6 February 2003
The Sydney Morning Herald - click here for link to original source

A good fella gets personal

The sage of innocence ... Martin Scorsese, right, says his latest work, Gangs of New York, is his most personal.
The man behind some of cinema's most brutal images talks war and peace to Garry Maddox.

The shaping of America through violence is a recurring theme in Martin Scorsese's remarkable career. So it's not surprising one of the world's foremost filmmakers is concerned about his country going to war. "It's certainly a very upsetting time," he says. "I'm only one voice here but I hope all of this can be settled without extreme violence."

The director of some of the most memorable and influential American films of the past 30 years - including Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ and Goodfellas - fears a long, drawn-out war. "It's a new kind of war too - it's just not going to end. It reminds me of reading the history of the crusades ... the continuum of attacks and violence [back then] just didn't seem to come to a real end."

Asked whether filmmakers have a role in preventing war, he says the real issue is "whether we will be able to".

"As a private citizen, we certainly can. Will that matter? I'm not sure. Look what happened with the Vietnam anti-war movement. It took many years for the war to end," he says.

"Is there a possibility of doing work that deals with that? Yes, I think there is, although there might be a period in the first year or so when it might be difficult to get that kind of film made."

Having finally brought his passion, Gangs of New York, to the screen after more than two decades, Scorsese is talking frankly about his career - even its limitations - from New York, despite occasional interruptions from his three-year-old daughter's cries in the next room.

The film, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Daniel Day-Lewis, is his first real epic and is set amidst the violent gang battles in New York in the 1860s.

Scorsese regards Gangs of New York as a very personal film.

"These stories come out of where I grew up, actually the lower east side. I heard these stories when I was seven or eight or nine years old. My father told me stories about the gangs, too ...

"When I used to walk those streets, those cobblestones, they'd have sorts of ghosts coming out of them. You could feel it."

The emerging father-son relationship between gang leader Bill the Butcher (Day-Lewis) and Amsterdam (DiCaprio) connects the film even more to its director's past. "The sense of who the father is becomes very personal for me. Also the idea of having finally to supersede a father - to, in effect, kill your father in order to become [your] own man. That becomes very personal to me."

Still intensely creative at the age of 60, Scorsese has other stories that he wants to bring to the screen. "I want to go back to when my grandparents came over here in New York in 1909 and go through 40 or 50 years of generations of the family to show how they assimilated as much as possible to become New Yorkers and Americans," he says.

"That's a project I've had in mind for many years but I'm still very close to it and I want to get a little more objective about it.

"There are also a number of religious themes I'd still like to deal with - to try to find a story that deals with people making moral choices. That's what stays in my mind, whether they're gangsters or priests."

Asked about his career, Scorsese is surprisingly candid. "I feel like a person that's been running and running. I turn around and take a deep breath and before I realise it, 25, 30 years have gone by," he says.

"I think it's more personal than I thought it would be, which doesn't mean that's a good thing in terms of entertainment. I thought I wanted to be a director who was entertaining like a traditional Hollywood director. But also had themes that were strong in their work - a style that could be recognised.

"I'm afraid that maybe it's gotten too personal over the years but that's what I can do. That's all I can do."

Even for such an acclaimed director, it has been a struggle to get films financed.

"I'm sure I can get pictures made but, at a certain point, I envisage projects where one needs a substantial budget. As I get older, I'm finding more and more projects like that. Therefore it's very difficult.

"If you get $US95 million [$160 million] to $US100 million or $US110 million to make a film ... you hope that you can get your themes, your ideas, your passion into something that could also work at the box office.

"That's been a tightrope for the past 25 years for me. There's always a danger of falling. Sometimes I fell. I guess I got back up. There's always a danger of falling again."

Having never won an Oscar despite five nominations, Scorsese claims to be unconcerned whether he gets one this year. "It matters to me that Gangs of New York is recognised. That I'm recognised? That time has past. I'm so glad to have gotten to a point where I've made the pictures I've made over the years without having been given an Academy Award as a director.

"But it has got to the point that many Academy members - newer ones and even ones that were voting back in the '70s - really believe that they gave me one or two."

On Hollywood's calculated reliance on franchises and sequels, Scorsese is dismissive. "So many of the big budget action films are literally becoming just consumer product that you consume in a weekend and throw it away. That's a problem," he says.

"However, there's an extraordinary vitality that you see in younger directors like Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Alexander Payne and so many others that are making films. Steven Soderbergh is making Hollywood films and personal films in Hollywood. There's a new energy coming up that is very heartening."

Scorsese is preparing to shoot The Aviator, with DiCaprio playing the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, later this year. He is also executive producer for director Baz Luhrmann's new film about Alexander the Great.

"I really admire his work and I admire the creative energy of his style. His visualisation is amazing. A lot of Moulin Rouge is really so exhilarating.

"At first, I screened it on a very big screen and I was sitting real close. So it was a little hard to take in. But then, when I just lay back and let the whole thing roll over me, I went with it. It's very beautiful and very interesting particularly in visualising drama through the lens."

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