martin scorsese references

Because that boom out [a huge camera pullback, isolating Cooper from the rest of the community] made me understand a little about effective imagery on the screen. Why was that so effective when he was so small in the frame? I went back and studied that one.

You know, in Sicily 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.

The struggle of the father and the son. The good brother and the bad one. And the good brother schmuck.

But as a kid I was fascinated by Ancient Rome because of the church. You had to get away from the pressure, and there was no place to go except the church. they were Italians and Italian Americans who were dealing with the older Italian community. So there was a disconnect with the younger people who were growing up in the mid fifties to the late fifties.

The priests was disappointed with John Wayne's character but we understood, you know, the darkness and the towering rage.

It's something

But I’ve never forgotten The River [Jean Renoir’s coming-of-age tale, set in India, about three girls falling in love with a former soldier] on that big screen. I was eight years old, nine years old. It was an astounding movie to me, and it still is. In fact, I showed it to Wes Anderson about four or five years ago. And I just spoke to Wes two days ago, and he said, That’s when it began, his film The Darjeeling Limited.

Yeah. He said, while he was watching it, he said to himself, I think there might be something here. And then it opened him up to Satyajit Ray films, and the Merchant-Ivory films they made in India.

Why does one remember a scene? Like the scene in Force of Evil where Thomas Gomez takes his friend who is ratting him out to a restaurant late at night to have coffee.

But when my father took me to see it, I had trouble with it, because it was more psychologically mean-spirited. It was very disturbing, almost an ugly picture of the West.

The way they were dressed, it had an authenticity to it, and there’s an extraordinary scene in a bar where Robert Mitchum fights Robert Preston. They’re wearing these heavy coats and the fight is not the traditional cowboy fight that I was used to seeing—the darkness, the low angle, these men sort of tumbling on each other, it was humiliating for the two of them. But it had a truth to it, and it was great how this noir aspect to the movie was really effective.

There are some great Catholic artists. For example, Roberto Rossellini and his film Europa ’51. That for me was something that had hope. It has to do with the teachings of the New Testament. I really bought into it, because of what I saw around me. I thought this is the right idea: feeling for the other person

There was no doubt when I was very young and I saw Duel in the Sun [the epic, heavily sexualized western of 1946], there were some edited sequences, spectacle sequences, not the melodramatic stuff. When they gather all over the ranch. It was the best scene ever.

Sam Fuller’s first film. My father took me to see that when I was about six or seven years old. That ending. And those close-ups are amazing. I remember those close-ups very strongly. But the thing is, I knew it wasn’t your traditional western—a High Noon kind of thing. Something else was going on there. It was more intense. But I think the big one for me was Shane.

there was something about the way the director [George Stevens] used the medium. For example, the fight scenes, the way the action erupts. And the way Shane goes for his gun—the use of sound effects and editing. And it cuts to Brandon De Wilde and his eyes open. And, of course, the fight in the bar. It’s beautifully constructed. You watch how it builds, and builds, and builds. Now, these days, I notice the music helps it to a certain extent. But, still, it’s got the traditional scene, which I did in Gangs of New York—you know, the intimidation at the bar.

When Brando came on the screen in On the Waterfront, my whole idea of acting changed. until Brando, cinema was the rhythm and the timing of the performers, like Judy Holliday and Broderick Crawford and William Holden in Born Yesterday: George Cukor directed that, and these films were plays, but yet they don’t feel like plays. You know, they don’t feel stagebound.

I learned alot of sound editing from it. About the plane, and the way it was landing, the way the director cuts to the plane. They hear nothing, nothing, and then suddenly the buzzing gets louder and louder, and comes right at the camera. I used that a lot in The Aviator.

There was something about watching The Red Shoes that was all-encompassing, the excessive performances—Anton Walbrook, Moira Shearer—the makeup on their faces, it was extraordinary, the beauty of the production design. Then this very strange ballet sequence, which visually had more to do with silent cinema than anything else.

The Third Man and Citizen Kane were the ones that actually made me try to direct—coupled with John Cassavetes doing Shadows, which has an improvisatory style. His people seemed like people I kind of knew. It had a freedom to it.

But what I caught in Nevsky [about a Russian prince defeating an invading army in a famous battle on the ice; Sergei Eisenstein, 1938] was the editing. The battle scenes were amazing in terms of energy and visualization. And very often it was a mixture of silent cinema and sound cinema with a very, very crude-sounding sound track—Prokofiev on the track, very, very crudely recorded, so that the instruments sounded as if they were recorded in the twelfth century.

But The Searchers was the key one, because of the nature of John Wayne in that. And the look of it. I saw it in VistaVision. What happened was that I realized there was one way of making a picture, which was the classical cinema. It was an infuriating movie for me. Because it has greatness, and it has banality.

I just loved it. I went to it from theater to theater. It was my favorite film as a kid. And then On the Waterfront wiped all that away. It didn’t wipe away the love for it, but I didn’t have to go see it again. But there was something about the ancient world and the way they shot it in modern Egypt that was interesting to me, using wide screen. And the sound, the music, was interesting, with Yma Sumac on the track, and it made me think of other cultures. Maybe it was all ersatz, but still I liked it a lot.

to understand Raging Bull

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