Martin Scorsese Breaks Down His Most Iconic Films

[upbeat music]

[Martin] Taxi Driver.

Then who the hell else are you talking to?

You talking to me?

It really goes back to Brian De Palma.

His independent cinema and Hollywood started saying,

Hey, maybe these indie films,

these kids could work in the industry.

And so we were all out in L.A.

and he introduced me to Paul Schrader.

Schrader wrote Taxi Driver.

Travis comes from his vision, but more psyche.

I connected with it

through Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground

It was like enlightening, you know?

And so for me, when I read the script, Brian gave it to me.

He said, You know, I don't wanna do it.

I can't do it, but maybe you should do it.

But I didn't have enough, cache, as they say,

at that time to make the picture.

But then they saw the rough cut of Mean Streets

and they changed their mind,

especially when they saw De Niro in it.

And so they said, for the two of you,

we could probably get this film made.

Why won't you talk to me?

Why don't you answer my calls when I call?

You think I don't know you're here?

We kept thinking in terms of the character

and his loneliness and his acting out.

Not condoning the acting out, but he does act out.

And yet an empathy with him, which is really tricky.

We wanted to make it so badly, nobody would make it,

that we were thinking of going to different cities

to make it San Francisco,

but the taxi driving wasn't the same.

And we said, no, it has to be Manhattan.

Ultimately what stayed with us

was the psychological and emotional state of that character.

As we know now, tragically, it's a norm.

Every other person is like Travis Bickle now.

For me, the visualization of the movie

was to always try to keep you off balance,

keep the audience off balance.

I felt that when he made that phone call,

it was so painful where you shouldn't witness it.

So the camera should track away, but not pan away.

It should move completely to a hallway.

And in the hallway you think somebody's coming,

but nobody's gonna come.

Nothing's gonna happen, we're all alone.

But we don't wanna experience

the depth of his pain at that point.

And at the same time,

there's a sense of anxiety on the viewer.

What's gonna happen in the hallway?

Well, apparently nothing.

That was the first shot I came up with,

I said, That's the style.

There's another thing too where the taxi pulls up

at the beginning of the film into the taxi garage.

The taxi is coming in, we're panning with it as it comes in.

And normally it goes this way

and the camera would pan with it and it stops.

Well, as it came in, I went the other way.

And as we rested, the cab came in and stopped.

Wait, I'm supposed to be looking at the car.

No, we're gonna go another way.

And so every shot, as much as possible,

was designed to be slightly disconcerting,

but ultimately, ultimately satisfying.

That was the philosophy of the shooting.

[upbeat music]

Gangs of New York.

Us natives, born right wise to this fine land.

Or the foreign hordes they're filing in.

[mob shouting]

Well, Gangs of New York comes out of

those cobblestone streets

around that church on Mott Street and Mulberry Street.

And also coming off the other element

that I grew up with really was the Bowery,

at that time the Bowery was what you call now homeless.

At that time really, basically alcoholics,

guys dying in the streets, basically.

Very, very difficult place to grow up around and in.

But there was something about that Bowery

and something about the neighborhood

and the way the buildings were created and the cellars.

The cellars, there's so many cellars,

and my father would talk about growing up there

and going into one building, going down the cellar,

and coming out two blocks away.

Running away from the cops or some of the guys, you know.

It had its own life, it was like an organism,

and it had a history.

Well then we got business.

That we do.

And with Leo DiCaprio it was interesting

because De Niro, we were acquainted with each other

when we was 16 years old.

So because of my relationship with him

going back to when we were 16,

he experienced what I experienced growing up.

So he's the only one I know who's around that,

and who was working in that capacity,

that knows who I am and where I came from,

and the world we were in.

He then called me and said, at one point,

he just made a film called This Boy's Life

and he was working with this kid

that he cast named Leo DiCaprio.

He said, He's very good,

you gotta do work with him someday.

And Bob never really used to tell me that,

work with somebody, you know,

just we'd go from picture to picture if we worked together.

DiCaprio liked our pictures, came together, and they said,

you've always wanted to do Gangs of New York,

we started it many times it got canceled.

Here's our chance,

this kid Leo DiCaprio really likes your films,

at least meet with him.

And he was willing to go whatever I could do

to make that film.

So that's how it all started with him

coming off of Titanic and a couple of other films.

Then we convinced Daniel Day to get into it

as a Bill the Butcher.

And Daniel Day's a very intense and very specific actor.

And what I love about working with him

is that Daniel has a thing where if he starts,

he stays in that character.

People think it's kind of a mystique,

but it really makes sense.

And also 'cause if I'm talking to Bill the Butcher

and in between takes it's Daniel,

I'm still talking to Bill.

He stays in that character and he'll be,

one of the other actors Irish

and he's not supposed to like the Irish and, you know,

he treats that person that way.

I don't give a tuppenny fuck about your moral conundrum,

you meat-headed shit-sack.

And they said, Why is he?

That's what that is, just, we're not playing.

I mean, we're playing, but we're living it. [laughs]

And so he is very good that way.

DiCaprio's another way entirely

and he comes at a character from every possible angle.

And we find that with Leo,

most of the work is done before we shoot.

[upbeat music]

Goodfellas.

[Henry] As far back as I can remember,

I always wanted to be be a gangster.

Goodfellas was made 18 years after Mean Streets.

So I didn't really want to go to do another genre,

gangster genre, right?

I mean, there is no main character.

I mean, Ray Liotta is a wonderful actor,

but he's like Virgil taking Dante through the underworld.

The real character in the movie is the underworld.

After doing the film Last Temptation of Christ,

when I got back, I owed Warner Brothers Goodfellas,

or it became Goodfellas,

it was called Wise Guys at the time.

I didn't really, almost didn't wanna make it.

It was Michael Powell, the director of the Red Shoes,

co-director I should say,

and other masterpieces who read the script

and insisted I make it.

Every shot may feel like a documentary,

but the camera moves, everything you see,

it's all, clearly, it's all there in the script.

We had to stage bits of action,

Joe Reedy did and Michael Ballhaus, my cameraman.

They worked out all the background action

for the long Copa Cabana shot.

All I said was, we start out in the front

and he gives the guy the money.

Next thing you know, we go through the thing,

we go through here, we go through here,

we go through here, you know,

we wind up on the famous comic, Kenny Youngman.

Everything has to flow with no obstruction.

He's gotta impress her,

they sent him bottles of champagne, everybody knows him.

That's his height, so that shot had to be.

And I wanted Joe Pesci to be in the film

and I think he resisted it.

I know he resisted it,

he said, I don't know, gangster stuff.

And yeah, but Joe, I said,

this character's really interesting based on a real guy.

Really funny, really funny.

What do you mean I'm funny? [Henry laughs]

And he said, Well, if you do it,

I gotta tell you something.

And I said, Well what is it?

He goes, Not here.

And he acted out this scene that happened to him.

I knew exactly where to put it.

We went through the scene over and over again,

recorded it all, each take,

and then I created from the actor's improvisations

and tried to make sure that it accelerated the right way.

Because the slightest change, you know,

of like, Why am I funny?

What do you mean I'm funny?

Otherwise it would just be repetitious.

Funny like I'm a clown, I amuse you?

I make you laugh, I'm here to fuckin' amuse you?

What do you mean funny?

Funny how, how am I funny?

And I decided we'd just do with two cameras.

We squeeze it in on a day that we wasn't scheduled.

The two cameras would be medium wide shots,

because it was important to see, there are no closeups.

It was important to see Joe's character and Ray's character

in relation to the people around them.

And while the intensity builds,

you see the body language of everybody around them change.

And it just happens.

And I said, Well that's even better.

You know, so closeups, no, let's get outta here, you know.

And we shot it in like an hour and a half, improvised too

with the bottle breaking on Tony Darrow's head

and that sort of thing.

He had the nerve to ask to pay the bill. [laughs]

[upbeat music]

The Departed.

Those guys you tuned up,

they're connected down Providence.

What they're gonna do

is come back with some guys and kill you.

I always wanted to work with Jack Nicholson, be in a film,

and I offered him the part and then he said,

you know, Gimme something to play.

And he was right, because the way the script was

in Bill Monahan's script, which was a very good script,

but the character of Costello was still presented as

your generic big shot gangster.

He hears this young kid in town

who just beat up somebody in a bar.

He calls him in, checks him out,

and then he says, come and talk to me.

'Cause he looks at him and says, Maybe I can use this kid.

We've seen that scene many times in westerns,

in gangster films, because it's very truthful,

that's what happens.

You do it in business too.

Suddenly you make a big hit with something

and everybody calls you

and they wanna see what you can do for them.

In this case, it's the underworld.

And there was a scene

where he's eating a lobster lunch, it said,

in his apartment and he has this kid coming.

The basic line was, What can you do for me?

You wanna work with me, tough guy, what can you do for me?

I'd seen that scene many times.

And Nicholson said, What if, called me and said,

What if while we're at lunch

on the table in a little plastic bag

is a severed human hand.

I said, Now that's a job interview.

And you'd never mentioned it, don't even discuss it.

We went off on a whirlwind of the fact that

Costello would be losing control

and in a sense, losing his mind really.

That's something that was very controversial at the time.

Some people went with it, some didn't.

But the thing was that I was around

a situation like that when I was growing up,

where somebody very powerful,

who was eventually killed in 1968,

was in effect losing his mind and killing people.

An atmosphere of fear that I saw around that area,

that was what I wanted to capture in Departed.

Worse than that,

these guys were all informers on each other.

That is true, in a world where everyone

is informing on each other now.

Complaining about the guy,

Oh, well he's out of his mind, he's overdoing.

No, that's, imagine, that's in effect what it would be like.

You're completely under his control

and he's out of his mind.

And that's what I feel the world is like right now.

[upbeat music]

Raging Ball.

Hit me with everything you've got,

I want you to fuckin' lay me out, go ahead.

You're sure. Yeah.

All right.

[blow thuds] Harder.

The '70s Studio system changed a great deal

and the week that film was released

was the same week from the same studio

that Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate opened.

That and Raging Bull, Apocalypse Now,

all from the same studio, United Artists.

That ended, what the '70s, they call this,

you know, golden age, that sort of,

but really it ended the power of the director in a way,

in American filmmaking.

And that had to come back through independent cinema

in another way through the '80s.

The '70s was very much that way

because things were wide open

and we went in and we took it,

like the Barbarians at the Gate.

And we transformed whatever we could, but they caught us.

Reggie Bull was a, we threw everything we knew into it,

not knowing how it was gonna be received.

We understood that people didn't like him,

and even the crew, it turned out, I didn't know until later,

why are we making a film about this guy, he's a horror.

But we stayed with it.

This man may be this way, but still,

he's a human being, he's got a heart, he's got a soul.

By the end of it, he finds some kind of peace with himself

and maybe the others around him.

And I think I was going there

to try to find peace in myself.

That year there were,

I think four more films coming out about boxing.

The Main Event with Barbara Streisand,

Prize Fighter with Tim Conway,

Matilda, the boxing kangaroo, and Rocky II also.

And they were all in color.

That's when I realized that we should go black and white.

And also the black and white would work

a distinctively different from the other boxing films

that were being made, comedies and Rocky II.

And also Irwin Winkle pointed out to the studio

that the films that were made in black and white

up to that point in the '70s

were Paper Moon and Lenny and they were hits.

I also thought too

that the boxing scenes had to be very powerful.

The rest of the film, anything else was concentrated

in an almost meditative state in terms of framing,

holding those people in that frame.

But the boxing scenes

would be like you're on another planet.

Primarily it was based on,

I came up with the idea when I was doing Last Waltz,

being on the stage with the band

and watching how the band worked.

The ballet sequences from Red Shoes

where you don't really necessarily go head to toe

where you see the dancer,

instead you see what's inside the mind of the dancer.

What's in the mind

and what's the perception of the fighter in the ring?

They don't even know where they are sometimes.

[upbeat music]

The Wolf of Wall Street.

They're gonna need to send in

the National Guard of fuckin' SWAT teams,

'cause I ain't going nowhere!

[brokers cheering]

Again, like Raging Bull, I didn't wanna make it.

But I had to find my own way in it,

and a lot of it had to do with style.

The style I felt originally was more like Goodfellas,

I had done it, and I did it again in Casino.

What more could I bring to it?

And we found a way, and that was

ultimately through his character.

And the whole idea of untethered capitalism,

this is the spirit of it.

Anything goes because you're making money,

it doesn't matter.

Now, it's a little bit that way too in Casino,

but Casino has organized crime, it's a different thing.

This is organized another way.

And so with that understanding,

then I was able to play with the structure of it

and make it, right away,

first three or four minutes of the film,

you could see right away

this is gonna be something unexpected.

Like every other shot,

there's something shocking going on in a way,

or supposedly shocking.

In order to do that, you have to have somebody

who's playing that part be prepared to do anything.

And he did.

I would provoke him, he'd provoked me, and we'd go further.

If you read the book, we could've gone even further.

[upbeat music]

Mean Streets.

Hey, what's the matter with this kid, huh?

Hey, there ain't nothing wrong with me, my friend,

I'm feeling fine.

[Patron] Keep your mouth shut.

You tellin' me that in front of this asshole?

I was living in the late '50s and into the early '60s

down in my old neighborhood of

what they used to call Little Italy.

At that time it really was Little Italy,

families were loving.

But you know, it was the tenements

and it was a not a really good place

and they were good people,

but at the same time it was steeped

in a kind of organized crime.

Mean Streets comes out of that violence,

which I missed by chance, really.

Now's the time.

I was with these people in this car,

I told my friend who was with me and we were in the backseat

and I said, Oh, it's two o'clock in the morning,

this is nonsense, let's go home.

He says, Yeah, yeah, okay, let's go home.

The car drove off and they got shot.

Had to do with a lot of street power, so to speak,

a sense of certain rules that the underworld works with.

And a lot of it had to do with, am I my brother's keeper?

It also reflects my father and his youngest brother.

My father was one of eight children,

his youngest brother was always in jail, always in trouble.

And my father was always trying to broker situations

where he wouldn't get killed.

He has about $30, it's always got on him, Michael.

Where's the rest? Yeah, where's the rest?

The extent to which one is your real brother

or one is such a close friend

that you put yourself on the line

is something that's really important to me

in terms of how you live a life

and try to live a good moral life

but you're in a world that is completely corrupt.

[Narrator] You don't make up for your sins in the church.

You do it in the streets, you do it at home.

And that's the essence of Mean Streets,

that's why I talk about in the beginning,

you know, you can go to church all you want,

but the real acting out of your morality

is outside the church.

It's outside the building of the church,

it's in the home, it's with your friends and that,

all the rest is an illusion.

I was five years old in New York, it was late '40s,

we had a television, 16 inch.

On Friday nights there was an Italian film shown

for the Italian American community.

And my grandparents would come over

and they didn't speak English, only Sicilian.

And my mother and father and my uncles

and we'd get around this little TV set

and we'd see The Bicycle Thief.

They had these words on the bottom,

the people that were speaking in the film,

they were speaking the same way as my family.

Those Italian films were more than cinema,

they were a form of truth that I related to because

it somehow had something to do with who I am.

And so no matter what I shoot, it isn't directly saying,

oh look, we're gonna do a shot now from The Bicycle thief.

No, it's the emotional and psychological impact

of experiencing that film when I was five or six

in the room with these people who lived it.

[upbeat music]

The Irishman.

I don't, I don't know, it sounds, it sounds funny.

It stops, it starts, it loses power.

Lemme see if I can give you a hand.

Over the years seeing the difference in the technology,

and one of the key things to give us the energy

to make our first film, features,

was John Cassavetes doing Shadows in 16 millimeter,

which came from France with the Aclier camera.

So all of that happening at that time

made it that we could make a film ourselves,

we didn't have to have the studio behind us

with giant lights and giant Mitchell BNCs.

I've kind of stayed pretty much traditional.

We edit now with the computer,

but I don't really know how to do that, Thelma does it.

If I can utilize the new technology

for the kind of story I wanna make, why not go there?

And so in the case of Irishman,

De Niro, and I had this idea for a long time.

But again, I didn't wanna do another gangster genre.

Part of the problem was flashbacks.

And by the time we got to do it,

he was too old to play his younger self.

And they said, well, a different actor.

And I said, Well then it's not like us

making a film together, what's the point?

And so we were talking about this idea of youthification

and Pablo Herriman of ILM was with us

and doing CGI or background material for us in Taiwan

where we're doing Silence.

And he came up and he said, I think I can do it.

And what I have seen is that

people have to wear golf balls on their faces.

You can't have a scene with Joe Pesci

and Bob De Niro and Al Pacino and whatever

and they all have golf balls on their faces,

and they're the kinds of actors

that kind of thing for this kind of movie, it doesn't work.

And eventually by the end of the shoot of Silence

he had it and we did a test with Bob, with De Niro,

and we tried it and we all felt strongly about it.

The drawback was financially,

because it was extremely expensive, and also length of time.

It was an extra five to six months in the post-production.

And that's when Netflix came in and really helped us.

It's not just CGI.

We accept it if a person puts on a fat suit

or you paint their hair white

when they're supposed to be old.

But what if you do it digitally?

It's like makeup.

It's just taking that leap of saying, oh no, it's gotta be.

What, the old way?

This is now a transformation into a new way.

[upbeat music]

Silence.

[water splashing]

Things that happened when I was making Last Temptation,

that took me only up to a certain point.

I found myself wanting more and I found it in Silence.

And when I read the book, I was in Japan actually,

it was 1989, and I tried to write a version of the script

with my friend Jay Cox, by 1990, '92.

But I didn't get it and it took me years,

another 10, 12 years to live a life and experience

with different exploration, making Kundun, for example,

on the Dalai Lama, all of these things.

And finally, by around 2006, 2007

I was able to put the script together.

I felt that we could do it.

Too many technical business problems

had almost made it impossible to get made,

but eventually it did.

Ang Lee's group helped us, to shoot in Taiwan, you know.

A special experience for the entire crew making the film.

The locations, the people, the scenes themselves,

what the Japanese actors,

I mean, it was really a kind of spiritual journey.

[upbeat music]

Killers of the Flower Moon.

Their time is over.

This has taken six years.

We didn't intend to take it six years,

but I was making The Irishman and then there was Covid.

I was given the book and read the book

and I was very excited by that.

I didn't quite know how to go about it.

Eric Roth and I went through a process of a few years

of pulling the script together and the story

and there was some wonderful things in it.

We got it to a point where we said,

let's sit down and read this thing, I got some friends,

and we sat down and Leah was there, Eric.

It was good, but there was something about it

that I felt we'd been there before,

and that was the idea of a police procedural.

And the character that he was supposed to play, Tom White,

was a character that is straight laced, you know,

very strong, very proper guy.

And so we thought about it for another week and a half

and then Leo came to me and he said,

Where's the real heart of this picture?

I said, the heart is with this guy Earnest

and his wife Molly.

The only problem is we don't know anything about Ernest,

everybody else who've got tons of material on,

we don't know anything about 'em.

So we came up with the idea of

what if instead of coming from the outside in,

what if we go from the inside out?

Then I said, oh yeah, the story really is

the relationship of Ernest and Molly and the betrayal.

I said, the only problem there is that,

it's creative problem, which is you take the script

and you turn it inside out

and how much of procedural do you need, not very much.

It started to come together,

it gave me the direction that I felt comfortable in.

The other way I've seen the kind of movies,

I enjoy doing it.

Imagine doing horses and running western tropes,

in a way, they call it, I would love that,

but I've seen it and they did it so much better.

Everybody else does it better.

So here though, you're in the house

and there's a husband and wife and this guy is dodgy.

He's being manipulated

by this sort of angel of death, his uncle.

[thunder rumbling]

You know, you got, you got nice color skin.

What color would you say that is?

My color.

We had been working on the casting for quite a while,

including indigenous people.

She says, I have somebody I want you to see.

But then I saw the scene from Certain Women,

Kelly Reichardt's film.

I thought she was wonderful.

And after Covid we got to meet, I was struck by the,

her whole visage, the face, and her intelligence.

One could see that there's a lot going on in her face,

by her not doing very much,

which is perfect for film acting.

Also the intelligence and level of understanding

and coming from indigenous people and being an activist,

we could learn from her, which is what we did.

And we all worked together, myself, her, and Leo,

very, very closely.