Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino talk movie obsessions, director heroes, process and violence as catharsis.
Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino are born storytellers, not just in
their movies—which bear each director's unmistakable stamp—but in their
deep-seated appreciation for the medium. While they hail from different
generations—Scorsese was among the first wave of film school grads in
the mid '60s, and Tarantino's rise coincided with the indie film
revolution of the early '90s—their passion and knowledge of cinema place
them on equal footing. No genre escapes their grasp, whether it's
prestige studio releases or B-movie potboilers, splashy musicals or
noirish thrillers, art-house fare or spaghetti Westerns. They've been
dining on this grand buffet all their lives, and it shows in their own
work, in the characters they've created, and the lens through which they
view the world. This is a particularly conspicuous year for both
filmmakers: Tarantino's
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood has galvanized critics and audiences alike since its debut at Cannes, while anticipation runs high for Scorsese's
The Irishman,
for which the director has spent considerable time in post dealing with
digitally de-aging his leads. The two sat down for the
DGA Quarterly
to talk directors, influences and violence as catharsis, among other
topics. This is an edited version of their conversation. –Steve
Chagollan
Martin Scorsese: I just finalized the last cut on (The Irishman).
Quentin Tarantino: I
get a situation when I kind of get down to that very, very end, where
it's like, "Let's try this" and "Let's try that." But we get to that one
spot and then I go home that night and I think, "You know, that was
horrible. I've got to put it all back in the next day."
MS: This has taken over
three months because, in a funny way, this particular film I didn't
really screen that much because the last six months have been dealing
with the de-aging.
QT: Yeah, yeah.
MS: And so we're doing
that and it's quite intense. And so the ending is like two shots and I
put another shot in. Then, [I'm thinking], "Wait, does it need that
medium shot? Maybe we would just stay with the wide shot." So we tried
that a few times, and then a couple of friends said, "Didn't you have
another shot in there?" I said, "Yeah, maybe that's better." But the
thing was, that in so doing, it changes the length of the last wide
shot.
QT: Well, let me ask
you a question about the movie you're doing now because you're dealing
with, I think, the longest canvas you've dealt with. It's quite a few
hours, right?
MS: Yeah.
QT: So how has that affected you as far as pacing is concerned?
MS: Interestingly
enough, I figured out the pacing on the page this time with the script
that [Steven] Zaillian [wrote]. And then—this is a complex situation
because of the fact that it's being made with Netflix—it kind of
stretches the length. In other words, I'm not sure if it had to be, for
example, a two hour and 10 minute movie. Or could I have been at four
hours?
QT: Right, yeah.
MS: I'm not certain as
to the ultimate venue, so I made it pure in my head in a sense like,
"What if it's just a movie? What if it's got to be as long as we feel or
as short as we feel?" And, because the nature of the
characters—basically, one character is telling the story in flashback at
the age of 81.
QT: Uh-huh.
MS: And when you get
to my age, Quentin—and you get a little slower, a little more
contemplative and meditative—it's all about thinking of the past and
about [the characters'] perception of the past and so, by the third shot
in the picture,
I felt it in the editing. And I said, "Let's see where it takes us and
play to a few audiences and see how they tolerate it or not."
So we kept saying, "We should try this and that." And also the nature of
the computer-generated stuff we were doing gave us a certain pace.
QT: Yeah, yeah, okay.
MS: It's a quieter
pace. It still has violence to it, it still has humor. But it comes in
different ways. It's the old story: The more pictures you make, the
more there is to learn.
QT: You know, Marty,
I'll tell you an interesting story that I'm going through right now, and
I thought it would lead to a very good question about you and movies,
so let me go with this.
Right now, I'm working on a book. And I've got this character who had
been in World War II and he saw a lot of bloodshed there. And now he's
back home, and it's like the '50s, and he doesn't respond to movies
anymore. He finds them juvenile after everything that he's been through.
As far as he's concerned, Hollywood movies are movies. And so then, all
of a sudden, he starts hearing about these foreign movies by Kurosawa
and Fellini…
MS: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
QT: And so he's like, "Well, maybe they might have something more than this phony Hollywood stuff."
MS: Right.
QT: So he finds himself
drawn to these things and some of them he likes and some of them he
doesn't like and some of them he doesn't understand, but he knows he's
seeing something.
MS: Uh-huh.
QT: So now, I find
myself having a wonderful opportunity of, in some cases, rewatching and,
in some cases, watching for the first time movies I've heard about
forever, but from my character's perspective. So I'm enjoying watching
them but I'm also [thinking], 'How is he taking it? How is he looking at
it?' I always like to have a good excuse for just throwing down into a
pit of cinema, so that brings me to ask you: When was it for you that
you started being lured away from what you considered Hollywood movies,
and started becoming more adventuresome and going outside of your
neighborhood to actually see some of the other foreign films that you'd
been maybe reading about?
MS: Well, it's a great
question because my first seven, eight years or so of my life we were in
Corona, Queens. And then my father had to move back to Elizabeth Street
(in Lower Manhattan's Little Italy), the street he and my mother were
born on, because of some problems with the landlord. And so I was thrown
into what looked like the Dead End Kids [or] Lionel Rogosin's On the Bowery, you know?
[laughing]
But prior to that, probably because of the asthma, [my parents] would take me to the movies all the time. So I saw Duel in the Sun, [that] was the first one. And then The Wizard of Oz, The Secret Garden, noirs like The Threat, [by] Felix Feist. Did you ever see that?
QT: Yeah, yeah. Loved The Threat.
MS: And so and [Robert Wise's] Blood on the Moon. [William Seiter's] One Touch of Venus.
[We] had a little television set, a 16" RCA Victor, and my grandparents
would come over on a Friday night because they were showing Italian
films for the Italian community. And the films were [Vittorio De Sica's]
Bicycle Thieves; [and Roberto Rossellini's] Rome, Open City and Paisan. And so at 5 years old, I saw the reaction of my grandparents crying watching Paisan
and I heard the language that was the same as they were speaking. And
so I knew there was another kind of cinema, but it wasn't the movies.
QT: Yeah.
MS: The first film I saw about Hollywood was [Billy Wilder's] Sunset Boulevard.
QT: Right, yeah. [laughing] Very dark view of Hollywood.
MS: And so in a sense,
they were codified—the truth was coming through a different code, and a
different culture in a way. And it didn't make them any less [important]
from the European films I saw. But there was something that affected me
when I saw those Italian films on that small screen that I never got
past, and so that changed everything.
That really gave me a view of the world, the foreign films. It made me
curious about the rest of the world, apart from the Italian-American
Sicilian community I was living in.
QT: So did it even open
you up to New York, in a way—reaching those other cinemas, going
outside of your neighborhood, searching out those places?
MS: It was more than that. Because it was really going into America, outside of the little village that I grew up in.
QT: Oh, yeah, I get you.
MS: It was scary. There
were a lot of bad areas, so you'd go with some friends. Did you ever go
to the 42nd Street when all the movies were playing at that time?
QT: You know, I never made it. As a matter of fact, the first time I ever went to New York was for one weekend of casting Reservoir Dogs.
Now understand, I wanted to go to New York since the minute I heard
that there was a New York and watch a New York cinema [bill]. But no one
ever took me when I was a kid, and I couldn't afford to go when I was
old. So we're casting the movie and Harvey Keitel was like, "I can't
believe we're not going to give the New York actors a shot here." And I
go, "Well, we can't afford it." He goes, "Well, I'll tell you what. I'll
arrange for a weekend of casting through a casting director and I'll
put you and (producer) Lawrence Bender up, and I'll fly you out." So we
had one weekend in New York casting. And when we come in from the
airport, it's like in the morning, and we're just kind of driving
through New York to get to the hotel, I think it was the Mayflower…
MS: Yeah.
QT: And I'm literally
like, "OK, I've been wanting to go to a Times Square cinema my whole
life. The first thing I'm going to do, as soon as we get done with work,
I'm going to go to the Times Square, I want to go see whatever is
playing." And Harvey goes, "Quentin, no you're not. In a week or two,
you could do that, but you can't do that tomorrow. You're too new." [Scorsese is laughing throughout this story.]
MS: He was so right.
And also the weird thing is that that was changed in the '50s. We'd go
up but you'd have to have about four guys with you. And you go and they
were showing every film you can imagine. There were no sex films. It was
all regular Hollywood films.
We'd go up there and it was a dangerous place, you know, it was crazy. And they would show, you know, The Elusive Pimpernel, directed by [Michael] Powell and [Emeric] Pressburger and on the same bill, Ulysses with Kirk Douglas, and beautiful Technicolor prints. But, across the street, they had Halls of Montezuma [and] To the Shores of Tripoli.
QT: Yeah.
MS: Two films. One (Halls)
I think is a Lewis Milestone, the other [Bruce Humberstone], and so
they were beautiful Technicolor films. Right? They showed them black and
white! [Tarantino laughing] And we'd go in the place, God
knows what was going on in the balcony—there were fights, all kinds of
stuff—but we went anyway. All of the prints were black-and-white prints,
of like (John Ford's) Drums Along the Mohawk—black-and-white!
QT: [Laughing]
Now, I had that experience in Downtown L.A., the Metropolitan Theatres
there, it was the Cameo and the Arcade (both on S. Broadway). They were
the all-night ones. As a matter of fact, I remember—I think it was in
'82 because they never got an L.A. release—I remember that movie that
Ralph De Vito did, Death Collector, which was Joe Pesci's [first film]…
MS: Yeah, that's how we got Joe for Raging Bull.
QT: Well, I heard it was playing at the Arcade. And I go, "Wow," it was like right after the Raging Bull.
I go; that's the movie. The only way to see it was to go there at four
in the morning. I'm not going to go there at eight at night.
MS: Death Collector,
Bob (De Niro) saw it on CBS. He said, "I saw this thing on TV, and this
guy is really interesting," so we got a print of it. That's how we
looked at it, you know?
QT: It's a good film. When I actually saw it. It was like, "Oh, wow, this is like an exploitation version of Mean Streets."
MS: You're right! [laughing]. Now the repertories are gone, of course, so, it's a different thing entirely.
QT: Well, just so you know, I own a repertory theater out here in Los Angeles, the New Beverly, and we do great with your films.
MS: Oh, thank you.
QT: And we only show 35 or 16 [mm]. And we have a full trailer collection.
New York vs. L.A. School of Cinema
QT: When I think of New
York filmmakers, I think of you, Marty. I think of Sidney Lumet. I
think of Woody Allen. But also, you're part of the New York New Wave,
which was the '60s. You had the '60s shoestring guys, like you and Jim
McBride and Shirley Clarke and Brian De Palma. I'm interested in that
whole concept of the New York New Wave, and you guys more or less being
inspired by the can-do spirit of the French New Wave. Give me a camera
in sync and I'll attach it to this car and away we go.
MS: Or put it in a wheelchair and just go—a cameraman and a wheelchair and that's your dolly shot.
QT: Right.
MS: The New York thing
sort of came out of postwar. There were very few films still being made
in New York. [In] the studio system, of course, you had the factory. Why
go to New York when you have everything you need in the studio? So what
I think changed it was, of course, again, Neorealism, which was
shooting out in the true actual locations.
QT: Yes.
MS: Slipping into film noir, like [Jules Dassin's] The Naked City and [Otto Preminger's] Where the Sidewalk Ends and everything else, even Force of Evil, [Abraham] Polonsky's film.
QT: Yeah.
MS: [They had] shots of New York, which were amazing. George Cukor, A Double Life, all these films, they actually started to take the cameras into the streets.
QT: Yeah.
MS: And New York was
not a shooting [destination] at that time. You had this traffic, there's
people that have work to do, they'd walk in front of the camera, they
don't want to be told anything. They were hiding the camera in different
places and, ultimately, it was the American avant garde, the films
Jonas Mekas curated in the mid-'50s, Cinema 16. Amos Vogel, Jonas Mekas,
Shirley Clarke [with] The Connection...
QT: Yeah.
MS: (Clarke's) The Cool World. She shot it out in the streets. The man who really broke it, of course, was Cassavetes with Shadows.
QT: Yeah, he's the godfather of that, exactly.
MS: Once I saw Shadows,
I looked at my friends and said, "Well, there's no more excuses." As
long as you have something to say, we can do this. They were using a
[16mm] Éclair [camera], which was smaller and lighter. And that was the
go-to move because we saw you were able to do it and you didn't need the
machine—good, bad or indifferent—of the West Coast.
QT: But the interesting
thing about the New York New Wave, especially when compared to either
Neorealism or the French New Wave is, I'd say, in the French New Wave
movies, they're all taking place in the same town. At any point in time,
Anna Karina's character from [Godard's] Vivre sa vie could bump into the piano player in [Truffaut's] Shoot the Piano Player. I mean, that could absolutely happen.
MS: Exactly. Yeah.
QT: Whereas the New
York New Wave, on the other hand, stuck to their neighborhoods. And
showed us a very multifaceted version of New York. You wouldn't imagine
the characters in The Cool World bumping into characters in [Scorsese's] Who's That Knocking at My Door or the Greenwich Village hippies from [De Palma's] Greetings. They're not going to exist in the same frame.
MS: No, no, no, those
were different countries. We would never go to 110th Street. I don't
know what they do up there. I don't care. It's a different world.
When I went to Washington Square College in 1960, NYU as it's known
today, I just went to the corner of Houston and Elizabeth where I lived
and made a left, six blocks. That was it. I was in another planet. And
then it balanced both. [In] Mean Streets, [they] were kind of both in
there, in a way: the outside world and the inside.
QT: I watched, fairly recently, Who's That Knocking at My Door. And one of the things that cracks me up on it is, because I know what a fan of [John Ford's] The Searchers you are, and so you had a whole big scene [on the Staten Island ferry] where [Harvey Keitel's character is] talking about [The Searchers]…
MS: I had to do it, I know.
QT: It is my favorite
scene in the whole movie. In fact, of the New York New Wave, your film
was the most New Wavy looking. It looked a little bit like the French
New Wave movies.
MS: Yeah, the
black-and-white… But yeah, you're actually right. No doubt there was an
influence of the French New Wave, and Bertolucci really; Before the Revolution was a wipeout. And Pasolini; for me, Accattone is the best of all of them, and somehow it translated. I loved what they did with the perforations on the film.
QT: Yeah.
MS: The frames, you
know—when you look at a frame and you're editing with celluloid—ah. It's
sublime. You could cut right on the edge of the frame. You'd go two
frames and pull one out. I mean they were doing it, and we started doing
it ourselves and experimenting.
It was what my old teacher, Haig Manoogian, said when we were shooting
these short films at NYU at the time, and we'd get into an editing
problem. We'd say, "But Truffaut said when he's cutting a film going one
way, he recuts it to go another way." And my professor said, "That's
nonsense. He wouldn't do that." Yeah, but we had this shot. He goes,
"Listen, the point is that you may shoot a shot for a certain reason and
then later when you're in the editing process and things aren't
working…" It's like the monolith in [Kubrick's] 2001. You know, you touch the monolith and you take a shot that had nothing to do with that scene…
QT: Yeah.
MS: …And it works in
another place and means something else. He said, "You learn about the
value of the shot itself." The shot itself takes on its own life, and
you can see that in little frames, 16 or 35, it didn't matter.
QT: It's funny you're
saying that because actually one of my favorite things with me and my
editors is basically when we cheat and get away with it, and it's as
obvious as the nose on your face.
MS: It's so obvious. There's a scene in Shutter Island
with this woman who's in the insane asylum and [Leonardo DiCaprio's
character is] interrogating her at a table, very nice woman, and she's
talking about [how] she had killed her husband with an ax. And there's a
shot over her shoulder—which is a very Hitchcock kind of thing; she has
a glass and she takes a sip and puts it down; and cut back to Leo, he's
interrogating her; come back to her; and then another shot over her
shoulder where she takes the glass and goes like this and puts it down
and there's no glass in her hand.
QT: Uh-huh. [laughs]
MS: Well, she was
rehearsing. But I said, "Let's do that." You think there's a glass
there. And hence, the whole story: what's true, what isn't true, what is
imagined.
QT: Oh, that's perfect.
MS: Cheating is…
QT: It's a very honorable thing to do. You just have to pull it off.
MS: That's right. It
takes on its own life. Things you'd think would never cut together, do.
[Then] things you think are just going to be beautiful cut together—a
disaster.
QT: I'm wrapping up my publicity tour on (Once Upon a Time…)
and I get questions like, "What was the most difficult scene for you to
do?" I guess my real answer to that question usually is, if I've got a
big set piece I'm getting ready to do, and it's Tuesday and we start it
on Wednesday. And half of the reason I'm doing the movie is to do this
sequence, which I've watched in my head so I see it. And now, if I don't
do it at least as good [as I see it] in my head, I will at least be the
[only] one who knows that I didn't do it.
MS: That's right. Exactly.
QT: And it's sort of
like me testing my talent. Am I going to hit the ceiling on this one? Am
I not as good as I think I am?
And just before those days, those sequences, are always my most
anxiety-filled, because I want them to be great and I'm at the bottom of
the mountain right now and I'm looking up. I know once I start
climbing, I'll be fine. But I've got to start climbing. You have to get
through that…
MS:[laughing]
It's true, and it's total anxiety, bad dreams, everything. Get in there
in the morning. Nasty, arguing, complaining. And then I want to get
started.
QT: On those mornings, I am the nastiest. I am like, "Don't bother me."
MS: "Don't come near me." [laughing]
I go outside the trailer. I'm very nice to everybody. I go in the
trailer, there's my AD and my producer, my assistant, and they get it.
And then the DP comes and they all get it. And I usually complain about
the traffic or there's something wrong with my teeth or I don't know
what. "Can't do a damn thing around here," you know.
QT: Yeah.
MS: But in any event,
it is that incredible thing that I always talk about: How do we get
these concepts up here, out through all this equipment, through that
lens, with the glass, and how do we get these dreams in our head? It's
so ephemeral.
Once you start to make them physical, we may lose part of what we're feeling up here, what we want to express. It's very tricky.
"I'm
interested in that whole concept of the New York New Wave, and you guys
more or less being inspired by the can-do spirit of the French New
Wave."–Quentin Tarantino
QT: It's an interesting
double-edged sword which, I think, is why we have the anxiety, because,
on the one hand, we've got this perfect movie in our head, but we don't
want that. We want to create something better than that because we
don't have those actors in our head.
MS: Exactly.
QT: You've got to
constantly [be] making the cuts with the music and this and that and the
audience ooh'ing and aah'ing. Yeah, we can maybe do that. But it's got
to have a heartbeat.
MS: That's right.
QT: But I still want all that ooh'ing and aah'ing.
MS: Yeah, I know. I
know, I know. And that's the tension. That's the incredible tension. And
people say, "Well, if you hate it." It's not that I hate it.
QT: No, it's not hating.
MS: It's what we do.
QT: It's actually the most invigorating thing in my life. But it doesn't mean I don't have trepidation.
MS: Oh, God. But you
know, you've tried your best under the circumstances: with the DP, with
your actors, with the weather, with how you're feeling, with that
location, with that shooting schedule. Unless, you know, some people go
back and they reshoot a lot of stuff that they really need.
QT: Yeah, it seems like
cheating to me. There is an aspect of, "No, you've got to pull it off
in the time—either one that you said that you were going to [meet], or
while everyone's all there to do it. Even if you go over, it's still…
MS: That's right. It's like a prize fight.
QT: Anybody could just do an unlimited thing…
MS: Yeah, no, a prize
fight. You've got certain rounds. You've got to get in there and you've
got to keep going and that's it. I mean, I did shoot four extra days, I
think, on The Departed. But what I did there, we were changing
it so much in the middle of the film when we were shooting. I kept
working with [screenwriter] Bill Monahan and everybody rewriting stuff.
It got so complicated that, at one point, my continuity person said,
"Where do you want this new scene [that] just came in?" I said, "Put it
in the middle with everything else. [laughing] I'll figure it
out later." Sure enough, in the end it was like we were wrangling six
wild horses, me and [editor] Thelma [Schoonmaker]. And then finally, we
put it all together and we realized, "Okay, we need this and we need
that."
QT: Yeah, that makes
sense, absolutely. I would have to think, though, that when it comes to
what I was describing about leading up to that big section, feeling
trepidation, I would imagine that you probably felt that way leading to
the big action climax of Taxi Driver.
MS: It was every day on Taxi Driver.
It was supposed to be a 40-day shoot and we went 45 days and they were
very, very upset with us—really upset, angry, coming down, phone calls.
It was a nightmare. And I must say, the energy you see in the frames—and
I designed that whole shootout sequence very carefully—there was a good
kind of anger that kept us going.
QT: Yeah.
MS: It took a lot out
of us, but it was like being in a battle. It was fight, fight, fight,
all the way through everything. It's like everything you did was a
battle to get the shots you wanted, how you wanted it. We were just
trying to fight the time.
QT: Yeah.
MS: But it had a crazy energy to it. Because of that, we were like commandos.
QT: That makes sense,
in particular that cathartic action scene and pulling it off, because
it's, on one hand, operatic, even Japanese style to some degree.
MS: Yeah, yeah.
QT: But also more
realistic than anything I'd ever seen in just a normal, go-to-the-movies
kind of movie theater experience. That ending has got to be cathartic.
That brings all these elements together. Also, you're giving us an end
to a movie. We've watched this guy in his apartment forever and now this
it, the fuse has met the bomb basically.
MS: Oh, yeah, yeah,
yeah. The thing was, [Paul] Schrader wrote that and it was very, very
personal. And he had imagined—I'm putting words in his mouth I guess—but
the impression I got was he wanted it more Japanese and more stylized.
And he, I believe, said he would have wanted more blood on the walls. I
said, "But I'm not Kon Ichikawa. Or [it's not Kurosawa's] Sanjuro…
QT: Yeah, where you trigger the sprinkler system basically.
MS: I watch those
things. I said, "I can appreciate it. I love it. But every time I try to
do it, it comes out another way." Because where I come from, Quentin,
when I saw violence or the threat of violence, it was very real.
QT: Yeah.
MS: Very serious and
there were great repercussions. And, you know, problems that dealt with
that, whether it's a slap in the face or a look, even, boom!, people
just stopped, and you could be dead the next minute. You don't know. I
just did it the way I imagined… as if it would happen realistically.
QT: I heard you say at
the time that you were kind of disturbed that audiences were thinking
[of the scene] cathartically but, to me, it seems like it is made to be
cathartic.
MS: But I didn't know
that. I thought it was a special passion project that had to be made
because we all had those feelings. I had feelings of this disconnect and
this rage. But the rage, I mean, ultimately, we don't cross that line
that [the title character] Travis crosses. But we understood it and we
didn't have to say much about it.
QT: Yeah, yeah. You just didn't know how much you would actually tap—how deep the vein was.
MS: I thought nobody was going to see the film.
QT: So my question, in Taxi Driver,
it's like I'm sure the reason the movie, when it came to actually
getting made (at Columbia) because it is vaguely similar enough to Death Wish…
MS: (Producers) Michael and Julia Phillips, who had just won the Academy Award for The Sting,
were really pushing the picture and working with the people at
Columbia—at that time it was David Begelman—and they got it made. But
[the studio] did not want to make it, and they made it very clear every
minute.
QT: Oh, really. [laughing]
MS: Every day. And
especially when I showed it to them, they got furious, and [it] also got
an X rating. And I always tell the story that I had a meeting with
Julia and myself and the Columbia brass. They looked at me. I walked in,
ready to take notes. They said, "Cut the film for an R or we cut it.
Now, leave."
QT: Jesus!
MS: I had no power at
all. There's nothing I could do. I came up against a monolith, and the
only people who were able to pull it through were Julia and Michael. But
meetings, talks, and then, of course, dealing with the MPAA to shave
and trim a bit here and there. Again, because, in doing the shootout, I
didn't know how else to present it. Maybe knowing that some of it was
artifice, I didn't realize the impact of the imagery. So I cut two
frames and walked out.
I mean, the violence, it's catharsis, it's so true. I felt it when I saw The Wild Bunch.
QT: Well, that's an interesting thing. For instance, I feel a catharsis at the end of Taxi Driver.
MS: And the character (in Taxi Driver), 80% or 90% of it was De Niro himself.
QT: Absolutely.
MS: With that look on his face and his eyes.
QT: It's interesting
because the thing about it is, you, De Niro and Schrader made a choice
to look through Travis' eyes. [De Niro] went inside of Travis. This is a
first-person study. You're seeing the world through his eyes. So if
he's a racist, you're looking at the world through the view of a racist.
MS: Right, exactly.
QT: Nevertheless,
though, in Travis' one-against-all stand against the pimps, I'm on
Travis' side. I mean, if we're not supposed to root for him even a
little bit, then there would be no point in making the prostitute
underage.
MS: No, you're right,
that's something that Schrader had in that script with her being
underage, and Harvey improvised some of those lines about, you know,
when Bob goes up to him in the doorway on 13th Street and says, 'I'm
hip,' but (Harvey) goes—
QT: 'Yeah you don't
look it.' I've got to say I love that movie and I love that sequence in
particular. Usually, if you're talented enough, you get enough happy
accidents you can never count on, so it all balances. But I think one of
the great ones to me in the history of cinema is (Harvey Keitel's)
Sport flicking that cigarette off of Travis and you see an explosion of
sparks.
MS: The sparks. Harvey
did it. "Bang!" You know, "Go back to your fucking tribe." You are so
right about that, you know, because I grew up in places where I saw that
happen in gatherings or a dance or something, and a fight breaks out.
Before it breaks out, there's always that cigarette. A spark. "Oh, here
we go." It's one of those [situations] where you know it's going to be a
war and that's the signal, you know.
Referencing Other Director in Their Own Movies
QT: From time to time,
if I'm in a really cool cinema bookstore, I like picking up a critical
essay book on a director that I haven't watched their films that much.
And I'll just kind of start reading about them and that will lead me
down the road to another filmmaker's work. And so I was in Paris for our
one weekend of shooting in France for Inglourious Basterds,
and they had this wonderful cinema bookstore by Rue Champollion, where
all the little cinemas are, and I hadn't watched a lot of Josef von
Sternberg's movies. So I picked up one book about him and I liked it so
much I got another book. I eventually got his autobiography, which I
thought was hysterical. I don't believe a word of it, but it's very
funny.
MS: [Laughing] I know, I know.
QT: Not a word. So I started watching some of his movies, and I was actually kind of inspired by his art direction.
MS: Yes.
QT: So I started, and now I do it at least a couple of times per movie, but on Inglourious Basterds,
it was set up to do this Josef von Sternberg shot where you take all of
the art direction and put it in front of the camera. And you dolly shot
through the art direction as you follow your lead character—all the
candles and the glasses and the clocks and the lights and just create
one big line and then put a track line in there and then have your
character go like this. So that is officially a Josef von Sternberg
shot.
MS: I have a thing with
tracking parallel to the action—just tracking it, like four people are
standing there. Instead of tracking this way, it just goes straight this
way and I think it comes from… there's a scene in Vivre sa vie
where the guy says, "I want a Judy Garland record," and she goes
across the record store to find the record and then the camera just
comes back with her. There's an objectivity to it that is like a piece
of music really, like choreography, but also the objectivity of this, I
should say the state of their souls in a way—it doesn't want to get too
close.
QT: Yeah.
MS: But the one I
really tried to—I tried to capture it in many films. I can't do it but
it doesn't matter. It's the fun of doing it. There's one shot in
(Hitchcock's) Marnie where she's about to shoot her horse. And
it's an insert. And it's her hand with a gun and the camera is on her
shoulder and it's running. The camera is moving with her and the ground
is going this way and I've done it in practically every picture. There's
something, the inevitability of that that she hasn't—somehow it looks
[like] I've put the actor on dollies…
QT: Yeah.
MS: The camera floating up. I'll never get it right because Hitchcock did it. But it's so much fun to do.
QT: I've had a
situation like that that I've done for like the last three movies. And
this movie is the only time I think I've gotten it right. And it's not
even for one of his movies per se; it was from the trailer to [Sam
Peckinpah's] Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, and the way they
cut the trailer is you see Kris Kristofferson like in 24 frames a second
doing tumbles and rolls as he's shooting, then [James] Coburn's in the
hideout and bullets are all around and he's running in 24 frames a
second, somersaulting and shooting and then it cuts to people getting
shot in slow motion.
MS: Yeah.
QT: And then it cuts
back to Kristofferson—24 frames, bam, bam, bam. And then it cuts to him
hitting the ground and falling at 120 frames.
MS: Wow.
QT: I've tried that juxtaposition and doing it that way. I tried that in Django and I didn't pull it off. I tried it in Hateful Eight during a shootout and it worked but it didn't work that way.
MS: [laughing]
QT: But, when Brad Pitt beats the fuck out of this one Manson guy in (Once Upon a Time…), I finally pulled it off. His punches are 24 frames, the guy's impact into the powdery dirt is 120 frames.
MS: That's great. Oh, the powdery dirt, you're right, it pops up—ah, that's fantastic.
QT: Yes.
MS: I always think of the powdery dirt.
QT: The blood on the sweaty face—
MS: That's great. I can never do it but the little Mexican boy in [Sergio Leone's] Once Upon a Time in the West and when it's revealed that his brother is being hanged.
QT: Oh, yeah, yeah.
MS: And he's on his shoulders and he falls to his knees when he's shot with the dust. I tried.
QT: Oh yeah—impossible.
MS: I tried even it in Last Temptation of Christ;
didn't work. Mary and Martha came, Jesus is coming to raise Lazarus. It
didn't work. We were in Morocco. Harvey was with me. We couldn't get
it. Never do. Maybe it's the dust. I don't know what it is.
QT: Yeah, it's that hard dust. Right? You need that Spanish [dust]. You need Almería dust.
MS: Spain. Oh, God. That's hysterical.
"How
do we get these concepts up here, out through all this equipment,
through that lens, and how do we get these dreams in our head? It's so
ephemeral."–Martin Scorsese
Working with DGA Teams
QT: In the last couple
of movies [Tarantino's longtime 1st AD William Paul Clark is among the
first to see a screenplay], because I know he's going to do it— while
he's here. And so those first five or six people, I invite over to the
house to read the script. It's a big deal.
MS: I've worked with
wonderful ADs for a long period of time. Worked with Joe Reidy, who was
terrific. He helped with so many [movies], from Color of Money all the way up to Shutter Island. And he was even—him and [DP Michael] Ballhaus are the ones who laid out the entire Copacabana shot [in Goodfellas]. And Chris Surgent [2nd AD on Gangs of New York and Bringing Out the Dead]…
QT: Yeah.
MS: Then I worked with Adam Somner, who is really terrific, on Wolf of Wall Street. And, since then, David Webb who [was] with me in Taipei doing Silence [and was on] Vinyl and, of course, Irishman. Yeah, Irishman,
which I found that the AD is really like [a] co-producer in a sense.
They're like my right arm. And so I've been very lucky in these past 25
years to be dealing with them.
QT: I just watched New York, New York
a few months ago with my wife. She had never seen it. Now, whenever I
watch it, I don't even think about watching the theatrical cut. I always
watch the "Happy Endings" cut.
MS: That's the right one. Yeah.
QT: But it breaks my
heart that you felt the need to cut it out before the theatrical
release. And I get it. I can [also] see that it would even be one of the
reasons that you made the movie, for the opportunity to do the "Happy
Endings" number.
MS: That's the key reason, yeah. I think what had happened at that point was… Sorry, go ahead.
QT: Well, you're backed up against the wall. 'What do I do?' OK, well, this will take 20 minutes out of it.
MS: I was experimenting
so much with the film and by the time the editing was coming to a
close, everybody always commented how wonderful that sequence is, etc.
And they said, "Sometimes you have to cut out the best thing to make it
work." And so I did. And it was almost like [I] was really punishing
myself for the whole situation, really. I never meant that that should
be out and, in a funny way, too, when we put the film back together a
couple of years later, the "Happy Endings" [sequence] gave the audience a
kind of appreciation for the relationship and they got a happy ending
because the ending is not happy in a sense.
QT: You've also got a
really smooth filmmaking thing there where it shows Francine's (Liza
Minnelli) journey from Broadway to movies, because it starts with (De
Niro's character Jimmy) going to the Broadway show and then it ends with
him being in the theater watching the movie version.
MS: Watching, yeah. That was very specific, you know, it was inspired by [the] "Born in a Trunk" [number in George Cukor's A Star Is Born] and it was inspired by the "Girl Hunt Ballet" [number in Vincente Minnelli's The Band Wagon]—all
these sequences that would stop the movie and suddenly a whole other
film would appear. And that was one of the main reasons for making the
picture, really, to be able to explore that and work with the great
[production designer] Boris Leven and [DP] László Kovács and, I mean,
the design of it was beautiful.
QT: I'm always curious,
especially when it comes to filmmakers whose work I've studied, you
hear about different iterations that could have happened with [one of]
their movies. That brings me to [an aspect of] Mean Streets
that I've never heard you talk about, when you went to Warner Bros. to
do it and the period of time that Jon Voight was going to play Charlie.
Will you explain how it didn't happen?
MS: Well, it's a
delicate issue because, around that time, I got to know Jon Voight in
Los Angeles a little. Harvey Keitel, all of us together, and it was
constantly, "What if so-and-so's in it? Maybe we can get financing. What
about this? What about that?" And Voight was a wonderful actor and so
we talked about it for quite a while. And he was really thinking about
it. I went to his class one night and there I found Richard Romanus and
David Proval and cast them [in Mean Streets] from his class. And then, you know, I spoke to Harvey about it because it was written for Harvey.
QT: Yeah, yeah.
MS: And Harvey told me,
"Look, you've got to get the film made. And I understand, maybe if he
does Charlie, I could do, you know, Johnny or whatever." We were working
out something. And I said, "You understand that I've got to get this
made." And even Barry Primus, we were talking about Barry doing it. And
it was a matter of getting the financing, really. Damn good actors. And
the night came finally when I had to shoot some background shots for
the San Gennaro Feast, and we were based on the corner of Umberto's Clam
House, where Joey Gallo had been killed six months earlier. And I was
on a roof, I remember, and I was about to put a coat on Harvey and go in
and shoot. But they said, "You know, Jon wants to talk to you one more
time," Jon Voight. So I went downstairs to make a phone call and he
said, "I'm really sorry. I just can't do it." I said, "OK." I thanked
him, hung up. I went up to the roof, I said, "Put the coat on. Let's go.
It was written for you, and that's the way God has worked out."
QT: I had another story like that. I make Reservoir Dogs and I'm making a movie for Live Entertainment, which was the video arm of Carolco at that time.
MS: Oh, God, yes.
QT: And so it was like,
we're not even guaranteed a theatrical release. It's like, well, "If
it's really good, we'll release it. We'll see." So I'm ready to lock
picture and Ronna Wallace, who was the head of the company—I had been
kind of working with her No. 2 guy, which was Richard Gladstein—she was
just like, "Well, these guys have been working really hard to get it
ready for Sundance so let's not lock yet. And she's actually trying to
be nice, like maybe I need another week or something. No, I don't need
another week so it doesn't seem so nice. I went to lock. But she says,
"Send a print to New York. I want to watch it." So we sent the print to
New York, and she comes walking into the screening room with Abel
Ferrara. And so Sally Menke, my editor, was like, "Oh my God, they're
going to take the movie away from Quentin…"
MS: That's where they hit you, yes.
QT: Okay. So now they
weren't doing that. She's just bringing a filmmaker she's also worked
with that year to watch it with her, and say, "What do you think?" And
so—I wasn't there—I hear about this story. They're watching the movie
and then, when it's all over with, Abel Ferrara goes, "Ronna, it's
great. Lock it. Release it!" And he just walks out of the room. And that
was that.
QT: So God bless him.
MS: Great! I have a
screening going on right now; it's supposed to lock in tonight. The CGI
took six months. So I'm going to go over there right now.
QT: Well, good luck. Break a leg and this has been so much fun. Thank you for doing this.
MS: You, too, thank you. I'll see you soon, I hope, if you come to New York.
QT: I definitely will. It's my pleasure.
