Conversations with Scorsese by Richard Schickel

parents for hisdocumentary
Italianamerican
(1974).
     
    RS: In your recent
DGA Quarterly
interview you talk a good deal about documentaries in that period.
    MS: I love them.
    RS: Did you think, Well, I wouldn’t dare to aspire to do a fictional film, but there are things I see around in life that I could make documentaries out of?
    MS: No, I didn’t feel that. I did feel, though, a power from a documentary that no fictional film could generate—a different kind of power.
    RS: Were there documentaries at that time that you particularly admired?
    MS: Oh, there was work by theMaysles brothers, and there were Leacock and Pennebaker. There were films coming out of France byChris Marker. There were the older ones from the USIA [United States Information Agency] and other government agencies.
    RS: Very formal.
    MS: Very formal. There were pictures likeGeorge Stoney’s
All My Babies.
Then there were pictures that kind of crossed between documentaries and fiction. And I responded to them—a lot of it is because it felt like it was of the street. I don’t want to say “real,” but it had a kind of authenticity to it.
    RS: Right.
    MS: Kazan’s films from
On the Waterfront
on—look at the extras in the background, look at the people
—Face in the Crowd, Baby Doll,
and ultimately even
Wild River
and
America, America.
Somehow, Kazan brought it all together in a way. He was really the one who made me see the combination, I think, of the real and the fictional.
    RS: Doesn’t that reflect back, too, on the Rossellini films?
    MS: You’re absolutely right. It goes back to
Paisan.
But, you see, that was from another world, related to my grandparents and my parents; I wasn’t there in Naples with the little boy with the black soldier. But it is the same impulse.
    RS: I remember Kazan talking to me about
Boomerang,
the picture withDana Andrews up in Connecticut, and saying how it was the first time he used real people in a fictional film. And that he really loved it. And then he went down to New Orleans and did
Panic in the Streets,
where he did the same thing.
    MS: When I saw that on television, after
On the Waterfront,
I realized that you could even do athriller, or a conventionalgenre film, a studio film, within the trappings of a real location.
    RS: He also said to me, “I don’t think I could have made
Waterfront
if I hadn’t made
Panic in the Streets.
”
    MS: That’s right. But you’re also right about my direct line with Italian neorealism
—Paisan
and
The Bicycle Thief,
and
Shoeshine;
real people, non-actors, in real urban settings. There’s no doubt about it. They were more than movies to me. They especially hit me at that age of five or six years old, because it was so personal because of watching them with my family.
    But remember, there was no school of the arts at NYU at the time. There was liberal arts. You did your first film, if you could, in your junior year. There was a course where you learned a little bit of technology—the basics of 16 millimeter. But mostly it was English courses and philosophy and French.
    And, frankly, I was still involved, in real life, with the group that was in
Mean Streets.
The problem was that I could never survive in that group. I was asemi-outsider there, because you had to be somebody who could handle yourself in situations …
    RS: You mean muscular situations.
    MS: Muscular. Also, you need a kind of bravado that you also should back up. If you’re going to use your mouth a certain way, look at somebody a certain way, you have to be strong enough to back it up.
    RS: Otherwise they’ll kill you.
    MS: They’ll kill you. And it was constant. At that time, you know, there were a number of kids who were killed. They were—taken out, I should say. It was shocking. And this priest,Father Principe, made some sense. He made some sense about people and about living—about what it is to be a human being. And what it is to transcend. I don’t mean, you know, becoming beatific and