David Cronenberg: On Being an Artist

Dead Ringers (Directed by David Cronenberg)

David Cronenberg's first mainstream success was with The Dead Zone (1983), a conventional adaptation of a Stephen King horror book. This was followed by The Fly (1986), a violent horror remake in which a scientist progressively transforms into a gigantic bug. Starring Jeff Goldblum it was largely regarded as superior to the 1958 original and became a box office hit. Jeremy Irons played twin gynaecologists whose identities seem to blend as they sink into depravity in the disturbing psychological thriller Dead Ringers (1988). The film received widespread critical acclaim. 

Cronenberg went on to make three further films, all of which were adaptations of controversial literary or theatrical works. He was a longstanding fan of William S. Burroughs' avant-garde novel Naked Lunch, and in 1991 he wrote and directed a surreal film based on both the text and Burroughs' life. 

Cronenberg next brought to the screen a play by David Henry Hwang that questions concepts of cultural and gender identity in the love drama M. Butterfly (1993), again starring Jeremy Irons and set mostly in 1960s Beijing. Crash (1996) is a film adaption of J.G. Ballard's controversial novel about a group of disaffected people who have a sexual desire for auto accidents. 

Despite the fact that the films displayed Cronenberg's growing breadth as a director, they received mixed reviews and performed badly at the box office. 

eXistenZ (1999), a kinetic virtual-reality adventure that he authored, and Spider (2002), starring Ralph Fiennes, a terrifying look inside the psyche of a psychotic man, received greater accolades (although comparable commercial reaction).

In the following extract from an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books, David Cronenberg talks about his transition from writing original cinematic works to working on adaptations.

The Dead Zone (Directed by David Cronenberg)

As a young upstart filmmaker I felt that you were not a real filmmaker if you didn't write your own stuff and it should be original. And that was beyond the French version of the auteur theory which was really meant to rehabilitate the artistic credibility of guys like Howard Hawks and John Ford. The French were saying a director could work within the studio system and still be an artist and that those guys were, even though they didn't normally write their own stuff. And for years I said, no, no you have to write your own stuff. But then I got involved with Stephen King's The Dead Zone, and it was more of a studio project, and there were five scripts that had been written, one of them by Stephen King himself, and frankly I didn't think his script was the best of the five. In fact, I thought that if I did his script people would kill me for betraying his novel. I think what happened is that he just wanted to try something else. He wasn't interested in just doing the novels, so he changed it quite a lot to the point where it was less like the novel than Jeffrey Boam's script, which was actually more faithful. So I started to work with Jeffrey Boam, and I started to really enjoy the process of working with other people and on the script, and I thought, well this is interesting 'cause what it means is, if you mix your blood with other people's, then you will create something that you wouldn't have done on your own, but is enough of you that it's exciting and feels like you. It's kind of like making children. 

Beyond that, frankly, what opened the door for me doing adaptations was realizing that it doesn't matter where the idea for the movie comes from. For me it's really just a matter of developing every aspect that you can as an artist. Film art is so complex that it's very rare to have someone who's good at every aspect of it. You could be good with actors but not have a really strong visual sense, or you have a strong visual sense, but you have a tin ear when it comes to music. Or your eye for costumes isn't so great; so you learn to work with other people who are good at the stuff you're not good at. And you have to be very honest with yourself because otherwise you're short changing yourself. I mean, if you can't admit to yourself that you're no good visually, you're not really going to let a director of photography help you. And then you're going to make flawed movies that could have been better if you'd allowed yourself to collaborate more. 

Naked Lunch (Directed by David Cronenberg)

It's dangerous to be an artist. That's what we talk about in Naked Lunch. It's dangerous on many different levels. Politically it can be dangerous, but psychologically it can be quite dangerous too. You make yourself very vulnerable. You put yourself out there and of course you open yourself up to criticism and attack. And so you have to be strong if you're going to make movies. But once you accept that movies can come from anywhere, that a movie can come from a dream or a conversation or a newspaper article, or it could be based on real people, you can expand that and say it could come from a work of art that someone has already done. It could be a play, it could be a novel, it could be a remake of another movie, and of course I've done all those things, and in each case the satisfaction comes from making a good movie; not from where the movie comes from. I don't have to question it if I find the story interesting. 

Like, I find psychoanalysis interesting, even though I've never undergone analysis myself, but I think it's a really interesting, new, relationship that Freud invented; a relationship between an analyst and a patient. And I'm thinking that's kinda intriguing, because we kinda accept that as a basic relationship that humans can have, between an analyst and a patient, but before Freud it didn't exist! The closest you might have got was a priest in a confessional, but there, you know the priest is very judgmental, having a huge religious structure informing everything he reacts to, so here you have a totally different kind of thing... 

Dead Ringers (Directed by David Cronenberg)

It's just that certain projects are, in their nature, extreme. Like Dead Ringers. The first I heard of the Marcus twins, these real twins, was a little article and I still remember the headline: "Twin Docs Found Dead in Posh Pad." I read that and thought: that's got to be a movie! I followed it back to the source and eventually there was an article by Ron Rosenbaum in Esquire called "Dead Ringers" and it was fantastic and I thought: I would like to do this story, but I don't to really base it on the real guys 100%. I don't want it to be a biography, but it's too good a structure. I mean, it's like a fiction thing. Who could ever imagine such a thing? It was too perfect. So I went through, it was Joe Roth at the beginning before he was any studio thing, he was an independent producer. And Carol Baum. And we started talking with my friend Norman Snider who then wrote the first draft and it took ten years from that point to get it made. Ten years. Very difficult. I mean we had the classic thing; we got, "do they have to be gynecologists? Can't they be lawyers?" We literally got that! And I said "do you think that's better?!" And we got "do they both have to die?" and that was the end of that conversation. We got all the sorts of conservative things that would turn that project into trash basically and it went through many incarnations before finally we got it made. But to make it more accessible or more palatable would subvert the reason for actually making the movie. 

Crash (Directed by David Cronenberg)

But movies like Crash or Naked Lunch can't cost a hundred million dollars and you must make sure they don't. You accept the limitations of the budget when you make an extreme or difficult movie — it's whatever it is you can raise. And then of course, there's a certain point where you say: can I actually make it well, for that money? Do I have to sacrifice any quality? And there are moments where I've said, about projects: I can't raise enough money to actually make the movie well, so therefore I'm not going to make it. I have to consider the outcome. Or for instance Spider. I really wanted ten million dollars to make Spider and we could only raise eight. And at that point it was, okay, do we make this movie or not? You know, if we make it for eight then it means we all literally have to not get paid. And I include there, Ralph Fiennes, Miranda Richardson, and the Producer and the Writer and the Director — me — but we all loved the project so much and we were already so far engaged in it, that we all agreed to do that. So we literally all of us, and Patrick McGrath the writer of the novel, we all literally didn't get paid and we made the movie for eight million, but we really needed ten. So that's an unusual moment, and just in terms of financial survival you can't do that very often, because you're spending two years of your life making a movie and you're making zero money during those two years. But that was sort of a happy case because we managed to survive it. Ralph went off and did Red Dragon and got a big payday. I didn't! But one thing that's interesting is, since we're showing A Dangerous Method to Jungians and Freudians, I've discovered that they and psychiatrists often show Spider to students and other doctors as an illustration of what schizophrenia might feel like from the inside. From the point of view of a schizophrenic. They feel that it's an incredibly accurate depiction of the experience of schizophrenia and that it's very useful for doctors and psychiatrists so I kinda like that. 

Full article at the LARB here

George Romero: The Monsters Within

Night of the Living Dead (Directed by George Romero)

Director George Romero had a remarkable start with his first feature, Night of the Living Dead (1968). With a cast of Pittsburgh unknowns and a budget of under $70,000, it went on to become a horror cult classic, grossing more than $10 million and establishing Romero as a master of the genre. 

Romero followed Night with It's Always Vanilla (1970) and Jack's Wife (1971), two films that were not widely released and now largely overlooked. Romero remained in Pittsburgh, concerned about being stereotyped as a horror filmmaker. Despite this, he continued to work, producing advertisements and sports specials for television. His next feature The Crazies has always been overshadowed by his zombie films, yet this pandemic thriller is possibly Romero's most daring investigation of his central theme: the breakdown of social order. 

The film's unsettling concept must have had a resonance in the crisis-ridden early 1970s. A military jet crashes in western Pennsylvania, unleashing an unknown virus into the water supply and rendering the locals violent. The administration moves into denial mode, contemplating unleashing a bomb on the afflicted town. The virus was being researched as a biological weapon. Soldiers in hazmat suits and gas masks storm the scene, and gun-toting residents quickly retaliate.

The basic paranoid theme of "The Crazies," which recurs in the cycle of plague films, can be traced back to Don Siegel's 1956 sci-fi classic "Invasion of the Body Snatchers": How can you know if someone is infected? Also, how can you avoid becoming infected? 

The action switches between a scientist (Richard France) working on an antidote and a ragged band of holdouts lead by a firefighter (W.G. McMillan) and his pregnant girlfriend (Lane Carroll). However, among the survivors, mistrust and terror quickly set in. 

When the calamity is a communicable virus, the feeling of community that often arises in disaster films is significantly undercut. Romero, like in “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), questions the purity of society's most basic unit: the nuclear family. 

Martin (1977), his comeback to the horror genre, garnered critical acclaim, telling the tale of a young man who believes he is a vampire, who moves to a Pennsylvania town to live with his elderly, cousin and try to satisfy his bloodlust.

This was followed by the seminal Dawn of the Dead (1979), in which the undead now roam the whole continent of America, feasting on the flesh of the living. In a desolate retail mall, TV reporter Francine (Gaylen Ross), her boyfriend Stephen (David Emge), and two SWAT team police seek sanctuary. Despite their best attempts, their brief shelter is jeopardised when a group of raiding motorcyclists destroys the barrier, allowing the undead to enter the retail centre.

The following interview for Twilight Zone magazine is from 1981 and was undertaken during the release of Romero’s Knightriders, about modern-day knights who joust on motorcycles.

Night of the Living Dead (Directed by George Romero)

TZ: You’ve been making movies ever since you were young. Were you always interested in horror films?

Romero: I loved all genre films—horror movies as well as war pictures and cowboy films. Whenever one was at a neighborhood theater or on television, I’d watch it. That’s the way I learned how they worked. However, it was just circumstance, the fact that Night of the Living Dead was my first picture, that I got a reputation as a director of horror films. I chose the genre because I liked it, and because I wanted to do something commercial.

TZ: Night of the Living Dead has come to be considered a classic independent film. How did you make it for so little money?

Romero: First of all, it was based on a short story that I wrote. I didn’t have to buy the rights. Then a friend of mine and I collaborated on the screenplay. The production was also very simple. At the time, I had a small film company going. We were doing commercials primarily, but we had all the hardware and a crew of people, and that’s what we used to make the film. Plus we used a lot of friends in the cast—even some of the advertising people we were working with in Pittsburgh. They came out to play the zombies. There was a great deal of local cooperation, because we were the first feature film based out of Pittsburgh.

TZ: Were the actors professional?

Romero: Three or four of them were. But as professional as you can get as an actor in Pittsburgh means doing radio or television. Primarily the cast was friends and people who showed up.

TZ: I’ve heard you were unable to get a major studio to distribute the film. Why do you think you had so much trouble?

Romero: Well, for one thing, I really didn’t know what I was doing. After I made the film, I literally threw it in the trunk of the car and brought it to New York. The first studio I called was Columbia, and I was surprised when they told me to come on in with the film. They held it for three months. They kept saying, “It’s great” and “We’re thinking about it.” But finally they turned it down, because the film was in black and white, and it was hard to get drive-ins to play black and white pictures. The next studio I went to was AIP. They said, “Change the ending, and you’ve got a deal.”

Night of the Living Dead (Directed by George Romero)

TZ: How did they want it changed?

Romero: They didn’t want the hero to die. But I refused to do it. It would have changed what the picture was about. By this time, five months had gone by, and I decided to forget the major studios and get my own sales rep. Finally the Walter Reade-Continental chain made an offer, and I took it.

TZ: Were you surprised when Night of the Living Dead became such a success on the midnight cult circuit?

Romero: Very much—although that was in its second wave. The film was an immediate hit on the drive-in circuit. That’s what a lot of people don’t realize. It made a lot of money right away. In fact, the only money that it ever returned to us was during that first nine months. After that, the film sort of dropped out of existence for about a year and a half. Then Walter Reade released it on a double bill with a film called Slaves. Rex Reed and some of the other critics wrote that it was better than Slaves. Then the Elgin and the Waverly and a couple of other theaters started to play it at midnight. It began to get international press, and that really surprised me. I knew that it was a good horror film, but by this point, all I could see in it were the flaws, the things I wished I could go back and correct.

TZ: Despite your own dissatisfaction, the film’s success was certainly important to your career.
Romero: Yes and no. I was able to raise the money right away to make more movies. But in retrospect, I think it happened too quickly. Though I did have ideas for other films, I had no idea what the business was about. I was just a guy making beer commercials in Pittsburgh.

TZ: I’ve read that you were reluctant to do another horror picture right away, for fear you’d be typed as a horror director.

Romero: That’s true. So what did I do? I went and made two films that probably six people saw—It’s Always Vanilla and Jack’s Wife. I learned a lot from them in terms of developing as a filmmaker, but what they really taught me was the nature of the film business. I learned that the film industry is not going to accept serious little dramas from some upstart in Pittsburgh—especially if the films have no stars. As they say in the biz, there’s no bottom-side protection. Those two films taught me what the odds were against that kind of small personal film. I still don’t think those films are bad, I just think they were the wrong kind of film to make at that stage in my career.

The Crazies (Directed by George Romero)

TZ: Is that why you returned to the horror genre?

Romero: No, because I didn’t—at least not right away. After those two films, I got involved with a small independent New York distributor, Cambist, and I made The Crazies. It’s a disaster film about a bio-weap- ons spill. This film didn’t hit, either, but in this case the problem was not with the film, but with the handling. When the distributor saw the rough cut, he thought he had Jaws on his hands. Consequently he tried to open it too big, and he spent a lot of money just opening in New York. It was a lot of money for him, but it wasn’t enough to compete with the big studios. He ended up having to shelve the film.

TZ: Tell me more about the film itself.

Romero: It was inspired by the science fiction disaster films of the 1950s. It’s about a plane that crashes, spilling a substance designed for germ warfare. Nobody knows exactly what’s going on. People are being affected by the germ, but they don’t know it. All they know is that the army has come into town and is trying to herd them all together. The soldiers are just as confused as the townspeople. There are only a few officials in the Pentagon who know what actually happened, and what results is a conflict between the townspeople and the military forces.

TZ: It sounds very political.

Romero: It is. It was made just around the time of Kent State. You remember how angry people were about the shootings on the campus by the National Guard. Ultimately, I think, the film deals with the politics a little too lightly. It has sort of an outrageous, bawdy style, and some people may have thought we were making fun of politics, exploiting Vietnam and the Kent State tragedy. We weren’t at all. In fact, The Crazies was a very angry and radical film, if one sees through the comic surface.

TZ: Who are the Crazies in the title? The soldiers or the townspeople?

Romero: The people. Once they come in contact with the bug, they go crazy. However, there’s a scientist brought in to handle the situation who observes that you can’t tell who’s crazy and who’s not.

TZ: It sounds to some extent like what happens in Night of the Living Dead, in which the people who are alive get killed and almost immediately turn into zombies.

Romero: That’s because I was dealing with the same idea in both movies—how easily the victim becomes the monster. For instance, in Night of the Living Dead, take those scenes with the little girl. Her mother’s trying to protect her, but then the girl dies, and seconds later she’s a zombie, going after her mother. What I’m trying to show is how the monster, the evil, is not something lurking in the distance, but something actually inside all of us.

That’s what Stephen King shows so well. He takes a real situation, a very mundane situation, and throws it just two degrees out of whack. It’s like Village of the Damned, where those delightful little children are really the evil ones. That’s a very scary thing. It’s like meeting an insane person on the street.

Martin (Directed by George Romero)

TZ: Talking about what constitutes horror, the next big feature you did was Martin. I remember the Newsweek review, which said, “Romero poses the question of whether the hero, Martin, is in fact an eighty-four- year-old vampire from Transylvania or an eighteen-year-old psychotic from Pittsburgh.” Is that how you saw the movie?

Romero: In a way. Martin is designed to show that all those supernatural monsters that are part of our literary tradition are, in essence, expurgations of ourselves. They are beasts we’ve created in order to exorcise the monster from within us. Whether it’s a monster made out of spare parts, one that grows out of us, or something we turn into during a full moon, monsters have traditionally been considered embodiments of our own evil. By distinguishing them from us, we could destroy them. I tried to show in Martin that you can’t just slice off this evil part of ourselves and throw it away. It’s a permanent part of us, and we’d better try to understand it.

TZ: Are you saying that we’re all innately evil?

Romero: “Potentially evil” is a better way of putting it. I don’t think there’s an intrinsically evil side to man. But I think all of us at certain times in our lives do things that are compromising, things that go against our conscience. There’s a line we won’t cross, and for all of us it’s a question of “Where is that line?” Sometimes we stretch it a bit. No matter who we are, and how much we’re satisfied with our own be- havior, there are always those moments we feel guilty about. That’s the guilt we’re trying to unload by creating monsters. We can then punish ourselves by punishing the monster, allowing our good side to prevail. In Martin, by showing an eighteen-year-old psychotic kid who on one hand is himself and on the other hand is this monster, I’m showing that the monster can never die. It’s like in Night of the Living Dead. You can kill the monster, but your next-door neighbor may become him tomorrow.

TZ: In real life, who would you be more afraid to run into on a dark Pittsburgh street—the vampire or the young psychotic?

Romero: Probably the psychotic, because he looks normal, but a second later he could change. That’s precisely the point I’m trying to make. Traditionally, whenever we see vampires in the movies, we’ve come to expect a certain predictable behavior. For example, we all know that vampires are only going to frighten us at night, and that to get rid of them, all we have to do is find their casket and put a stake through their heart. What I’m trying to show in Martin is that we can’t expect the monster to be predictable. That’s also what Steve’s saying in his books.

Martin (Directed by George Romero)

TZ: One of the things I found most interesting about Martin, and which lends itself to what you’re saying, is the fact that he uses razors against his victims, rather than fangs. I think that makes him much more horrifying.

Romero: Visually it’s certainly more horrifying. It also makes him more mysterious. Fangs don’t come out just when he feels the need, and the need is not connected to the moon or the night. However, on the other hand, Martin’s got a very detailed and meticulous M.O. He uses syringes and razor blades. He has a little kit with breaking and entering tools, and he knows about things like burglar alarms, and electric garage-door openers, which is one of those supposedly fail-safe devices, but which he uses to get into the one house he attacks. That’s another level of Martin. It’s saying that the very things we take comfort in and feel safe because we have, like garage-door openers, are in fact not going to save us.

TZ: In the case of Martin, did you have the different levels of the film thought out in advance, or did they just develop?

Romero: I planned it all in advance. I always do that. It’s a self-preservation technique. Knowing what this business is like, I don’t like to sit down and do a final script and get all excited and emotionally involved with it until I know for sure there’s a deal. And thanks to the talents of my partner, I’ve been in the luxurious position of making all of our deals on the basis of treatments and story ideas. Consequently, all of the films I’ve made come from ideas that I’ve had for a year or more. I have little index files with story-line ideas, and I work on them a lot. But it’s not until I know the film’s definitely going to be made that I actually sit down and write the final script. I think it’s important to be in touch with the story at the time you’re doing it. I would hate to take out one of my old scripts that’s been sitting in the drawer and film it without being able to rework it.

TZ: As a novelist, I know that when you’re in the process of writing scenes that are particularly horrifying, they can sometimes have a chilling effect. Does the same thing happen to you as a director? Or because it’s a group enterprise, with so many people around, does that diminish the thrill?

Romero: It happens when you’re cutting the film. It’s four in the morning, you’re all alone working on a scene, and you finish it, shut off the lights, and play it for yourself. Those are the times one of your own scenes may frighten you. It’s happened to me three or four times. It happened with Night of the Living Dead, with a couple of scenes in Martin, and with the knitting needle scene in The Crazies. It’s a scene with a little old lady—again, it’s one of those things that are two degrees off-whack. She’s sitting in a rocking chair, knitting. A soldier walks in to take her to safety, and she lays into him with her knitting needle. That scene really got to me the first time I saw it.

Martin (Directed by George Romero)

TZ: What about when you rescreen one of your movies? Does it still have an effect on you, or have you seen it too often?

Romero: I make a habit of laying off my films for long periods of time, and then taking a fresh look. After it was first made, I laid off Night of the Living Dead for three years. Even when I would be speaking about it somewhere, I wouldn’t sit in while it was being shown. That’s because all I could see were the problems. Right now, I haven’t seen the film for four years.

Even when you’re making the film, it’s sometimes hard to tell whether it’s working. In that respect, filmmaking is different from writing. I know that when I write a script, I can lay off it for a few days and then go back and get a sense of how it’s reading. A film is different when you’re working on it, because you see it over and over. You see how the images cut against each other, and you know exactly what’s coming. You really need time away from it before you can let it affect your senses with any degree of freshness.

The impact of film is basically visceral—and that’s particularly so, with horror, as well as comedy. Whenever you’re trying to evoke a spontaneous reaction, like a laugh, a cry, or a startle, it’s a very delicate process. You don’t know if it’s working, because you yourself never get to experience it for the first time. It’s really instrument flying. You’re banking on understanding intellectually that if you connect this sound with this image, then you’ll get a rise out of the audience.

TZ: But you don’t really know until you show it to people?

Romero: That’s right. And sometimes it’s a very rude awakening. The first time you have it is in front of forty people. If everyone sits there and the suspense or horror doesn’t hit them, you know it’s not work- ing. You can just feel it.

TZ: Do you make a point of seeing the films of other horror directors? Romero: Sure. I go to see everyone else’s work. I like John Carpenter a lot. He’s really very skilled at frightening you, and I think Halloween is beautiful. I also think David Cronenberg does a good job. I like both The Brood and Scanners. Another favorite director of mine is Roman Polanski. I thought Repulsion was incredible, especially the scene with the mirror. Catherine Deneuve opens a door that has a mirror on it, and as the door is moving, there’s maybe a frame or two where you see, in the mirror, a figure standing behind her. There’s not even a sound, but it’s a real heart-stopper. The film itself is beautifully crafted. It tightens all your nerve endings and makes you ready for something horrifying.

Alien did that, too. Alien is an example of how a film can create tension regardless of its story. If you really think about it, we’ve seen that kind of plot, before. What gives the film its tension is the sight of those empty halls, plus the steam and the noise, all of which has a very visceral impact. It wasn’t the jumps that were particularly effective.

TZ: What do you mean by jumps?

Romero: Jumps are when you manipulate the audience into literally jumping in their seats. Anybody can do them. You can make an audience jump with ninety minutes of black leader in which, at random intervals, you’ve put a white frame synchronized with a loud noise. That’ll make them jump. Of course, it’s not the same thing as really putting the audience on edge and holding them there.

– Revealing the Monsters within Us by Tom Seligson/1981. From Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, August 1981, 12–17. 

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.