RICHARD SCHICKEL’S Conversations With Scorsese seems as indispensable as Joseph McBride’s Hawks on Hawks or Hitchcock/Truffaut. Where the 2008 Scorsese by Ebert didn’t leave much distance between Roger Ebert and the director, there’s enough tension between interviewer and subject here to keep the conversation lively. This is not to say that Schickel is confrontational, but it is refreshing to hear “a born atheist” interview Scorsese about The Last Temptation of Christ or to realize that four pages of analysis on Kundun does that film just about right.
There are tasty touches of gossip: Schickel says that Hitchcock made up Raymond Burr to look like David O. Selznick in Rear Window and suggests that critic Penelope Gilliatt, who despised The Last Waltz, was bottle-carrying drunk at the press screening. The perspectives on the director you thought you knew change when you realize how much he was forced to do for money. (“I cannot tell you how much garbage I have written in my life for exactly that reason,” Schickel sympathizes.)
If Gangs of New York looked truncated, that was due in part to its ruinous expense. We learn about the hackwork, but we wouldn’t have known about the pursuit of metaphysical depths in what seemed like slick entertainments. You see Jack Nicholson gnawing the scenery in The Departed; Scorsese sees “God the Father going mad.”
Chapters on music, editing, color and film preservation round out the film-by-film discussions of essential works such as Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. The conversation level is erudite and never swoony, and the director does manage to parry sometimes. Regarding Shutter Island, Scorsese tries to fend off Schickel’s mystification: “I don’t even want to talk about it because it’s like I can’t handle any more criticism of it. Sorry.”
“I’m always interested in people who lose their world,” Scorsese says. Certainly this was the theme of his first great movie, Mean Streets, where an old neighborhood’s limits, laws and certainties dissolved before our eyes. This sense of no direction home may be the ultimate connection among all of Scorsese’s movies. No wonder one of his favorite films is East of Eden. The Biblical illusion in the title alone must resonate with this director.
By Richard Schickel
Knopf; 448 pages; $30 hardback
