Martin Scorsese interrupts his remarks on the subject of fear and guilt and lies, and suddenly addresses the tape recorder: "Audiences planning to see the movie--when you read this, don't listen to all that. It's a picture about a man who wants revenge, and it's a lot of fun."
The picture that has occasioned this plea from its impassioned director is "Cape Fear." The man who wants revenge is played by Robert De Niro--with Jessica Lange, Nick Nolte and young Juliette Lewis as the attractive victims he relentlessly pursues.
We're about halfway through lunch, and the salmon and lentils Scorsese has been picking at seem already transformed into pure adrenaline. Silhouetted against one of those ambiguous Manhattan November skies, wearing a gray shirt open at the collar and a very well-cut black jacket, Scorsese looks pale, intense, compact, somehow at once friendly and ready to spring.
He talks faster than most human beings can think, trying to figure all the angles as he races along. The sum of the angles, of course, is the rich sensibility forged of the explosive Italian-American, Lower East Side life of the '40s, rock 'n' roll street culture of the '50s, aspirations to priestdom in the '60s, and then New York University Film School, cinema buffdom, Hollywood in the early '70s, and ensuing dramas, temptations and ordeals.
Scorsese's career over the last two decades seems a map of the tribulations that must be endured by an American director who is compelled to make personal movies. Buffeted by Hollywood fashions and vagaries, forced to squander his energies in often futile quests for money, at the mercy of fickle word-of-mouth, he has nevertheless continued to make idiosyncratic films. Some Scorsese films--"Mean Streets" and "Raging Bull," for instance--have come to be considered extraordinary documents of American culture. He explains his steadfastness: "You have to keep your own course."
His work grapples with crises of the soul. In his movies there usually lies a moral contradiction in the hero's heart: the hood who wants to be good in "Mean Streets," the champion boxer who needs his opponents to defeat him in "Raging Bull," the crazed vet in "Taxi Driver" who believes he can right injustice with violence, and, of course, the saintly yet flawed and insufficient Jesus of "The Last Temptation of Christ."
There seems no stereotype Scorsese fears to defy, including that of himself as a master of only urban-jungle films. Yes, he did last year's brilliant take on the Mafia, "GoodFellas," but years before that was "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore." He hopes one day to make a Western. "I don't want to do a neurotic Western," he says. "What I'd love to do is a Western where you'd be able to do a big landscape. Of course I'd still be shooting people in bars and long halls."
And as if an ultimate proof of his versatility were necessary, his next project is a film version of Edith Wharton's "The Age of Innocence," a novel of aristocratic Manhattan life in the 19th Century that Scorsese calls "a costume piece." But that story, too, has its tormented hero.
To many of his fans, Scorsese is a one-man passion play, a stylist, a truth-teller, a populist, an aesthete, an ethicist.
He's talking about guilt, fear, and all that is suppressed in families because this constitutes the added "layer" that enabled him to undertake a remake of the 1962 thriller that featured Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum. He had resisted the "Cape Fear" project, first developed by Steven Spielberg, for a long time. "What happened is, I finally started to listen to Steve and De Niro. I was down in TriBeCa one night and they finally forced me to read the script. I had read it twice before and I was very busy with 'GoodFellas' and with a lot of other personal things going on and I couldn't focus on it. And it's like, 'Cape Fear'? A remake? Who wants to be bothered? This is insane.
"Finally I went to watch a reading of the script. Halfway through it I kind of zoned out. . . . There were about eight of us at the table and I finally told Steve, 'I don't like the people. I don't like the family. I just don't like it. I just don't like the script.' He said (Scorsese mimics Spielberg in a deep voice), 'Well, Marty, if you don't like it you know you can change it.' "
The way Scorsese changed it was to transform the happy family (something he says Spielberg knows how to film) into an unhappy family (something he knows how to film), a family that was "already wounded" from the inside--by the father's infidelities, the mother's anger and the child's withdrawal--before it is threatened from the outside by the ex-con determined to destroy them.
