Like Truffaut with Hitchcock, uber-interviewer Richard Schickel got a great director to fess up fascinatingly in his new, photo-filled book, Conversations with Scorsese (Knopf, $30). Here, Scorsese directs Leonardo DiCaprio’s mad scene in 2004’s The Aviator: “Nine days and nights,” says Scorsese. “It was hell, absolute hell.”
To get his 1967 debut Who’s That Knocking at My Door distributed by an exploitation mogul, Scorsese had to add a nude scene shot in Amsterdam. “Harvey [Keitel]’s having a good time…I was probably the only one who wasn’t sexually liberated. I had to edit it in Amsterdam. And I put it in my raincoat and got it through customs.”
Directing a Mean Streets mafioso (Cesare Danova) and Keitel: the movie is about “walking a tightrope of respect, not being a wiseguy…The shooting at the end was based on something I experienced. We could’ve been killed.”
With De Niro and Keitel in 1973’s Mean Streets: “Harvey, Bob, and me – up through ’76, ’77 we were almost the same person.”
Jodie Foster, De Niro, and Snidely Whiplash-moustached Scorsese making Taxi Driver (out on Blu-ray with 3 hours of extras Apr. 5): “The film had a rage in it that I saw in my grandparents. With Taxi Driver, I was going to blast that away. I didn't think anybody was going to see it. I was going to make this musical New York, New York, which I thought everyone would want to see and nobody saw.”
With Liza Minnelli on New York, New York: “The Hollywood studio film meets a new style, the Italian cinema, the French cinema, Cassavetes…people have said it’s tantamount to watching a car crash. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a bad thing.”
Scorsese’s sketches for the Sugar Ray Robinson-La Motta fight in Raging Bull: “That was based on the shower sequence from Psycho. I designed corresponding shots of what it would be like in the ring.”
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio smooches her The Color of Money director: “It made a lot of money. [Paul Newman won his Oscar], Richard Price was nominated, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and Boris Levin.” But not Tom Cruise. "A damned good actor. Years later, he would go to [my parents' apartment] and have dinner. He would just go and hang out with them."
Willem Dafoe in The Last Temptation of Christ: “Barry Diller asked why I wanted to make the film. I said, ‘Because I want to get to know Jesus better.’ I was in debt for years after that. I only came out of debt by doing Cape Fear.”
With DiCaprio on Gangs of New York, which sank him in debt for 4 years: “It would have been a good 5-hour picture. I mean, The Sopranos goes on and on. People like that. There's nothing I cut out that I would want to put back in. Whatever I cut out I did better in another movie anyway.”
DiCaprio in The Aviator: “It was scary to do a picture about Howard Hughes. His obsessive-compulsive disorder is like the labyrinth that he gets stuck in – sort of like the Minotaur. He’s got wings, like the ones Daedelus makes for his son Icarus.”
With DiCaprio and Matt Damon on The Departed: “I had to work with the studio very closely. Screen it, argue, discuss it. I don’t know if it’s worth going through the process again. When I was finishing, I said, ‘I’m out of here.’”
With cinematographer Robert Richardson in Shutter Island’s madhouse: “Those places were genuinely weird. That’s an abandoned hospital where you could feel, from the walls, the pain and the suffering that it contained.”