a girl kidnapped by Indians. To save her? No, to kill her.

"It had the extraordinary ability to convey the darker side of character. I was already aware of such constructions as 'good-bad' as opposed to the more common, simple 'good-good' hero. I preferred the complexity."

And even then, at 13, he got what some critics even today don't: that movies, even the westerns reviled by snooty mainstreamers then as infantile, were frequently propelled by ideas.

"That movie illustrated the turmoil of postwar America. Wayne's Ethan Edwards is a key character -- we accept his contradictions and love him for his inability to fit in. When he walks off, just before the door closes, that's our country walking off, never coming back. Something's changed."

Other picks from his favorite period in film, 1945 to 1960:

"Sunset Boulevard": "It's like a monster movie in a way. You feel compassion for the monster (Norma Desmond); it's also the truest film there is about what it's like to be in front of the camera."

Italian neorealism: "I was very attracted to neorealism, 'Paisan,' 'Open City,' 'The Bicycle Thief,' because I felt the reality. It was as close to my world as possible. So I was beginning to see how to make a movie -- over here -- but make it about my world -- over there. Then there was 'On the Waterfront,' which was somehow both: a real movie, but not about cowboys or monsters or spaceships, but about recognizable New York reality. That told me it was possible to combine the two. It could be done."

A certain part of Scorsese felt a deep religious impulse. In fact, to this day, he credits priests from the early '50s with suggesting to him and his peers that the "cycle" could be broken, that they didn't have to have the same kind of service jobs in the garment industry their parents did. "They liberated my mind," he recalls.

They also liberated his butt. After a year in the seminary, someone found him watching Bergman's "The Seventh Seal."

"You're not for us," he was told.

After failing to get into Fordham ("My grades were too low!") he went to New York University, but not "the film school." There was no film school. "It was the film department," he says. He stayed for six years, got a master's, became an instructor. He made his first film there, "Who's That Knocking at My Door," which took three years.

* * *

His next film took 24 days. It was "Boxcar Bertha," a Roger Corman exploitation film, the sequel to "Bloody Mama," itself an imitation of "Bonnie and Clyde," which horrified his friends. He had gotten to Hollywood as an editor on "Woodstock," the concert documentary. Brian De Palma, who would in some ways prove to be Scorsese's mentor, introduced him to Corman, and 10 months later he found himself in Arkansas with tommy guns and Barbara Hershey.

"I learned how to make a movie."

Then a big thing happened: He met Robert De Niro and began one of the great collaborations in movies.

De Niro had starred in "Hi, Mom!," De Palma's first notable film, and the actor had been off in the South making a biggish film called "Bang the Drum Slowly," which would also win him great notice.

"We really connected," recalls Scorsese. "I met him at dinner in New York, small apartment, and after dinner, De Niro called me over and said, 'When you grew up, were you friends with so-and-so?'

" 'That's right,' I said. He was 'Bobby from Hester Street,' and I was 'Marty of Elizabeth Street.' He knew the world I came from, the nature of that world. We both felt outsiders. We don't have to say what the reasons are. We just kind of feel it."

Of course, the rest is pretty much legend. They astounded the world with their first film together, "Mean Streets" in 1973, a violent tale of small-time thugs scuffling along as minor Mafia players, as far from the magisterial political concerns of 1972's "The Godfather" as could be imagined. Old pal Harvey Keitel plays Charlie, heir to a restaurant who is simply biding time until he inherits; new pal De Niro is Johnny Boy, out-of-control, possibly nuts, someone whose mental vibrations of destruction threaten the whole system. As Pauline Kael wrote in a New Yorker review that changed Scorsese's life, "Martin Scorsese's 'Mean Streets' is a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking." And on and on and on.

Kael's remark "a triumph of personal filmmaking" could have been the hallmark of what became known as '70s cinema, which Scorsese himself came to represent.

The movies he made for years thereafter were rooted in the same psychology -- the out-of-control alpha male -- the same locale (New York City), the same formal technical elements of conveying emotional intensity with slow motion, superb lighting schemes. ("I know how to light for celluloid," he says matter-of-factly.)

Yet to represent his career as a perfect acceleration from the proto-greatness of "Mean Streets" to the success of last year's "The Departed" is to simplify considerably.

Failure and disaster, scandal and depression were as constant as success. "Sometimes a picture is considered 'special,' " he says now, almost ruefully, "and sometimes it's not."

"Taxi Driver" was considered special "but it only got made because of the combination of myself and De Niro. I'm glad I'd committed to it earlier."

About "New York, New York": "I felt the failure was mine. I felt I didn't succeed as a director. What happened next was the big version of 'Last Temptation of Christ' was canceled as a consequence, and that was the worst it ever got for me. Then someone called me to do 'The Last Waltz' [the 1978 documentary on the Band] and that got me back to making the kinds of films I was born to do."

As for "Raging Bull," considered by many to be his greatest film, "I put most of everything I knew into 'Raging Bull.' But it was really De Niro's film. He wanted to do it, and he talked me into it."

He says very little about some smaller films and commercial projects like "The Color of Money" and regrets only that when he finally got to make "The Last Temptation of Christ," it was on a small budget, unlike the grand version he'd wanted.

* * *

Then came another "special" one, "GoodFellas."

"I didn't see anything particularly different about it. But Michael Powell [the great British director who'd married Scorsese's longtime, multi-Oscar-winning film editor, Thelma Schoonmaker] urged me to do it. He saw it as so much more than a genre picture. But it was really the actors who brought it to life. When they got on the set, I realized we had something very special."

His next two films were dazzlers, but they baffled critics who couldn't figure out the reason he chose them. "The Age of Innocence" took him, for some reason, from mean streets to stuffy parlors, a dramatization of an Edith Wharton novel of high society. Then came "Casino," which replicated many of the tropes in "GoodFellas," though some critics (including this one) admired it extravagantly.

He had one more ordeal to get through.

"I wanted to do 'Gangs of New York' in the '70s, and it was very much a '70s kind of movie. It was a sort of 'personal epic,' that is, a film made from one man's perspective on a vast social and historical situation. But by the time I finally got to make it, the market had changed. It was like there was a disconnect between what I was making and what they were expecting."

The movie wasn't helped by widely publicized fights between Scorsese and Harvey Weinstein, then the Miramax studio boss. At one point it was postponed for a year.

The last two pictures have been quite the opposite. Scorsese doesn't sound as if he was terribly eager to do either, and some have seen in them a kind of professional impersonality heretofore alien to his work. But they've happily delivered at the box office.

"I think of these as genre films," he says now.

" 'The Aviator' was a Hollywood spectacle. I read the script and I was thinking, I didn't know about that. It was a film I hoped would be entertaining to the audience and keep me in the running.

"As for 'The Departed,' I thought of it as a modern-day noir, a film that reflected society, of today's American excesses. But I got interested in the characters again and the relations between DiCaprio's and Damon's. Jack Nicholson was a man in power out of control. It was the ultimate noir: Everybody is killed. The lesson: You know nothing. It was simply a genre film. Somehow we came out of it better than we went in -- I don't know how. I don't remember finishing it, I remember leaving it."

As for the future, some projects have been announced, but it's unclear with the writers' strike what will happen next. There's also the uncertainty of the changing methods of making film, with the increase in digital video and CGI in movies. Martin Scorsese possibly glows a little less than he once did, but he hasn't given up.

"I don't know what else to do. I like making them."