In “Gangs of New York,” Bill the Butcher (Daniel
Day-Lewis) gives a monologue about how the spectacle of violence
maintains the social order, an idea which informs much of
Scorsese’s film work. Films such as “Goodfellas,”
“Taxi Driver,” “Casino” and “Mean
Streets” are not exactly a civil cup of tea.
So when Scorsese appeared at his own tribute at the
Director’s Guild of America Thursday night as part of a UCLA
retrospective of his work, it was a bit surprising to hear him say
that the teacups in his Victorian-era film “The Age of
Innocence” were among the most violent images he’s
made.
“Why I say the teacups are more frightening is because the
way everything is held in,” Scorsese said. “At least,
if you blow your top, you yell, scream, throw your cell phone,
something, you get to a point finally where you get past
it.”
Even in “Raging Bull,” a film about a troubled boxer
who turns all his relationships into fights, Scorsese likes to talk
about the violence of camera bulbs flashing to the sound of camera
shutters closing after the boxer is forced to lose a fight. To him,
they are like bullets recording a humiliation.
While Scorsese’s shooting of those boxing scenes seems so
facile, Scorsese only came up with his visual pyrotechnics when
Robert De Niro was rehearsing the boxing choreography. Not to
mention that Scorsese was not a sports fan.
Scorsese was diagnosed with asthma at the age of 4, limiting his
physical activities.
“I was told by doctors and parents that they can’t
take me anywhere, can’t run, can’t laugh, can’t
do anything,” Scorsese said. “So we went to the movie
theater all the time.”
Scorsese has a legendary grasp of film history, and that can be
a bit intimidating for other filmmakers.
“He’s just seen every film that’s been
made,” said director Charles Burnett, who attended the
tribute. “I thought I was a filmmaker before I met him, and
after I met him, I wasn’t too sure.”
All that filmgoing knowledge would pay off handsomely when
Scorsese decided to use that film language to bring his own
experience to the big screen. “Mean Streets,” released
in 1973, was a look at Scorsese’s neighborhood and the type
of characters he grew up around. While those wise-guy characters
are now common in shows such as “The Sopranos,”
Scorsese’s film was the first to show America that social
underbelly.
“At the time it was never shown,” Scorsese said.
“”˜The Godfather’ (came out earlier), but
they’re like noblemen. We were just basically in the streets
on the corner.”
Scorsese loves talking about those real-life mean streets where
he grew up. These settings, especially neighborhood sounds, still
affect his filmmaking sensibility.
“Basically, music was scoring my life,” Scorsese
said. “Outrageous things would happen to an extraordinary
piece of music playing to score it, particularly looking out the
window with things going on outside and in your own house with
arguments or jokes.”
The commitment to such personal filmmaking led UCLA Dean Robert
Rosen to call Scorsese “the ultimate auteur,” an artist
with complete control over his craft, from the storyboards to the
script, the editing and the camera work.
“Whenever I tried working for someone else, I always got
fired,” Scorsese said. “Even if I tried it their way,
it ended up my way, and it was not good.”
It’s an attitude that lives on in new filmmakers such as
director and UCLA alumnus Alexander Payne, who attended the event.
He claims his film “Election” was influenced by the
voiceovers in “Goodfellas” and double take shots in
“Casino.”
“I would talk to him about film history and film
technique,” said Payne, who says he will renew an invitation
to give Scorsese a call.
“There are even certain shots that are called Scorsese
shots,” said UCLA graduate film student Ham Tran, who also
attended.
Short clips of Scorsese’s films were shown during the
tribute, including the famous Copacabana shot in
“Goodfellas,” one long five-minute take that follows a
couple through the back-door entrance and finally to the front row
of the most exclusive nightclub in town. Another was the bloody
shootout in “Taxi Driver,” a scene so violent the film
was originally given an X-rating before Scorsese re-edited it.
Yet, Scorsese is genial, not mean, and he’s not afraid to
say that he got emotional watching “Bambi” as a kid.
His violence is not so much malicious as it is an attempt to show
history and life as it is, not as we think it should be. The last
shot of “Gangs of New York” says it all, the twin
towers standing tall as a testament to the violent beginnings of a
metropolitan city.
“The people in the film love, hate, fight, suffer, suffer,
and suffer, and then die and get buried, and are forgotten,”
Scorsese said. “They helped create that city, those towers,
not tear it down. I felt that it didn’t seem right to start
revising history, start erasing towers from all these
movies.”