INTERVIEW BY DAVID RENSIN
PLAYBOY | APRIL 1991
PURCHASE THE FULL DIRECTORS COMPILATION HERE.

Playboy: All three major film-critics’ organizations have named GoodFellas as best picture and you as best director. Now it’s Academy Award time. Do you want to go out on a limb and predict if this is finally your year for an Oscar?
Scorsese: What does “This is your year” mean, ultimately? When you’re an asthmatic kid from the Lower East Side and you’re watching television and you’re movie-obsessed because the movies and church are all your parents will let you go to, then I suppose it means a great deal. [pauses] I get chills now thinking about the Academy Awards televised in black and white in the early Fifties. But as I grew up, I understood that when they give you an Oscar, it doesn’t mean it’s always for your best picture. Howard Hawks never got one. Alfred Hitchcock never got one. Orson Welles never got one. Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe. Everything has to be kept in perspective. If I win, it doesn’t mean that GoodFellas is better directed than Raging Bull or Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. I think a great deal of the Academy, but much of it has to do with timing. The only thing you can do is make more pictures. In other words, it’s the old story: You keep proving yourself time after time after time. [smiles] It’s like this Playboy Interview: Where were you ten years ago?

Playboy: Well, you’ve reached a certain level, and—
Scorsese: Reached a certain level? I didn’t reach that level with Raging Bull ten years ago? I certainly did; it’s the same picture I’ve been making for fifteen years. I think people just began to understand and realize that. And maybe you’ve interviewed everyone else so there’s only me around. And while you were doing all the other people, Scorsese’s still chopping away and making these pictures.

Playboy: Back to the Oscars. You do want one, don’t you?
Scorsese: I’d love to have a bunch of Oscars. It would be fun. But I’m at a point in my life where I’m just happy enough to make the pictures. But I feel good about any awards. I love the film-critics’ awards from different cities; I’d love the grand prize again in Cannes if I could get it. GoodFellas got the Golden Pit Award [for insensitivity], along with the soap opera Santa Barbara. That was good, because I don’t want GoodFellas to be too respectable.

Playboy: Let’s talk about the work. Why do you direct?
Scorsese: I don’t think I can do anything else.

Playboy: You can give us a better answer than that.
Scorsese: Well, despite all the pain of it, all the difficulty, a lot of times, I’ve made things happen that I really enjoy. Actors do something that I don’t expect, or they interpret what’s there perfectly. You hear me laugh on the tracks a great deal. The beauty of it is when I get into the editing room and combine what they did on the set with my pre-thought-up cuts and camera moves. I’m fascinated by the moving image. It’s like a miracle to me. I’m obsessed with those sprocket holes. Sometimes, in editing, we stop on the little frame and go, “Look!” Perhaps it’s half-flash-framed because it’s the end of the tape. Or the expression on the actor’s face is so beautiful we have the frame printed up and we put it on the wall. And then putting music on: the music in GoodFellas or Taxi Driver. I just want to listen to it over and over. Those are the joys, the rewards. That’s it. That’s a lot.

Playboy: What are the problems?
Scorsese: On certain films, every day was anxiety-producing, just wondering if I was going to get enough done for the day—let alone if it was going to be the shots that I had planned, the performances I had worked on. Let alone if it was going to be any good. Another problem, of course, is not having enough money to make the picture.

Playboy: It’s never enough, is it?
Scorsese: Well, when you really know it’s enough, that can be a problem, too.

Playboy: In four days, you’ll start shooting a new film, Cape Fear, with Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange and other surprise stars. Are you excited?
Scorsese: I’m nervous.

Playboy: But you’ve made thirteen films.
Scorsese: Yeah, but it’s a matter of being afraid of becoming complacent about the ability to make films. If I’m not nervous, then there’s something to be nervous about.

Playboy: You mention a period of excess. That was when you were roommates with the Band’s Robbie Robertson in the Hollywood Hills. What happened?
Scorsese: It was pretty self-destructive. Lucky to get out of it alive. I nearly died. But I did it; it’s over.
Playboy: Did what?
Scorsese: [Uncomfortable] Knock around, party after party.
Playboy: Drugs?
Scorsese: Whatever. Everything you could get your hands on. We had some good times, but eventually, I began to ask myself, What was this life ultimately going to be like? Were we going to hit the ultimate party? Meet the ultimate young woman? The ultimate drug? What? No!

Playboy: When did you realize that?
Scorsese: Toward the end. Of course, Robbie and I had extremely creative, interesting discussions. We’d have little soirees in our house on Mulholland, and we’d screen movies—Jean Cocteau, Sam Fuller, Luchino Visconti—all night. We’d close off all the windows so we didn’t see any light coming up in the morning. We didn’t want any light coming in. It really got to the point where I got so bewildered by it all that I couldn’t function creatively. I realized that something had to be done about my having “checked out” this way of life.

Playboy: Checked out? Come on. This wasn’t a case of mere curiosity.
Scorsese: Whatever you want to call it. It’s a symptom of my having developed later in life than other people. You go out and say, Well, I’m going to have some fun. It’s like watching some old cartoon where people do stupid things. It gets very boring after a while. I was just acting out like a child would.

All that stuff eventually found its way into Raging Bull. I also put some of it into The Last Waltz. In fact, when I finished The Last Waltz, I thought that it was the best work that I had done. That’s what I felt. And I still wasn’t happy. Even the good work wasn’t making me happy. That’s when I had to really start to find out what was going on.

Playboy: You’ve said before that you use your films as personal therapy.
Scorsese: Yeah, that was another stupid thing I’ve said—as if there’s an inner rage in you when you make, say, Taxi Driver, and at the end of it, you think the rage has been expelled. It hasn’t. No movie is going to do that for you.

Playboy: Can you describe the ideal film you’d like to make?
Scorsese: Pictures that interest me as much as possible personally, are experimental and stay within the system somehow so that they can be shown in theaters. I’ve always tried to blend “personal” movies with being inside the industry. A lot of my success has to do with sacrifice: being paid very little for certain types of pictures and learning to work on a very, very small budget.

Playboy: Isn’t that increasingly difficult in the era of the megahit?
Scorsese: Yeah. I’ve got to be lucky just to make fifty or sixty million dollars on a picture. I have a great love for organized studios in Hollywood and the way the system works. I’ll argue, I’ll discuss, I’ll complain and I’ll say, “Yeah, but if you’re making too many films that you expect to make two hundred million dollars on, where are the new people going to come from?” And, sure enough, there’s a wonderful sturdiness about independent film making in America. For example, where was Tim Burton a few years ago? Doing smaller pictures. It isn’t as if we got some guy who had worked ten, fifteen years in the business to direct Batman and that’s why it became the four-hundred-million-dollar epic.

Playboy: When did you make your last confession?
Scorsese: Oh, 1965, I think. I’ve been confessing most of the time since then on film, so it doesn’t matter. My old friends who are priests, they look at my films and they know. Still, I can’t help being religious. I’m looking for the connection between God and man, like everybody else. Some say there is no God, and that’s the end of the connection. We exist and then we don’t exist.

Playboy: And the women in your other films are also allowed to be strong. Taxi Driver, for instance.
Scorsese: You’re the first person in fifteen years to say that.

Playboy: Do you agree?
Scorsese: Oh, totally. Others have missed it, though I’ve really tried to make it clear. Even in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, I was trying to do something radical in terms of women. But ultimately, we all came to the conclusion that it was OK if she wanted to live with somebody. I felt bad about it and thought maybe it wasn’t a radical enough statement for that time of feminism.

But I like women. A lot of the people who’ve worked with me for years are women: my editor, my producers, my production managers. I find that they have a whole other point of view. It’s fascinating to me. I was the first instructor at New York University to allow women to direct. They didn’t have any women directors.

Playboy: The question, of course, is how women react to your films.
Scorsese: I’ll tell you one interesting anecdote about this. After the [American Film Institute] tribute to David Lean, there were some cocktails. I’d been working with a number of the archivists and one of them introduced me to another archivist, a young woman. We talked awhile, then she said, “I must say that I’m an admirer of your films. After all, I am a woman.” I don’t get it.

Playboy: If you had to do it over again, would you do it the same?
Scorsese: Oh, there’s no doubt. I would have to, because the mistakes are even more important than the successes.

Playboy: Any other wisdom to share?
Scorsese: I’m reminded of a sequence I always loved from Diary of a Country Priest. The priest is listening to a woman’s problems. She’s had a very hard time. He tells her something I’ve always felt deep down: “God is not a torturer. He just wants us to be merciful with ourselves.”

Playboy: Is that the kind of advice you’d give to Martin Scorsese?
Scorsese: It’s good advice. I’m just trying to get through every minute of the day. It’s the continuing struggle. It sounds pretentious, but I mean it in a good way. I don’t mean being an achiever. I mean accomplishing whatever there is to accomplish between friends and in relationships. I was pretty strongly single-minded when I was young. I knew that I wanted to be a director, and I got that. And when you get it, when you get your dream, what do you do with it?

Playboy: Good question.
Scorsese: You go minute by minute.