“It comes out of an anger about the way things are”: Martin Scorsese on The Departed

Perhaps it’s no surprise that Martin Scorsese wondered if he ought to make The Departed. Even though the Boston-Irish setting provided a new spin on the milieu of gangsters, corruption and violence he’s been so identified with in the 30 years since Mean Streets, he could be forgiven for doubting that he’d anything fresh left to say about it. ”Yet for some reason I kept being drawn to the story and how writer William Monahan had put it together.”

As is by now well known, the original tale of two long-term ‘moles’ planted within the mob and the police respectively comes from Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s 2002 thriller Infernal Affairs, set in the world of the Triads and the Hong Kong police, which has already spawned two local sequels. In transposing this to Boston and refiguring the conflict as between gangsters and police who are both Irish-American, Scorsese has recruited a high-profile cast that includes Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg, in addition to such recent regulars as Leonardo DiCaprio and Alec Baldwin, plus Ray Winstone making his Scorsese debut. By all accounts, Nicholson’s gang boss Frank Costello emerges as a figure of monstrous evil, and the game of cat and mouse with each mole trying to protect his identity creates a climate of terrifying moral bankruptcy and uncertainty. For Scorsese, “It comes out of an anger that’s really strong about the way things are, which I’m trying to harness, because I don’t want to be just nihilistic.”

Scorsese is understandably irked by the assumption that he has only made gangster movies, since fewer than a quarter of his 20 features have underworld settings. “This is a world I’m always associated with. I know it, I hate it and I also love it – it’s like a drug in that even though I detest it, I keep going back.” Back because, in this case, The Departed allows the connoisseur in him to tap into “the tradition of film noir in America” as well as to explore a contemporary setting where the Irish-American gangsters and police are engaged in “some kind of perennial war that has no foreseeable end. No one knows who they really are, or who anyone else really is. Institutions like the police, government, the church, offer no help. It’s a world that’s morally at ground zero.”

Despite that modish note, Scorsese has no desire to jump on the post-9/11 bandwagon, and still isn’t sure if his latest venture into big-budget Hollywood production has any message for America or for those who consume its movies around the world, except that “the only way to go from here is up.” But his continuing belief that movies must have passion and meaning, even while they have to entertain, is palpable. And although he will never criticise a fellow film-maker, it’s clear that he feels isolated among a generation that were dubbed the ‘movie brats’ 25 years ago but have since (with the notable exception of Steven Spielberg) largely fallen silent or retreated into formulaic film-making.

I had gone to New York to talk to Scorsese not about The Departed, which was still under wraps nearing the end of its long post-production, but about his plans to make a very different film. Silence is a novel by Japanese writer Endo Shusaku (1923-1996) which Scorsese has had an option on for over 15 years. Set in the 17th century, it uses the story of the Jesuit missionaries who came to Japan and suffered torture and martyrdom for their faith as a basis for exploring the apparent conflict between traditional Japanese and western Christian values. Endo himself was a Japanese Catholic, and Scorsese believes that he has an important message for the modern world: a message that Scorsese, the son of Sicilian Catholics and raised in New York, has been struggling to define for himself ever since he first ventured outside Little Italy.

The novel was proposed to him by one of the churchmen who gathered in 1988 to give their views on the controversial The Last Temptation of Christ. Paul Moore, then Episcopal Archbishop of New York, found Scorsese’s film, to his surprise, “Christologically correct”. Scorsese laughs as he recalls the phrase, not because he didn’t value such unexpected praise, but because he knows that he was working on a more naive level. Still under the influence of Pasolini’s gritty 1964 Gospel According to St. Matthew, and burning with a desire to recreate the drama and iconography of the Passion that he had loved since his days as an altar boy, his The Last Temptation aimed to involve a contemporary audience in the challenge posed by Christ’s incarnation. Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel provided a framework by telling the gospel story from Jesus’ point of view, as a carpenter who recognises his destiny and fights against it. In fact, this meant taking the idea of the incarnation – of Christ as truly human – seriously, rather than as a theoretical given.

But what really made The Last Temptation a matter for debate was Kazantzakis’ big question: what if Christ was tempted to abandon his mission at the last moment, to step down from the cross and settle for a normal life? This is the ‘last temptation’, and as we’re led to believe that Jesus has fallen for it, it’s as if we too are being tested.

Scorsese agrees that the saddest irony is that while The Last Temptation probably makes most sense to committed Christians, the majority have never seen it, having been warned to stay away by their priests and ministers. He’s well aware that the whole congregations who were bussed to Mel Gibson’s 2004 The Passion of the Christ were the same people told not to watch his picture. He respects Gibson’s convictions, but regards his Passion as “more like going to pray” than posing questions about what Christ and Christianity mean today. And he’s still hopeful that The Last Temptation will reach a new, less prejudiced audience when it eventually appears on DVD.

After the archbishop gave Silence to Scorsese it took a year for him to read it, which he finally did while he was in Japan to appear as Van Gogh in Kurosawa’s elegiac fantasy Dreams. Deeply moved by Endo’s portrayal of Christian faith being tested, he arranged a deal to film the novel through the Italian company Cecchi Gori and started writing the script with his long-time collaborator Jay Cocks while working on Cape Fear (1991). In retrospect the timing is significant, since this was one of the films Scorsese had agreed to make in return for Universal backing The Last Temptation. He still looks back on the period of Cape Fear and Casino (1995) with a shudder, even if some, like me, regard the latter as a malign masterpiece that explores the lure of evil with an almost Miltonic grandeur.

Scorsese’s eventual salvation appeared in the form of Kundun (1997), a film that came as a script by Melissa Mathieson and was acceptable to his new studio Disney. The challenge of telling the Dalai Lama’s early lifestory absorbed some of the frustration he felt while unable to pursue Silence. Apart from its specifically Buddhist dimension, it offered the theme of a young man trying to lead a good life amid obstacles and temptations – which seems to be the underlying template of almost all Scorsese’s work. And from the Dalai Lama Scorsese learned a distinction that gave him a new insight into Endo: “Having faith is very different from being spiritually evolved.”

By now Scorsese felt he was beginning to grasp the profound challenge Endo posed to conventional western Christianity. “Silence was the answer to the void I felt after The Last Temptation. What I found there was this great compassion for Judas and for Mary Magdalene, and the idea of Jesus not as someone who glows in the dark, but as someone who’s afraid to die – remember how he reacts when Lazarus reaches out from the grave.” But he was still no closer to being able to make the film, even though his next project would tackle another spiritual quest, in the less exotic form of Nicolas Cage scouring the streets of what had once been known as Hell’s Kitchen for human wreckage to save. Bringing Out the Dead (1999) appealed to Scorsese not only as a New Yorker but also as a contemporary take on the theme his hero Roberto Rossellini had explored in Europa ‘51. There Ingrid Bergman is driven to give up a pampered life and devote herself to helping others in the desolation of post-war Europe. In the more sceptical and hallucinatory Bringing Out the Dead, based on the story of a real paramedic, Cage’s character Frank is torn between an almost messianic belief he must save people and the acceptance that he’s “only a witness”.

Probably the most remarkable aspect of Bringing Out the Dead is the visions Frank experiences, especially the recurrent one of the street-waif Rose, whom he failed to save. Scorsese now thinks the realisation of these visions may have been too concrete, but insists that he could never go about making a film like this in a “Protestant” way – despite his respect for Bergman – where the visions would remain wholly subjective. “That’s not me: I have to show them, even if they’re clumsy. I think you really do see these things.”

The following year Scorsese was offered the unexpected opportunity to realise his dream of creating a fresco of his city’s earliest period as a battleground between competing factions in Gangs of New York. But even in this sprawling epic there is something of his continuing spiritual quest, as the new Irish-Catholic immigrants are shown assuming the religious identity they would still have a century later, when young Martin was educated by their descendants, the Irish nuns of St Patrick’s School, and especially by the charismatic Father Principe. It was this young priest, arriving in Little Italy in 1953, who opened the youthful Scorsese’s eyes to a wider world, and also encouraged him to see that apparently contemporary films could have a religious meaning: he described the battered Brando leading the dockers back to work in On the Waterfront as “a kind of Calvary”.

This sense of a world permeated with the drama of Catholicism – in which “the actual transubstantiation is real, better than any movie: you actually consume the body of Christ” – is palpable in Scorsese’s earliest film-making. In Who’s That Knocking at My Door? (1968) a church statue literally bleeds before Harvey Keitel’s guilt-torn J.R.; the same Keitel famously speaks of atoning for sins on the street rather than in church in the opening words of Mean Streets (1973). Scorsese still recalls vividly the naive “faith of youth, which came from my own inward nature, protecting myself as I was growing up. That’s when I read Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter.” But he has since lived through four turbulent decades in the history of the Catholic church that have seen its authority and integrity challenged on all sides. After the promise of reform launched by the council known as Vatican II in the early 1960s, the church has increasingly set its face against modernisation. This has left many Catholics of Scorsese’s generation disappointed and angry, especially as financial and sexual scandals have revealed an organisation seemingly more concerned with self-protective secrecy than with Christian candour.

Such revelations haven’t driven Scorsese to abandon the church but rather to become clearer about separating the earthly institution from its role as – well, what exactly? He has been greatly impressed by Garry Wills’ 2002 bestseller Why I Am a Catholic and supports Wills’ wish to insist on a core set of beliefs quite distinct from the “man-made church” of the Vatican. Scorsese says he’s neither a radical Catholic nor even a “good” one by normal standards. Yet he is clearly preoccupied by the question of faith: “How can anyone have faith in the modern world? We saw the explosion of interest in spirituality in the 1960s. Maybe it was driven by drugs to some extent, but at least it was exploring, questioning – and now that’s been completely shut down. Still, we have to do everything possible to keep asking questions.”

Indeed, it’s the question of how to live one’s life with compassion and, as the existentialists would say, authenticity, that has kept Silence on his agenda for over 15 years. Yet it wasn’t until during the editing of The Departed that Scorsese and Cocks finally wrote a script he considers workable. The crux of Endo’s novel appears to be the drama of torture and doubt that leads the captive Father Rodrigues towards committing apostasy – publicly renouncing his faith. What Scorsese has come to realise, after living with the book and studying Endo’s other work, is that “Rodrigues thinks he’s Jesus, but in the end he discovers he’s Judas.” The starring role he has envisaged in his own story in fact belongs to the cowardly Japanese convert Kichijiro, a “truly disgusting human being” who keeps falling short of his ideals and asking for forgiveness. Rodrigues is forced to recognise that a Christianity true to Christ’s example demands he grant Kichijiro forgiveness – and, as Endo writes, only when he overcomes his repulsion does “the face of Christ look straight into his” and fill him with shame as he realises his failure.

This devastating work, hailed by Graham Greene as “one of the finest novels of our time”, allows Scorsese to pursue his concern with “what Jesus meant” (the title of another influential Garry Wills book) in a dramatic form as challenging as Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation. He also thinks the issues the novel raises are more relevant than ever today. “If you have a real faith, then of course you want to make other people as convinced as you are – go out and save their souls! But you can’t impose your beliefs on another culture unless you understand that culture properly, which takes time and compassion. Once the Catholic church was pretty certain of its rightness, as was Islam, and perhaps the Pentecostal Christians today. I can understand that feeling ‘it’s for their own good’, but I resist it. Endo thought the Christianity that would have the most chance in Japan was the feminine side – not the God of judgement but of forgiveness. And I’m interested in how the traditional cultures of Japan, Korea and China accept the evanescence of life and the inevitability of destruction.”

But the task of persuading financiers, a studio and actors to embark on such a spiritual quest remains formidable. Might Daniel Day-Lewis be tempted to return to Scorsese’s fold to contribute his unique brand of intensity to the older priest, already accused of apostasy? Might this also be a chance for Scorsese to work with younger European actors, if the new Hollywood spurns his unfashionable choice of subject? Could he find a way of stepping off the superhighway of big-budget production to work once again on the scale of After Hours (1985) and The Last Temptation (or indeed the ultra-low-budget Taxi Driver, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year)? Such decisions aren’t easy for a director who has fought so long to establish his authority and keep control of his career, in a world where budgets proclaim clout.

Meanwhile back to the present, where The Departed awaits its launch after what were reported to be some outstanding test-screening results which may have allayed studio worries about extreme violence and lack of ‘political correctness’. This is Scorsese’s first film with a strictly contemporary setting for 20 years, he reminds me. I had been telling him about showing some passages from GoodFellas (1990) and Casino as examples of modem montage construction, including the sequence from GoodFellas in which Jimmy (De Niro) calls excitedly from a pay-phone to find out how the “making” of Tommy (Joe Pesci) has gone. When he hears the flat account of Tommy being whacked (delivered by Scorsese’s own father Charles, playing a minor mobster), which we’ve already seen in a few vertiginous shots, De Niro vents his rage on the telephone handset in an outburst that’s almost more violent than the earlier killing. All of which, Scorsese confirms, was carefully designed in advance shot by shot.

Phones, it transpires – though now of the mobile kind – also loom large in The Departed. Extra shooting was needed to clarify this new world of near-constant communication, which has important implications for rethinking traditional space-construction by editing. Scorsese has always been in the forefront of making film form an integral part of his storytelling – from the burst of home-movie colour in Raging Bull (1980) to the historically graduated colour palette of The Aviator (2004). So when he discovered what skilled users could do on mobiles he was keen to include all the tricks of texting – especially “since September 11 had highlighted the perverse uses of all these gadgets.”

It’s hard to imagine Scorsese wanting to tackle 9/11 as directly as his one-time protégé Oliver Stone has in World Trade Center, even though back in 1970 both he and Stone helped make the collective Vietnam-protest documentary Street Scenes. Yet it also seems clear that The Departed does address the moral bankruptcy that appals many Americans of Scorsese’s generation. “It’s scary: is this really the end of morality?” Having been accused of glorifying gangsters and their brutality in GoodFellas and Casino, he is understandably wary of the new film’s likely reception. “There are elements that won’t be settled until the final weeks of the mix: only then will we know how to layer in certain characters and their eccentric behaviour. It’s a great cast, but you have to wrangle them and rein them in – that’s the trick and that’s what I’m doing with Thelma [Schoonmaker, his long-serving editor]. I don’t know if it’s pointing anywhere, but I hope that if we reach the bottom we can maybe start to rebuild. The key is the journey, and one character is making that journey – Billy, Leo DiCaprio’s character – but he runs up against a lot of resistance.”

Scorsese chuckles, no doubt recalling the battles with Warners over the film’s violence and provocation. And his recent reading material has thrown up another frame of reference for this. “I’ve become very fond of the old Icelandic sagas, with their harsh view of life. Also, I’ve just finished Halldor Laxness’ Independent People [a 1946 novel by the Icelandic Nobel prizewinner], which poses the question: is it in our nature to be compassionate, or to deal with problems by violence? That’s the really important issue for me. But of course a film also has to be entertaining – a balance between the box office, the studio and the street.”