Conversations with Scorsese Read Online Free Page B

between the movies and the place I was living. Where I came from was a Sicilian village re-created on the Lower East Side. You know, inSicily you don’t trust anyone. It’s not very evolved, but the reality is that on a certain level you grow up full of mistrust. And I’m sorry, it was pounded into me. It really was. My parents were good people, hardworking people, weren’t in organized crime. But there was that attitude toward the world. If you see that film,
Golden Door,
[Emanuele] Crialese’s film [about Italian peasants immigrating to the United States], those are my grandparents.

     
    Elizabeth Street inLittle Italy. The photo, taken by Marty, was shot from the fire escape outside the Scorsese apartment.
     
    RS: I’ve seen it. I understand.
    MS: There’s a woman in it who’s a healer, could have been one of my grandparents. Now I didn’t say my grandmother did that, but I know a guy who did that. Basically he was the same age as my grandparents, and he was a healer. And if you had a headache, you had something wrong with your stomach, you would go to him. Women would go into his room and he would do things to them. I mean, my mother said, “Yeah, he was a healer,” and she’d wink. She was growing up American.
    But the old ones, I was raised by those people. I was raised by the people you see climbing the mountains in
Golden Door.
In the fifties, it was very interesting trying to be American and trying to buy into something American. I mean, for instance, I just could not reconcile the nature of authority—of, let’s say, Eisenhower playing golf every day—with my own experience. I came from a world where the reality was “Yeah, sure. Just be careful.”
    And so what happened with
The Departed
is that what it came down to, dammit, was the same story, the fathers and the sons. I was shooting the scene with Jack [Nicholson] and Leo [DiCaprio] where Jack is at the table and Leo is in the room. We had done the scene, a seven-page scene, the night before, and it was very nice—four takes, maybe, two cameras. But I said to Leo, “There’s something there. I don’t know what it is. Something is not quite pushing it yet.” This was the turning point in the picture for me. I can’t get into how I work with Jack, or how he’dwork with me, but there was something about just being around him and making it easy for him to go to certain places. So I just said to him, “Jack, we’re going to do the same scene tomorrow. We’ve got the whole thing. It’s just two angles. But anything you could think of to put him on edge—”
    And then the next day Jack came in, and told me, “I have ideas. I’ve got some ideas.” I said, “Don’t tell me, don’t tell me. Let me see.” And so he sat down. Leo sat down. And the first thing Jack did was sniff the glass and say, “I smell a rat.” If I was that kid, I couldn’t imagine the guts you’d have to have to sit there. And then he pulled a gun on him. He didn’t tell me he had a gun. It was great. And he had all these other ideas. We took a lot out, but Leo’s reaction is in real time. So I said to him, “I don’t know what’s going to happen to you. And he’s capable of doing anything. You have to work your way out of it. You have to make him believe that you are not the rat. And you are the rat.” As we were doing it, I thought it was wonderful.
    And suddenly I looked around and I said, “I’ve done this scene before.” Looking back now I find that theme in other movies I’ve made
—Mean Streets,
Raging Bull,
all the way up through the other movies. They usually have to do with fathers and sons, and what a father owes his son, and what a son owes his father in terms of loyalty. It has to do with trust and betrayal. Growing up in that world, the worst thing you could do was betray. And I felt excited, I’m even excited telling you the story now. I think I should go and make the picture again! I probably will!
    RS: You can make all the gangster