Scorsese: Goodfellas, Gangsters and Guilt

Goodfellas (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

Goodfellas is about guilt more than anything else. But it is not a straightforward morality play, in which good is established and guilt is the appropriate reaction toward evil. No, the hero of this film feels guilty for not upholding the Mafia code – guilty of the sin of betrayal. And his punishment is banishment, into the witness protection program, where nobody has a name and the headwaiter certainly doesn't know it. What finally got to me after seeing this film – what makes it a great film – is that I understood Henry Hill's feelings. Just as his wife Karen grew so completely absorbed by the Mafia inner life that its values became her own, so did the film weave a seductive spell. It is almost possible to think, sometimes, of the characters as really being good fellows. Their camaraderie is so strong, their loyalty so unquestioned. But the laughter is strained and forced at times, and sometimes it's an effort to enjoy the party, and eventually, the whole mythology comes crashing down, and then the guilt – the real guilt, the guilt a Catholic like Scorsese understands intimately – is not that they did sinful things, but that they want to do them again. – Roger Ebert

Martin Scorsese's mid career masterwork GoodFellas (1990) is a follow-up to his own Mean Streets (1973), released in the same year as Francis Ford Coppola's third episode of his gangster epic The Godfather, Part III (1990). It is a gritty, honest examination of a true life mobster scenario involving three violent "wiseguys" accentuated by the Italian-American director's personal experience growing up in Little Italy. Scorsese reunites with one of his favourite actors, Robert De Niro, who previously featured in Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), New York, New York (1977), Raging Bull (1980), and The King of Comedy (1982)

The film's factual, semi-documentary narrative was adapted from Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese's script, which was based on Pileggi's 1985 non-fiction book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family. 

The true story involved a low-level, marginalised gangster (or 'foot-soldier') with mixed ethnic ancestry (half-Irish, half-Sicilian) - Henry Hill - who eventually broke the gangster's code of 'never ratting on your friends' and became an informant for the FBI.

The fast-paced, exhilarating, episodic plot, which is peppered with profanity, bold editing cuts and graphics, changing points of view, and people speaking directly to the camera, is delivered via voice-over narration by Henry Hill (Ray Liotta). It spans thirty years of his life, from his adolescent years in a Brooklyn Irish neighbourhood to his exploits as an adult gangster, ranging from the 1950s to the drug-fueled 1970s, during which he was married to Karen (Lorraine Bracco). The inclusion of his wife's voice-over gives more insight into the all-encompassing culture and allure of 'family life.' The freeze frames interspersed throughout emphasise the lasting, formative events of Henry's life. 

GoodFellas is a film defined by an extraordinary, almost anthropological attention to experiential and procedural detail, stylistic virtuosity manifested through freeze-frames, majestic subjective tracking shots, overlapping and occasionally improvised dialogue, propulsive editing, dual voice-overs, a breathless pop-rock soundtrack, and an insider's knowledge of organised crime. 

The picture is both wonderfully constructed and produced, as well as a bravura mash-up of tones, genres, and sensibilities, inspired by films such as Truffaut's Jules et Jim. 

This overpowering sense of the material realities and pleasures inherent in the film's chosen, sometimes gaudy, environment draws us into a mostly male, chauvinist world characterised by easy corruption, hair-trigger violence, moral ambiguity, and a sense of imperiousness. 

GoodFellas creates a minutely portrayed atmosphere that we both repelled and seduced by. As is the case with many Scorsese films, we identify with the scenario of an outsider being indoctrinated into a highly ritualised environment with each picture "filled with activity and texture," as Scorsese puts it. 

While essential collaborators such as editor Thelma Schoonmaker and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus have been rightfully recognised for their work, Kristi Zea's production design really brings this "cloistered" and insular universe to life. The garish, residential interiors are densely evocative and immersive. We're fascinated from the minute the picture starts in the middle of the tale, with bright red taillights illuminating Henry's face as he declares, "As long back as I can remember, I've always wanted to be a gangster." 

Scorsese's films often derive their cues from snippets of music, riffs from certain songs, or the rapid-fire transitions between tracks. This approach to music contributes to its jagged, sometimes abrupt, almost jazz-like rhythms and tones by Harry Nilsson, Eric Clapton and The Rolling Stones.

Scorsese's career peaked with GoodFellas, and marked a notable return to form after his more disjointed work of the 1980s. The film ushers in an era of unprecedented output in the first half of the 1990s, which includes such landmark works as The Age of Innocence, his documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Films, and an equally violent and kaleidoscopic slice of mob life, Casino. 

In many respects, GoodFellas is an unsettling love letter to the gangster cinema, packed with distinctive allusions to earlier inspirations such as The Roaring Twenties, Public Enemy, and Scarface.

It is considered the defining work of Scorsese's career, drawing the audience into its hellish world through cinematic virtuosity, and dazzling performances, simultaneously promising the fulfilment of one’s deepest desires and the pain of getting what you want.

The filming is enticing because it portrays Hill's criminal lifestyle as alluring; it invites us into his world. Thus, Scorsese creates a subjective experience, frequently literally: in the shot introducing the film's various gangsters and hangers-on, all of whom speak directly into the camera ("I'm going to go get the papers, get the papers"), or in the film's infamous "May 11, 1980" sequence, which uses jagged cutting, jittery camerawork, and clashing musical cues to transport us directly into the action.

In comparison to prior tales of mob life (including The Godfather films), the immediacy of Goodfellas is striking, terrifying and visceral.

It left clear imprints on a number of subsequent films and television series. “Boogie Nights is unmistakably Goodfellas,” Glenn Kenny, author of the forthcoming book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, stated. He also finds a strong parallel to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs - specifically the repeated theme of gangsters who hang around, speak trash, and go about their business as if it were a business. 

The majority of gangster films concentrate on the top bosses and godfathers; Goodfellas and its sequels focus on the grinders, intermediaries, and lower level thugs. 

Kenny also identifies the concept of "mobsters having other facets of their existence," such as ordinary marital and family difficulties, which was a critical component of David Chase's groundbreaking series, The Sopranos. Chase has openly cited the film as his holy book, not only for the tone and viewpoint of the picture as inspiration for The Sopranos, but also the cast, which includes numerous future Sopranos co-stars. 

In the following extract from Richard Schickel’s Conversations with Scorsese, director Martin Scorsese discusses guilt, celebrity and the gangster in his great movie of mob life:

RICHARD SCHICKEL: Your next full-length feature after ‘Last Temptation’ was ‘Goodfellas’ in 1990, which I suppose with ‘Raging Bull’ is one of my two favorite movies of yours. Perhaps part of my feeling for that is based on the fact that most of us share a sort of love for gangsters as outsiders, or rebels. I mean, we always sort of sympathize with the gangster Jim Cagney, or people like him. They seem to have such a nice, rich life: lovely meals they’re always making for each other, a certain amount of friendship, brotherhood, and all that. They enjoy the good life, and at the same time they get to whack people.

MARTIN SCORSESE: When I was doing The Color of Money in Chicago, I was reading The New York Review of Books and saw a review of a book by Nick Pileggi called Wiseguy. It seemed like Nick was taking us through the different levels of purgatory and hell in the underworld, like Virgil or like Dante. Irwin Winkler said, ‘Are you interested in that?’ I said yes and he bought it for me. I said yes because I thought Nick was telling the story in a different way. It’s about that lifestyle, and the dangerous seduction of that lifestyle.

I remember I was talking to Marlon Brando from time to time, and he said, ‘Don’t do another gangster picture. You’ve done Mean Streets, you did the gangsters in Raging Bull. You don’t have to do that.’ I came to feel the same way. So I said to Michael Powell, ‘I think I don’t want to do this Goodfellas thing,’ or Wiseguys, as it was then called.

Michael Powell went back to his apartment with Thelma Schoonmaker, whom he’d married right after Raging Bull. He couldn’t see anymore, so she read the script to him. I was in the editing room, I remember, in the Brill Building, and suddenly he called and said, ‘This is wonderful. You must do it. It’s funny and no one’s ever seen this way of life before. You must do it.’ And that’s why I did it.

RS: Well, there’s a William Wellman story on ‘Public Enemy’. He found the script and he took it to [Darryl] Zanuck, who was running Warner Bros. It was then called ‘Beer and Blood.’ He loved it – these young writers had lived in Chicago and knew some of the mobsters. But Zanuck said, I can’t do another one of these. I’ve just done this, I’ve just done that. Tell me one good reason to do it. And Wellman said, ‘Because I’ll make it the toughest one you ever saw.’ And Zanuck said, ‘You got it.’ You could argue that, of all the modern gangland things, ‘Goodfellas’ is the toughest one of all. Was there some aspect of ‘Goodfellas’ for you that was like Wellman’s attitude, that you could do it tougher?

MS: I thought of it as being a kind of attack.

RS: Attack?

MS: Attacking the audience. I remember talking about it at one point and saying, ‘I want people to get infuriated by it.’ I wanted to seduce everybody into the movie and into the style. And then just take them apart with it. I guess I wanted to make a kind of angry gesture.

RS: Why were you angry?

MS: I guess I used to feel I was the outsider who has to punch his way back in, constantly. Some people don’t have to do that, but I do. I’m not just talking about films, but everything.

I get angry about the way things are and the way people are. I get very involved in stories and the way a character behaves and the way the world behaves. More than anger, I think, maybe it’s caring about how characters behave, how the world behaves. I’m curious about those things. I still get excited by the story. I still get upset by what a character does. And the anger is something to get me working. I have to get sometimes rather upset with myself or a situation before I can really start working, thinking clearly. Some other people can do it very quickly, which doesn’t mean they don’t put energy into it. But they don’t put their heart and soul into it. I’m one of those people who does. It’s every minute of the day and night.

In the Rolling Stones documentary, I do a takeoff on myself for the first ten minutes. It’s about everything that could go wrong for me as the director. And things do go wrong. And they affect you.

I remember a priest told my father to come to talk to him and bring me with him to the rectory one day. I wondered why, what I did that was so bad? I must’ve been about twelve. He said something about me going around with the seriousness and the weight of the world on my shoulders. At that age I shouldn’t be that way, the priest said. I should have been enjoying my life. And he told my father something I’ll never forget. He said, ‘This boy,’ he says, ‘behaves.’ I did really, because I always was sick and never got in trouble.

But then later, when they threw me out of the preparatory seminary, the monsignor told my father, ‘Your son? There’s a brick wall. Don’t hit your head against it, you’re going to get hurt.’ The monsignor gets up, mimes hitting his head against the brick wall, and that was the end of it.

Everybody cares about what they do. But I tend to get emotionally involved, or let it get to me. I get too emotionally involved with everything. So over the years it became funny. Except when it wasn’t funny. In my mind, whether it’s the stroke of a pen or a bullet, a lot can happen to people. In our America, businesspeople are slaughtered every day. People are robbed every day.

RS: Well, there’s that whole theory of Robert Warshow, about ‘the gangster as tragic hero.’

MS: I was going to mention Warshow.

RS: I’m not sure I completely buy into that in a movie like ‘Goodfellas’; there’s actually nothing very tragic about those guys.

MS: No.

RS: What happens to Henry Hill is not tragic; he’s just not having fun anymore.

MS: Right. Too bad for him!

RS: And it’s not a tragic ending.

MS: No, he’s still breathing.

RS: I guess I need you to explain where you’re coming from with that because it really is a unique movie, I think. You’ve said you can’t see ‘The Sopranos’ in it, but I see a sort of precursor in it.

MS: A lot of the wonderful actors in The Sopranos were in my pictures, so we always talk about it. A lot of the people in Goodfellas are not on the upper levels, so they’re not tragic. It’s just everyday tragedy. These guys are dealing on the everyday level. I knew them as people, not as criminals. If something fell off the truck, you know, we all bought it. It was part of surviving, part of living. Some of those guys were smarter than others. Some overstepped their bounds and were killed. That was based on reality.

There’s a danger in idolizing that world, but many of the police who were down there in that neighborhood were on the take. I was surprised the first time I saw the American system at work, which was in Twelve Angry Men, Sidney Lumet’s film. Today, I credit the priests in the neighborhood who screened a 16 millimeter print of it down in the basement of the church for some of the kids. It was like being on Mars.

RS: The surrogate in your film, practicing that idolization as a kid, is the Henry Hill character.

MS: Yes. If you engage in that life, certain things are expected of you. First of all, to make a lot of money for everybody. Or to be the muscle. You have to perform, and you have to be careful: the scene that Joe Pesci asked to be put in, and improvised with Ray Liotta – the ‘You think I’m funny?’ scene – shows that you could be killed any second. They don’t care who’s around. The trick in the picture was to sort of ignore that danger, make it a rollicking road movie in a way – like a kind of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby picture, with everybody on the road and having a great time.

When the Sicilian police finally broke up the Mafia in the early nineties, they arrested some guy – I forget his name, but he was the second in command – and an Italian reporter asked him if any movie about that world was accurate. And he said, Well, Goodfellas, in the scene where the guy says, ‘Do you think I’m funny?’ Because that’s the life we lead. You could be smiling and laughing one second, and [snaps fingers] in a split second you’re in a situation where you could lose your life.

RS: Quite an amazing anecdote.

MS: That is exactly where you live all the time. That’s the truth of it. Now that happened to Joe Pesci, originally, with a friend of his. He got out of it just by doing what Ray did. So when he told me the story, I said, ‘We’ve got to use that. That really encapsulates it completely. That’s the lifestyle.’

Remember when Jimmy Cagney got the AFI [American Film Institute] award, he thanked somebody I think was called Two-Times Ernie and the other street guys he knew as a kid. Because they taught him how to act. The kids in my neighborhood who told stories on the street corner, they’d have you enthralled, and often with a sense of humor about themselves. And these were some tough kids.

I’ll never forget one of the toughest I’d ever met telling a story about losing a fight in such a funny way, and not being embarrassed about it. [Laughs.] Not losing any dignity. I thought, That is brilliant: to accept the fact that he was knocked down so badly, had to get up again, get knocked down again. We were all laughing, and he was laughing. I’ll never forget it.

In the Wiseguy book, Henry Hill speaks that way, almost like a standup comic. He’s got his own rhythm. There’s a truth to it. Someone owes you money, and he doesn’t pay you. So you go to him, and he says, ‘Oh, my wife got sick.’ ‘Fuck you, pay me.’ ‘My daughter is –’ ‘Fuck you, pay me,’ a guy like Hill says. ‘My mother –’ ‘Fuck you, pay me’.

RS: De Niro in ‘Mean Streets’ has no conscious sense of consequences, always living in the moment. That’s symbolized in ‘Goodfellas’ by the great tracking shot into the Copacabana, when they all go out on the town. That’s the privileged moment they pay for in blood and death.

MS: Well, the Copacabana – that’s the top of the line for Henry – it was Valhalla. When you were able to get a table there, it was like being in the court of the kings. The Mob guys were really the ones in charge. The Copa lounge was always more significant because the real guys were up there. That’s why you have a lot happening in Raging Bull in the Copa lounge. My friend’s father, the one who would read and listen to opera, his father was the head bartender there. We have him in Raging Bull. Nice guy.

Everyone paid for the privilege eventually. The danger of the picture is that young people could look at it and think, Hey, what a great life. But you’ve got to see the last hour of the picture when things start going wrong in a big way.

RS: I think in one of the voice-over lines Henry Hill says, You only have it for maybe ten years.

MS: That’s right.

RS: That made me think about celebrity. Ballplayers, for example, only have maybe ten years.

MS: Right. Actors, filmmakers, you’ve got about ten years. Some of the greatest filmmakers had a run for ten years. It’s part of American celebrity.

– From Richard Schickel: Conversations with Scorsese (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). Copyright © 2011 by Richard Schickel.

Martin Scorsese on Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers

Rocco and His Brothers (Directed by Luchino Visconti)

A distinct feature of Luchino Visconti's work is his realistic approach to individuals caught up in the conflicts of modern society, which led to the designation of Visconti as the ‘father of Neorealism’ in relation to Italian cinema. 

From an aristocratic background, Visconti was familiar with the arts as his mother was a noted pianist, and his father hired professional entertainers to play at their own theatre throughout his boyhood. He spent around 10 years studying cello and, after that, worked briefly as a theatre set designer. 

Visconti joined Renoir as his assistant in 1935, at a time when the French filmmaker was beginning to address social and political concerns in his films. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, he began to distinguish himself as an inventive theatrical and opera director. 

The first major project to establish him as a filmmaker was Obsession, an adaptation of the James M. Cain novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. The film he produced employed natural locations, paired professional performers with locals, and included footage captured with concealed cameras to augment the believability of the story. Neorealist directors like as Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica were some of the most prominent filmmakers during the postwar period. The Earth Trembles (a documentary-style study of Sicilian fishermen) took home the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival. Senso from 1954 is widely acclaimed by critics. Among Visconti's other noteworthy works is Bellissima (1951; The Most Beautiful). White Nights, an adaptation of a story by Dostoevsky, and Rocco e I suoi fratelli (1960; Rocco and His Brothers).

His 1963 drama Il gattopardo (The Leopard) is widely admired, and connects strongly with Visconti through his identification with the character of Giuseppe di Lampedusa, an aristocrat with liberal political convictions. When he died in 1976, Visconti was finishing the editing of his last picture, L’innocente (The Innocent), based on a novel by D’Annunzio. 

Here, Martin Scorsese pays tribute to Luchino Visconti, whose early classic Rocco and His Brothers had been recently restored to its original glory.

Luchino Visconti was one of the greatest artists in the history of cinema. He had a fascinating life, which was intertwined with many different strands of European art and culture.

Visconti came from the Milanese branch of one of Europe’s oldest families, whose roots can be traced back to the early 13th century. He might have appeared as a character in one of his own films about the aristocracy, such as Senso or The Leopard – that’s the life he was born into. But at a certain point in the 1930s, his passion for theatre, opera and the cinema set him on a radically different path.

Visconti had a kind of apprenticeship with Jean Renoir and worked as an assistant on some of the pictures he made during the period when he was associated with the French Popular Front – Renoir was actually the one that gave him the idea for his first film, Ossessione, an adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice. Visconti’s artistic and political lives became almost one and the same – he started making films and directing theatre during the war years, the same period in which he joined the Communist party and worked with the Resistance.

He has often been referred to as a great political artist, but that’s too limiting and frozen a description. His sense of European history was vast and he knew the lives of the rich and powerful first hand – but at a certain point he became drawn to understand the other side of life, that of the poor and powerless. He had a strong sense of the particular manner in which absolutely everyone, from the Sicilian fishermen in his neorealist classic La Terra Trema to the Venetian aristocrats in Senso, was affected by the grand movements of history.

Visconti directed 14 features in his lifetime, each one extraordinary. Some, such as Senso, The Leopard and Rocco e i suoi Fratelli [Rocco and His Brothers], are among the greatest in the history of the art form. Written by Visconti and his long-time collaborator Suso Cecchi D’Amico (along with the contributions of four other writers), Rocco was based on elements of Ghisolfa Bridge by the Milanese writer Giovanni Testori, but it was also inspired by themes found in Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers and Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. Visconti follows the fortunes of Rocco (Alain Delon) and his three brothers Simone (Renato Salvatori), Ciro (Max Cartier) and Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi), who travel with their mother (Katina Paxinou) from south to north in search of a better life. Unlike Senso and The Leopard, Rocco was set in the present, which at the time was in the midst of the industrial and economic boom that transformed Italy during the mid-1960s. The picture is about the effects of life in this new world on the family, which gradually comes apart at the seams.

When Rocco and His Brothers came out, in 1960, a lot of people criticised it for what they perceived as emotional excess. It is operatic, as were all of Visconti’s films, but the remarks about excess made no sense to me. Rocco is Italian culture. I grew up in Italian-American culture, but there wasn’t much of a difference. For us – that is, me and my family and my friends – the physical and emotional expressiveness of the characters in the film, Katina Paxinou’s character in particular, seemed like an accurate and only slightly heightened reflection of the life we knew. We all saw that kind of ‘excess’ on a regular basis.

Rocco is one of the most sumptuous black-and-white pictures I’ve ever seen. The images, shot by the great Giuseppe Rotunno, are pearly, elegant and lustrous – it’s like a simultaneous continuation and development of neorealism. Thanks to Gucci and The Film Foundation and our friends at the Cineteca di Bologna, Luchino Visconti’s masterpiece can be experienced once again in all its fearsome beauty and power.

MARTIN SCORSESE, founder and chair of The Film Foundation, is a director, producer, screenwriter, actor and film historian, and widely regarded as one of the most significant and influential film-makers in cinema history; film-foundation.org

Martin Scorsese: Violence and Sin

Mean Streets (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

‘You don’t make up for your sins in church – you do it in the streets.’


Inspired by Scorsese’s own experiences of growing up in Little Italy around small-time mobsters and young hoods, Mean Streets tells the story of Charlie (Harvey Keitel), a young debt collector for his gangster uncle. His ambitions to rise in the family business are hampered by his friendship with the self-destructive Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro), and his relationship with his cousin Teresa (Amy Robinson) who rejects his background of Catholic guilt and street machismo. 

Less a crime film than a character study and homage to the streets of New York’s Little Italy, Mean Streets is not strictly autobiographical but in Scorsese’s words, ‘was an attempt to put myself and my old friends on the screen, to show how we lived, what life was like in Little Italy. It was really an anthropological or a sociological tract.’ 

After his feature debut with Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967) – originally a film-school project inspired by John Cassavetes’ Shadows – Scorsese found work in Hollywood as an editor before being hired by Roger Corman to direct Boxcar Bertha (1972), a low budget genre picture set during the American depression. 

Corman then offered Scorsese another low-budget exploitation project when Scorsese’s mentor John Cassavetes urged the young director to make something more personal instead. Scorsese mentioned a script he was working on titled Season of the Witch, a sequel to Who’s That Knocking at My Door, that needed a rewrite. 

The script developed into Mean Streets and was eventually filmed in 27 days mostly in Los Angeles, where it was easier to get permits and shoot with a non-unionized crew.  Energetic, inventive and deeply personal, it is the first recognisably mature Martin Scorsese film. It opened to critical acclaim and established the careers of De Niro and Keitel and brought Scorsese to the attention of Hollywood.

In the following extract from his book Conversations with Scorsese, Richard Schickel discusses with Scorsese the events behind the making of Mean Streets: 

RS: I have to tell you: Of all your movies Mean Streets remains the hardest one for me to come to grips with.

      

MS: It’s an aggressive film. I didn’t think anybody was really going to see the film. Jonathan Taplin produced it. A young man named E. Lee Perry gave us the money, and I just thought it was going to be a film that ultimately might be on a shelf. But we thought it was a pretty accurate portrayal of that way of life—not on the upper levels, like The Godfather, but on the street level, what I knew and how I lived.

But it’s tough: People would get up in the middle, saying of it, ‘Please stop the screening.’ And walk out. ‘I hate pictures like this,’ they would say.

RS: Harvey, on the one hand, seems to want to be with these tough guys, he wants to be as tough as they are. He is as tough as they are, in a way. At the same time, he’s always going back to the church—there are those wonderful shots of him in the church. And the church is so beautiful and, as you said before, peaceful. It seems to me he’s projecting the conflict you felt.

      

MS: After about six years of working on the script and story, that’s what I channeled into it.  I had three different groups of friends. One group went to Fordham, and are now lawyers and bank presidents—good guys who made good lives for themselves. I had another friend who was more the intellectual of the group, and a loner, and I’d go with him to see Broadway plays. And then I had another couple of guys who were more street toughs. I was split among the three. When I went to NYU, in 1960, when I walked six blocks down Houston Street, it was like going to Mars. I had seen movies like Twelve Angry Men, showing the American process, and I was living with people who were not part of that.

People complain about my depiction of Italian Americans. But I can’t help them with that. I’m sorry. It’s just that it’s my perception of what I know. There are guys, as I say, who are upstanding members of the community. They’re doing fine. There are guys who are out of town, who can’t come back. There are guys who are dead. I was in the middle of it. In a way, I was trying to understand how one should behave in life. What is the moral code? What is right, and what’s wrong?

      

RS: Harvey’s character has a little bit of you and a little bit of your father in him, doesn’t he?

      

MS: Well, Harvey’s character is named after my father, Charlie, who is trying to live morally in a world that’s not moral, in a world that’s primal. But there are two things going on. There’s his relationship with his uncle, in which he can be elevated to a certain extent in that community. And I had him going to college at the same time, though he doesn’t have enough in him yet to utilize the American opportunity education provides to get the hell out of there. But he can, because he is generally a decent guy, work with his uncle and make a good living, and have a sense of dignity in that world.

He’s not a street tough. I mean, he hangs with them. But he tries to bring reason to all of this. And, ultimately, because of his relationship with Johnny and his girlfriend, Teresa [who is an epileptic], his chances are destroyed completely. He should have been killed, because he has nowhere to go. There’s no way his uncle could work with him now.

He’s messed up because he has this sense of love for the both of them. And he has to leave town and go to Texas or Florida or somewhere.

His love for the both of them, for Johnny and Teresa, is interesting, because for me it has religious implications, in that, for whatever reasons, this guy is just filled with guilt. Why he’s filled with guilt, that’s something else. There’s a kind of deep curiosity in him. He’s not part of a world in which he can go off into the desert, let’s say, and be a monk and a hermit: he’s got to deal in a rough world, a primitive world, a savage world. Can you still be a good person? Can good still happen? I know there’s no justice, but can it be worked out? And so that, along with his own feelings about leading a spiritual life, he calls down upon himself a kind of suffering.

RS: Is that what the girl represents—loss as a form of...

      

MS: To a certain extent. But mainly it’s Johnny. Because he says in the bar, Here comes my penance. Ultimately, I think Johnny senses something. Because at the end of the picture he says to Harvey, You’re doing it for you, not for me. So that you can feel better spiritually.

But he’s caught. He’s caught. In that world, they’re not dealing on the spiritual level. It’s fate. He has transgressed, and he’s going to have to pay for it.

      

RS: I don’t understand why the uncle is so dead set against the girl, who’s perfectly nice—

      

MS: She wants to move out. She wants to move out of the neighborhood. She’s different. She’s a troublemaker. She threatens the value of the family: to stay together and support each other.

RS: Let’s talk about De Niro. He comes on—

      

MS: —and he just inhabits the role.

      

RS: It is certainly the beginning of the Jake LaMotta...

      

MS: Yeah, it is. It’s the same picture, really.

      

RS: The main thing, I think, is that Johnny has no sense of consequence. He has no sense of being able to look ahead.

      

MS: Why should he look ahead? He’s got no place to go. He doesn’t have the education. He doesn’t have the temperament. And he acts out against these people, knowing to a certain extent that his youth will help him. He is all anarchy at that point.

He says, You want to stick with me, you’re coming down with me. It’s not just about how much you love me, and how much you want to take care of me. There’s a lot going on with you. You don’t even know what the hell you want out of life, he tells Harvey, in effect.

I thought what was going on between Harvey and Bob was great in those three and a half weeks of shooting. They understood that, ultimately, the relationship is based on loving each other, but that one was getting more out of it than the other. It was something that, in Charlie’s mind, was a more spiritual thing. But they’re all of them damned at the end. None of them die, which is worse, because they might as well die. The worst thing that could be—and it happens to all the characters at the end of Mean Streets—is that they wind up humiliated, not killed. Humiliated.

And so it was very real. In Mean Streets, the shooting in the car at the end was based on something I experienced. I was at NYU when it happened. I got out of a car with a friend of mine only a half hour before a shooting like that occurred. On the weekends I’d hang out with my friends—at after-​hours clubs, the backs of tenements, that sort of stuff. This kid had a car, and he was going around for a ride. He was a part-​time cop, had a gun. And so we went with him in the car a few times.

And then on Elizabeth Street one night at about two in the morning, we realized he was acting with bravado, in a way that we pulled back from. So we told him we were going to go home. So, all right, he drops us off. On Elizabeth Street you had cars parked on both sides. And he’s driving down the block. And there’s a red light, and there’s a car in front of him. And the red light changes to green, and the car doesn’t move. A guy comes over and starts talking with the driver in the first car. Our friend blows his horn. The car in front of him doesn’t move. The guys are talking. He blows his horn again. The guys continue talking. He gets out, walks up to them, he takes his gun out or his badge. He says, ‘I’m a cop. Move this car.’ The guy says, ‘All right.’ He moves the car.

The next morning, we heard our guy was driving on Astor Place. He looked over at a car next to him and the people in that car started firing shots into his car. There was another kid in the car who got shot in the eye. And it was because he talked to the wrong people the wrong way.

And that became something that was very important to me and my friend, who had left the car an hour or two earlier. Because we could have been killed. Mean Streets had to be made because I was in the car that night. I went backwards from that. How the hell did he get into a situation like that? We didn’t even know the guys. And I said to myself, That’s the story to tell.

It made you stop and think—the kind of world we’re in, the society we’re in. So, anyway, that was a major moment in my life, and that’s what Mean Streets comes out of. And it has to explode like that. I’ve seen it happen, a lot of times. It’s just the way things work. So that’s why the chaos is there. I was almost a victim of it. Another friend of mine was killed, taken out because he was a wild cannon. But by that point, I was moving to California, you know.

You get a touch of that sort of thing in Goodfellas—the poor kid who gets shot first in the foot and then in the chest. When the kid is shot in the foot, why the hell does he come back the next week? Why? Because he has no place to go. Can’t get on a plane. He doesn’t know anybody. He doesn’t have the education. And it was just one of those things. He came back. He came back and he said one word too many. You know? And that was it. It happens.

       

RS: One other thing: Right here at the beginning of your career the violence seems to me so characteristic of what we’d see later. It just occurs. There’s not a lot of motivation. It almost comes out of nowhere.

      

MS: Well, that’s the way it was. That’s the world I was in. The violence is always in the background. I’d go into a place, even in a movie theater, I always had my antennae out all the way, because I had to watch if somebody said something wrong to somebody else. Some complain that the films denigrate Italian Americans. But I’m just telling it from my perspective. That doesn’t mean that other friends of mine see it that way. But my experience is that there are certain groups of people who are aligned with certain families. I didn’t know they were called families at the time, but there were certain people with power, and if somebody hits somebody, or does something, not just on the street level, not just kids, the settling up is done, usually, in the old way, between the different groups. Lives were run that way. It’s a very tough way of living.

RS: Is that violence explicable if you really, really connect it to the Mob? And it’s only to somebody like me that the violence seems almost totally inexplicable?

      

MS: I don’t want to seem to contradict what I said before. But, no, at least in this world, it’s always explicable. People criticized the film for pointless violence. I said, No, there’s no such thing as pointless violence. It comes from something. In that world we have to be very careful as to who insulted whom, who brushed by another, who said something a little in a nasty way. In Goodfellas, where Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta are playing a game, and joking around, and all of a sudden Pesci is saying, Why do you say I’m funny? Well, says Ray, because you tell a funny story. Do you think I’m a clown? No, I didn’t say you’re a clown. What did you mean then? And somebody starts to speak—No, he’s a big boy, he can talk for himself. And it changes on a dime. You could be killed. You could get into a fight, not be killed, but get beaten up pretty badly if you didn’t know how to handle yourself.

I mean, there was always tension. None of this business of the happy immigrants jumping and dancing and doing tarantellas. It’s Los Olvidados. It’s Journey to the End of the Night by Céline. That is the closest of anything I ever read to the reality of the people in those Lower East Side buildings.

    

RS: So all of that fed into Mean Streets?

      

MS: Mean Streets was based on myself and a couple of friends I had, but particularly two guys. One of them thinks the Johnny Boy character is really about him, and in a way it was, but not fully. He no longer lives in New York, but he always felt angry about that.

After my father died, I realized what the hell the picture really was about: my father and that brother of his who we’ve talked about; a lot of money that was owed, a lot of sit-​downs. Every night I’d hear the drama. For twenty, twenty-​five years, that’s all I heard. About what’s right and wrong and you’re in a jungle. It had to do with the dignity of the name, and respect—walking a tightrope of respect, not being a wiseguy. Mean Streets was about him and my uncle, but I couldn’t verbalize it until after ’93 or ’94, when it really hit home.

- Extracted from ‘Richard Schickel: Conversations with Scorsese’ Alfred Knopf, New York, 2011.  

The End of Innocence: Kubrick on Barry Lyndon

Barry Lyndon (Directed by Stanley Kubrick)

‘I’m not sure if I can say that I have a favourite Kubrick picture, but somehow I keep coming back to ‘Barry Lyndon’. I think that’s because it’s such a profoundly emotional experience. The emotion is conveyed through the movement of the camera, the slowness of the pace, the way the characters move in relation to their surroundings. People didn’t get it when it came out. Many still don’t. Basically, in one exquisitely beautiful image after another, you’re watching the progress of a man as he moves from the purest innocence to the coldest sophistication, ending in absolute bitterness – and it’s all a matter of simple, elemental survival. It’s a terrifying film because all the candlelit beauty is nothing but a veil over the worst cruelty. But it’s real cruelty, the kind you see every day in polite society.’  

                                                      - Martin Scorsese on ‘Barry Lyndon’.

Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon is a period drama starring Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Leonard Rossiter, and Hardy Krüger, that tells the story of a fictitious 18th-century Irish rogue and opportunist who ascends the social ladder by marrying a rich widow. 

After Kubrick completed A Clockwork Orange in 1971, he had intended to make a biography on Napoleon. However, due to the poor box office returns of the similarly themed Waterloo, Kubrick could not get the funding to make the picture. Kubrick turned to Barry Lyndon instead, a film set largely during the Seven Years' War, that enabled him to use the research and development that he had intended for the now discarded Napoleon project. Filming started in December 1973 and lasted for around eight months, in England, Ireland and West Germany. 

The film's cinematography is widely regarded as groundbreaking. Of particular note are the lengthy double shots, ending with a slow backward zoom, which were frequently placed in candlelit settings, inspired by works of the British artist William Hogarth. The interiors were largely filmed in London, with some location work done in Ireland, England, and West Germany. issues with logistics, weather, and even politics affected the production.

The film received four Oscars at the 48th Academy Awards for Adaptation; Costume Design; Art Direction; and Cinematography. Although the film's slow pace and restrained style were subject to some criticism at the time of its release, the film's reputation has only grown over time, with many critics maintaining that it is among Kubrick's best works and one of the greatest films of all time.

The following interview with Stanley Kubrick is excerpted from the book ‘Kubrick’ by Michel Ciment. It was conducted upon the release of ‘Barry Lyndon’ in 1975 and published in a partial form at the time. In 1981 Stanley Kubrick revised and approved the complete text of the interview for the English edition of Ciment’s book on his films.

Michel Ciment: Your last three films were set in the future. What led you to make an historical film?

Stanley Kubrick: I can’t honestly say what led me to make any of my films. The best I can do is to say I just fell in love with the stories. Going beyond that is a bit like trying to explain why you fell in love with your wife: she’s intelligent, has brown eyes, a good figure. Have you really said anything? Since I am currently going through the process of trying to decide what film to make next, I realize just how uncontrollable is the business of finding a story, and how much it depends on chance and spontaneous reaction. You can say a lot of ’architectural’ things about what a film story should have: a strong plot, interesting characters, possibilities for cinematic development, good opportunities for the actors to display emotion, and the presentation of its thematic ideas truthfully and intelligently. But, of course, that still doesn’t really explain why you finally chose something, nor does it lead you to a story. You can only say that you probably wouldn’t choose a story that doesn’t have most of those qualities.

Since you are completely free in your choice of story material, how did you come to pick up a book by Thackeray, almost forgotten and hardly republished since the nineteenth century?

I have had a complete set of Thackeray sitting on my bookshelf at home for years, and I had to read several of his novels before reading Barry Lyndon. At one time, Vanity Fair interested me as a possible film but, in the end, I decided the story could not be successfully compressed into the relatively short time-span of a feature film. This problem of length, by the way, is now wonderfully accommodated for by the television miniseries which, with its ten-to-twelve-hour length, pressed on consecutive nights, has created a completely different dramatic form. Anyway, as soon as I read Barry Lyndon I became very excited about it. I loved the story and the characters, and it seemed possible to make the transition from novel to film without destroying it in the process. It also offered the opportunity to do one of the things that movies can do better than any other art form, and that is to present historical subject matter. Description is not one of the things that novels do best but it is something that movies do effortlessly, at least with respect to the effort required of the audience. This is equally true for science-fiction and fantasy, which offer visual challenges and possibilities you don’t find in contemporary stories.

How did you come to adopt a third-person commentary instead of the first-person narrative which is found in the book?

I believe Thackeray used Redmond Barry to tell his own story in a deliberately distorted way because it made it more interesting. Instead of the omniscient author, Thackeray used the imperfect observer, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the dishonest observer, thus allowing the reader to judge for himself, with little difficulty, the probable truth in Redmond Barry’s view of his life. This technique worked extremely well in the novel but, of course, in a film you have objective reality in front of you all of the time, so the effect of Thackeray’s first-person story-teller could not be repeated on the screen. It might have worked as comedy by the juxtaposition of Barry’s version of the truth with the reality on the screen, but I don’t think that Barry Lyndon should have been done as a comedy.

You didn’t think of having no commentary?

There is too much story to tell. A voice-over spares you the cumbersome business of telling the necessary facts of the story through expositional dialogue scenes which can become very tiresome and frequently unconvincing: ‘Curse the blasted storm that’s wrecked our blessed ship!’ Voice-over, on the other hand, is a perfectly legitimate and economical way of conveying story information which does not need dramatic weight and which would otherwise be too bulky to dramatize.

But you use it in other way – to cool down the emotion of a scene, and to anticipate the story. For instance, just after the meeting with the German peasant girl – a very moving scene – the voice-over compares her to a town having been often conquered by siege.

In the scene that you’re referring to, the voice-over works as an ironic counterpoint to what you see portrayed by the actors on the screen. This is only a minor sequence in the story and has to be presented with economy. Barry is tender and romantic with the girl but all he really wants is to get her into bed. The girl is lonely and Barry is attractive and attentive. If you think about it, it isn’t likely that he is the only soldier she has brought home while her husband has been away to the wars. You could have had Barry give signals to the audience, through his performance, indicating that he is really insincere and opportunistic, but this would be unreal. When we try to deceive we are as convincing as we can be, aren’t we?

The film’s commentary also serves another purpose, but this time in much the same manner it did in the novel. The story has many twists and turns, and Thackeray uses Barry to give you hints in advance of most of the important plot developments, thus lessening the risk of their seeming contrived.

When he is going to meet the Chevalier Balibari, the commentary anticipates the emotions we are about to see, thus possibly lessening their effect.

Barry Lyndon is a story which does not depend upon surprise. What is important is not what is going to happen, but how it will happen. I think Thackeray trades off the advantage of surprise to gain a greater sense of inevitability and a better integration of what might otherwise seem melodramatic or contrived. In the scene you refer to where Barry meets the Chevalier, the film’s voice-over establishes the necessary groundwork for the important new relationship which is rapidly to develop between the two men. By talking about Barry’s loneliness being so far from home, his sense of isolation as an exile, and his joy at meeting a fellow countryman in a foreign land, the commentary prepares the way for the scenes which are quickly to follow showing his close attachment to the Chevalier. Another place in the story where I think this technique works particularly well is where we are told that Barry’s young son, Bryan, is going to die at the same time we watch the two of them playing happily together. In this case, I think the commentary creates the same dramatic effect as, for example, the knowledge that the Titanic is doomed while you watch the carefree scenes of preparation and departure. These early scenes would be inexplicably dull if you didn’t know about the ship’s appointment with the iceberg. Being told in advance of the impending disaster gives away surprise but creates suspense.

There is very little introspection in the film. Barry is open about his feelings at the beginning of the film, but then he becomes less so.

At the beginning of the story, Barry has more people around him to whom he can express his feelings. As the story progresses, and particularly after his marriage, he becomes more and more isolated. There is finally no one who loves him, or with whom he can talk freely, with the possible exception of his young son, who is too uoung to be of much help. At the same time I don’t think that the lack of introspective dialogue scenes are any loss to the story. Barry’s feelings are there to be seen as he reacts to the increasingly difficult circumstances of his life. I think this is equally true for the other characters in the story. In any event, scenes of people talking about themselves are often very dull.

In contrast to films which are preoccupied with analyzing the psychology of the characters, yours tend to maintain a mystery around them. Reverend Runt, for instance, is a very opaque person. You don’t know exactly what his motivations are.

But you know a lot about Reverend Runt, certainly all that is necessary. He dislikes Barry. He is secretly in love with Lady Lyndon, in his own prim, repressed, little way. His little smile of triumph, in the scene in the coach, near the end of the film, tells you all you need to know regarding the way he feels about Barry’s misfortune, and the way things have worked out. You certainly don’t have the time in a film to develop the motivations of minor characters.

Lady Lyndon is even more opaque.

Thackeray doesn’t tell you a great deal about her in the novel. I found that very strange. He doesn’t give you a lot to go on. There are, in fact, very few dialogue scenes with her in the book. Perhaps he meant her to be something of a mystery. But the film gives you a sufficient understanding of her anyway.

You made important changes in your adaptation, such as the invention of the last duel, and the ending itself.

Yes, I did, but I was satisfied that they were consistent with the spirit of the novel and brought the story to about the same place the novel did, but in less time. In the book, Barry is pensioned off by Lady Lyndon. Lord Bullingdon, having been believed dead, returns from America. He finds Barry and gives him a beating. Barry, tended by his mother, subsequently dies in prison, a drunk. This, and everything that went along with it in the novel to make it credible would have taken too much time on the screen. In the film, Bullingdon gets his revenge and Barry is totally defeated, destined, one can assume, for a fate not unlike that which awaited him in the novel.

And the scene of the two homosexuals in the lake was not in the book either.

The problem here was how to get Barry out of the British Army. The section of the book dealing with this is also fairly lengthy and complicated.

The function of the scene between the two gay officers was to provide a simpler way for Barry to escape. Again, it leads to the same end result as the novel but by a different route. Barry steals the papers and uniform of a British officer which allow him to make his way to freedom. Since the scene is purely expositional, the comic situation helps to mask your intentions.

Were you aware of the multiple echoes that are found in the film: flogging in the army, flogging at home, the duels, etc., and the narrative structure resembling that of A Clockwork Orange? Does this geometrical pattern attract you?

The narrative symmetry arose primarily out of the needs of telling the story rather than as part of a conscious design. The artistic process you go through in making a film is as much a matter of discovery as it is the execution of a plan. Your first responsibility in writing a screenplay is to pay the closest possible attention to the author’s ideas and make sure you really understand what he has written and why he has written it. I know this sounds pretty obvious but you’d be surprised how often this is not done. There is a tendency for the screenplay writer to be ’creative’ too quickly. The next thing is to make sure that the story survives the selection and compression which has to occur in order to tell it in a maximum of three hours, and preferably two. This phase usually seals the fate of most major novels, which really need the large canvas upon which they are presented.

In the first part of A Clockwork Orange, we were against Alex. In the second part, we were on his side. In this film, the attraction/repulsion feeling towards Barry is present throughout.

Thackeray referred to it as ’a novel without a hero’. Barry is naive and uneducated. He is driven by a relentless ambition for wealth and social position. This proves to be an unfortunate combination of qualities which eventually lead to great misfortune and unhappiness for himself and those around him. Your feelings about Barry are mixed but he has charm and courage, and it is impossible not to like him despite his vanity, his insensitivity and his weaknesses. He is a very real character who is neither a conventional hero nor a conventional villain.

The feeling that we have at the end is one of utter waste.

Perhaps more a sense of tragedy, and because of this the story can assimilate the twists and turns of the plot without becoming melodrama. Melodrama uses all the problems of the world, and the difficulties and disasters which befall the characters, to demonstrate that the world is, after all, a benevolent and just place.

The last sentence which says that all the characters are now equal can be taken as a nihilistic or religious statement. From your films, one has the feeling that you are a nihilist who would like to believe.

I think you’ll find that it is merely an ironic postscript taken from the novel. Its meaning seems quite clear to me and, as far as I’m concerned, it has nothing to do with nihilism or religion.

One has the feeling in your films that the world is in a constant state of war. The apes are fighting in 2001. There is fighting, too, in Paths Of Glory, and Dr. Strangelove. In Barry Lyndon, you have a war in the first part, and then in the second part we find the home is a battleground, too.

Drama is conflict, and violent conflict does not find its exclusive domain in my films. Nor is it uncommon for a film to be built around a situation where violent conflict is the driving force. With respect to Barry Lyndon, after his successful struggle to achieve wealth and social position, Barry proves to be badly unsuited to this role. He has clawed his way into a gilded cage, and once inside his life goes really bad. The violent conflicts which subsequently arise come inevitably as a result of the characters and their relationships. Barry’s early conflicts carry him forth into life and they bring him adventure and happiness, but those in later life lead only to pain and eventually to tragedy.

Why did you choose to have only one flashback in the film: the child falling from the horse?

I didn’t want to spend the time which would have been required to show the entire story action of young Bryan sneaking away from the house, taking the horse, falling, being found, etc. Nor did I want to learn about the accident solely through the dialogue scene in which the farm workers, carrying the injured boy, tell Barry. Putting the flashback fragment in the middle of the dialogue scene seemed to be the right thing to do.

Are your camera movements planned before?

Very rarely. I think there is virtually no point putting camera instructions into a screenplay, and only if some really important camera idea occurs to me, do I write it down. When you rehearse a scene, it is usually best not to think about the camera at all. If you do, I have found that it invariably interferes with the fullest exploration of the ideas of the scene. When, at last, something happens which you know is worth filming, that is the time to decide how to shoot it. It is almost but not quite true to say that when something really exciting and worthwhile is happening, it doesn’t matter how you shoot it. In any event, it never takes me long to decide on set-ups, lighting or camera movements. The visual part of film making has always come easiest to me, and that is why I am careful to subordinate it to the story and the performances.

Do you like writing alone or would you like to work with a script writer?

I enjoy working with someone I find stimulating. One of the most fruitful and enjoyable collaborations I have had was with Arthur C. Clarke in writing the story of 2001: A Space Odyssey. One of the paradoxes of movie writing is that, with a few notable exceptions, writers who can really write are not interested in working on film scripts. They quite correctly regard their important work as being done for publication. I wrote the screenplay for Barry Lyndon alone. The first draft took three or four months but, as with all my films, the subsequent writing process never really stopped. What you have written and is yet unfilmed is inevitably affected by what has been filmed. New problems of content or dramatic weight reveal themselves. Rehearsing a scene can also cause script changes. However carefully you think about a scene, and however clearly you believe you have visualized it, it’s never the same when you finally see it played. Sometimes a totally new idea comes up out of the blue, during a rehearsal, or even during actual shooting, which is simply too good to ignore. This can necessitate the new scene being worked out with the actors right then and there. As long as the actors know the objectives of the scene, and understand their characters, this is less difficult and much quicker to do than you might imagine.

- From ‘Kubrick’ by Michel Ciment.

Paul Schrader: Notes On Taxi Driver

Taxi Driver (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

A screenwriter, director and film critic, Paul Schrader is best known for his work with the award-winning director Martin Scorsese. Schrader worked on screenplays for a number of Scorsese films including Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ and Bringing Out the Dead. Schrader’s films and scripts are haunted by one dominant and recurring theme: they focus on a lone protagonist hurtling towards self-destruction.

Schrader’s early script about the disturbed New York City cab driver Travis Bickle was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture and, eventually, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Having initially worked as a noted film critic, Taxi Driver was Schrader’s breakthrough.

An extraordinary and influential film Taxi Driver is however rooted in a dark time of  Schrader’s life: “Travis Bickle is me,” he has repeatedly stated said in interviews. “At the time I wrote it, I was in a rather low and bad place,” Schrader has explained. “I had broken with Pauline [Kael], I had broken with my wife, I had broken with the woman I left my wife for, I had broken with the American Film Institute and I was in debt,” he goes on to explain.

A contemporary interview with Film Comment offers a revealing insight into Shrader’s state of mind at the time of writing Taxi Driver: “I got to wandering around at night; I couldn’t sleep because I was so depressed. I’d stay in bed till four or five P.M. then I’d say, ‘Well, I can get a drink now’,” he claimed.

“I’d get up and get a drink and take the bottle with me and start wandering around the streets in my car at night. After the bars closed, I’d go to pornography. I’d do this all night, till morning, and I did it for about three or four weeks, a very destructive syndrome until I was saved from it by an ulcer: I had not been eating, just drinking,” he added.

It was during hospital treatment, that he conceived the metaphor of the taxi cab: “That is what I was: this person in an iron box, a coffin, floating around the city, but seemingly alone,” he explained.

Schrader has stated that his motivation to write the screenplay was done out of a sense of therapy rather than a quest for success, “I wrote the script very quickly, in something like fifteen days. The script just jumped from my mind almost intact”.

“As soon as I finished writing – I wrote it for no commercial reason, just because I saw that was the need — I gave it to my agent and I left L.A. and bummed around the country.”

“Taxi Driver was written when I couldn’t really distinguish between the pain in the work and the pain in my life,” he said in the ’70s. “I hope I’ll continue to write stuff that is as good.”

Paul Schrader was 26 and destitute when he wrote Taxi Driver. In a discussion published in Martin Scorsese - A Journey he reflects on the origins of the script, its transition to the screen and subsequent reaction to the film.

The script of Taxi Driver is the genuine thing. It came from the gut, and while it banged around town everyone who read it realized it was authentic, the real item. After a number of years enough people said somebody should make it so that finally someone did.

In 1973 I had been through a particularly rough time, living more or less in my car in Los Angeles. riding around all night, drinking heavily, going to porno movies because they were open all night, and crashing some place during the day. Then, finally, I went to the emergency room in serious pain, and it turned out I had an ulcer. While I was in the hospital, talking to the nurse, I realized I hadn’t spoken to anyone in two or three weeks. It really hit me, an image that I was like a taxi driver, floating around in this metal coffin in the city, seemingly in the middle of people, but absolutely, totally alone.

The taxicab was a metaphor for loneliness, and once I had that, it was just a matter of creating a plot: the girl he wants but can’t have, and the one he can have but doesn’t want. He tries to kill the surrogate father of the first and fails, so he kills the surrogate father of the other. I think it took ten days, it may have been twelve – I just wrote continuously. I was staying at an old girlfriend’s house, where the heat and gas were all turned off, and I just wrote. When I stopped, I slept on the couch, then I woke up and I went back to typing. As you get older it takes more work. Hovering in the back of my mind is a fondness for those days when it was so painful it just had to come out.

I didn’t really write it the way people write scripts today – you know, with a market in mind. I wrote it because it was something that I wanted to write and it was the first thing I wrote. It jumped out of my head.

Taxi Driver (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

Right after writing it, I left town for about six months. I came back to Los Angeles after I was feeling a little stronger emotionally and decided to go at it again. I was a freelance critic at the time. I had written a review of Sisters and interviewed Brian De Palma at his place at the beach. That afternoon, we were playing chess – we were about evenly matched – and somehow the fact that I had written a script came up. So I gave it to him and he liked it a lot and wanted to do it. De Palma showed the script to the producers, Michael and Julia Phillips, who were three houses down the beach, and he showed it to Marty, who was in town after finishing Mean Streets. Michael and Julia told me they wanted to do it but that Marty was a better director for it. So Julia and I went and saw a rough cut of Mean Streets, and I agreed. In fact, I thought Marty and Bob De Niro would be the ideal combination, so we aligned ourselves – De Niro, the Phillipses and myself – but we were not powerful enough to get the film made. Then there was a hiatus of a couple of years, and in the intervening time, each of us had successes of our own. I sold my first script, The Yakuza, for a lot of money. Marty did Alice the Phillipses did The Sting, and De Niro did The Godfather; Part II.

At the time I remember describing Taxi Driver’s Travis as sort of a young man who wandered from the snowy waste of the Midwest into an over-heated New York cathedral. My own background was anti-Catholic in the style of the Reformation and the Glorious Revolution. The town I was raised in was about one-third Dutch Calvinist and one-third Catholic, and the other third were trying to figure out why they were there, and sort of keeping peace. Well, both cultures, Catholic and Calvinist, are infused with the sense of guilt, redemption by blood, and moral purpose – all acts are moral acts, all acts have consequence. It’s impossible to act amorally. There’s a kind of divine eye in the sky that ensures your acts are morally judged. So you know once you’re raised in that kind of environment, you don’t shake that, you shake a lot of things, but the sense of moral responsibility, guilt, and redemption you carry with you forever. So Scorsese and I shared that. I came from essentially a rural, Midwestern Protestant and Dutch background, and he is urban and Italian Catholic, so in a way it’s a very felicitous joining. The bedrock is the same.

Taxi Driver was as much a product of luck and timing as everything else – three sensibilities together at the right time, doing the right thing. It was still a low-budget, long-shot movie, but that’s how it got made. At one point, we could have financed the film with Jeff Bridges, but we elected to hold out and wait until we could finance it with De Niro. It was just a matter of luck and timing. Marty was fully ready to make the film; De Niro was ready to make it. And the nation was ready to see it. You can’t plan or scheme for that kind of luck. It just sort of happens – the right film at the right time...

Taxi Driver (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

Bob was so determined to get the character of Travis down, he drove a cab for a couple of weeks. He got a licence, had his fingerprints taken by the police and hit the streets.

The dialogue in Taxi Driver is somewhat improvised. The most memorable piece of dialogue in the film is an improvisation: the “Are you talking to me?” part. In the script it just says Travis speaks to himself in the mirror. Bobby asked me what he would say, and I said, ‘Well, he’s a little kid playing with guns and acting tough.’ So De Niro used this rap that an underground New York comedian had been using at the same time as the basis for his lines.

I remember the night before Taxi Driver opened, we all got together and had dinner and said, ‘No matter what happens tomorrow we have made a terrific movie and we’re damn proud of it even if it goes down the toilet.’ The next day, I went over to the cinema for the noon show. There was a long line that went all the way around the block. And then I realised, this line was for the two o’clock show, not the noon show! I ran in and watched the film and everyone was standing at the back and there was a sense of exhilaration about what we had done.

Jean-Luc Godard once said that all the great movies are successful for the wrong reasons. There were a lot of wrong reasons why Taxi Driver was successful. The sheer violence of it brought out the Times Square crowd.

I’m not opposed to censorship in principle but I think that if you censor a film like Taxi Driver all you do is censor a film, not confront a problem. These characters are running around and can be triggered off by anything.

When I talk to younger filmmakers they tell me that it was really the film that informed them, that it was their seminal film, and listening to them talk, I really can see it as a kind of social watermark. But it was meant as a personal film, not a political commentary.

– Paul Schrader in Martin Scorsese - A Journey by Mary Pat Kelly. Pages 87-98.