Celina Murga has experienced what all young film-makers must dream of – being mentored by Martin Scorsese. The master craftsman of American cinema explains why fostering talent is important to him, while Murga reveals what it’s like to be on set with a legend
Kevin Maher1965, midtown Manhattan, outside the production offices of Elia Kazan. A 23-year-old film student called Martin Scorsese is standing in front of his hero, the already legendary film-maker Kazan (On the Waterfront, East of Eden), and begging him for a break. Scorsese has written Kazan a long fan letter, has previously accosted him after a guest lecture that Kazan gave at Washington Square College (soon to be NYU Film School), and now finally has buttonholed the reluctant auteur for a brief two-minute face-to-face. “Can I be on the set of your next picture, The Arrangement, just as an observer?” asks Scorsese. “No, I don’t do that,” answers Kazan, flatly. “Well, I’ve got a script that I’m trying to make into a feature,” continues Scorsese, ever hopeful. “Could you read that?” Kazan winces. “I’m trying to write my own scripts right now, so I don’t want to read anyone else’s.” The two men stare at each other for a moment, then Kazan simply wishes Scorsese the best of luck, turns on his heels, and is gone. They will later become close friends, and indeed Scorsese will present Kazan with a Lifetime Achievement Oscar at the 1999 Academy Awards, but for now the younger man remains on the pavement, watching his hero depart, and thinks, “If I ever get into a position where I can offer some young film-maker an observer’s role on one of my pictures, then I will. Because, of all people, I know how much it will mean to them.”
2008, W57th Street, Manhattan, inside the production offices of Martin Scorsese. The 65-year-old film-making legend is torn in two. As much as he wants to be here, on a sofa in his office, surrounded by leather-bound film journals and old Italian movie posters, to discuss his mentoring project, he really needs to be there, across the hallway, in the editing suite, where Leonardo DiCaprio is currently leaping from frame to frame in another key scene from Scorsese’s new mental asylum thriller, Shutter Island. “I’m in the middle of editing a sequence right now, and I can feel the tug,” says Scorsese, dressed in a sharp blue pinstriped suit and white open-necked shirt, and gamely leaning that familiarly inscrutable face of his – the neat bulbous nose, the plaintive eyes and the bushy black caterpillar eyebrows – upwards and sideways, as if he’s being dragged towards the office wall by an invisible tractor beam. “Got to get back! Got to get back!” he jokes, before a great whoop of bass laughter.
If Scorsese seems to be in ebullient mood today, it might just be a subtle form of hysteria leaking in from the Shutter Island edit, which is being, he claims, increasingly resistant to easy thrills. “The picture is a thriller, in a sense,” he says. “But the words ‘in a sense’ are what I’m dealing with right now! Ahahaha!” Or, alternatively, it might just be because his status as a grand old master of the movie business and an establishment mentor to an entire generation of upcoming film-makers – which is the ostensible focus of our conversation – is something that this former perennial outsider cannot yet comprehend.
Of course, he says, he’s been an unofficial mentor for years now. Wherever possible, and motivated by his famously fruitless early Kazan meeting, he has brought aspiring young film-makers on to his productions in the hope that they will learn through osmosis alone. “I first created the position – I called it production assistant, but it was really as an observer – on Taxi Driver for a young woman called Amy Jones [who subsequently became a writer whose hits include Mystic Pizza and Indecent Proposal],” he says. “It was purely about observing the production without being intrusive. I’m not interested in people talking, or being there for any reason other than finding out how to express themselves with the moving image. That’s it. You take in what you take in, and take away what you can. I’ve done it for most of my movies. Some people have gone on to do great things, and others have left the business entirely.”
Today, however, Scorsese’s mentorship has become official, thanks to his participation in the loftily titled Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. Here masters in their fields (including Toni Morrison in literature and Sir Peter Hall in theatre) are paired with promising novices from around the globe. For Scorsese this meant inviting aspiring 35-year-old Argentine film-maker Celina Murga to spend seven weeks on the Massachusetts set of Shutter Island. Originally offered a choice of three candidates by the project, Scorsese says he chose Murga on the strength of her movie A Week Alone (which is screening at the London Film Festival). “Her film seemed to be an accomplished work from someone who has a way of looking at the world,” he says. “It was very sensitive, very unique, and a film that I can learn from.”
Murga is dumbfounded by Scorsese’s very public appraisal of her work. A Week Alone is an atmospheric look at the empty, ultimately destructive lives of a gang of bourgeois Argentine teenagers left home alone in a gated community – think Larry Clark, but with a social conscience. “If you asked me to list all the directors in the world whom I’d like to be mentored by, then Martin would be there at the top,” says Murga. “I think he chose me precisely because my film was so different to anything he had done. And he’s very interested in sharing different film-making experiences.”
Murga adds that, ironically, despite his much-vaunted “no talking” rule for on-set observers, the director himself was an inveterate chatterbox. “He talked to me the whole time,” she confesses. “He loves to talk, and was constantly sharing things about his movie-making process, which was amazing.”
Scorsese says that his own mentors have included producer Roger Corman (for whom he directed his debut feature, Boxcar Bertha), British director Michael Powell, and even his own college professor, Haig Manoogian (to whom Raging Bull is dedicated). He says that, although film-making is still a male-dominated industry and “will never be an even playing field”, he didn’t choose mentoring subjects such as Murga, or even Jones, just because they were women. “The bottom line is about having the drive,” he says. “And it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman. You’ll both run into the same difficulties when you’re making a movie, and you have to possess the tenacity and the will to survive.”
Scorsese is, of course, the great survivor. The tenacious film student who became a director of critical favourites (Taxi Driver), of Oscar also-rans (Goodfellas) and commercial duds (The King of Comedy), he suddenly finds himself sitting here with a $289 million box-office champ (The Departed) behind him, a long-coveted Academy Award (for directing the same), and a reputation that is now peerless among living film-makers. “But this isn’t my fault!” he protests. “I didn’t intend things to turn out this way! When I set out to make The Departed I wanted simply to do a stylistic exercise, but as we went on it became more personal. I was hoping it would do well, because of the nature of the film and the stars that were in it. But for me, with my record, doing well isn’t $289 million! That was a total surprise. But it doesn’t mean that now I’m going to change, and only make a certain kind of film. No, the goals have stayed the same, even if you think I’m finally working from the inside.”
1950, Little Italy, Manhattan, inside the Scorsese family apartment. Eight-year-old Martin Scorsese is sitting at the kitchen table. Other children are playing outside, but Martin, weak from asthma, has turned his attention to creative pursuits. He has started drawing his favourite movies in panel strips, almost like comic books. He draws the best bits, the scenes he remembers, and some he makes up completely, in frames that run across the page. Suddenly, there’s a knock on the door and in walks the 65-year-old Scorsese from today. Scorsese chuckles fondly at the very thought of meeting his younger self, and happily plays along with the hypothetical. He grins as he thinks aloud, “What advice would I give myself? How would I mentor me?” He pauses for a moment, and then goes straight into cineaste mode, deadpan, and without irony. “I guess the first thing
I would talk about would be the aspect ratio, the frame composition and the camera movement, because sometimes the panels I drew had three different images in them, corresponding to three different parts of a camera move.” He continues, at length, fully fleshing out the fantasy lecture. He concludes then, with a sigh, “But the more important thing is to write everything down. I would say, ‘Write down what’s going on around you, what’s going on in your family, on the street, and with your friends. Just keep writing and writing. You don’t even have to think it’s a script. Write down as much as you can, and then out of that you might eventually be able to pull a picture’ – which, over the years, I have been able to do.”
Scorsese’s office door swings open. He’s needed in the Shutter Island edit. He waves away his assistant. “Five more minutes!” he says, adding that he wants to talk some more, but is worried that he might just be procrastinating to avoid the troublesome sequence next door. He says that his next movie, Silence, will surely be a challenge to all those who suspect he’s gone mainstream. “It’s set in 17th-century Japan, and it’s about the Jesuits and the persecution of the Christians at that time. And it’s going to have to be made in an entirely different way to the others.” He then talks about spirituality and about his migration, as a young man, from the church to the cinema. “I wasn’t capable of the selflessness of the priesthood,” he says, “but I was able to explore that in my movies instead.” He says that at the best of times, in the cinema, even now, he’s capable of being moved spiritually by film. “You can be taken out of yourself and transcend your experience,” he says. It happened to him only last week, he adds, at a private screening of Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light.
He wonders how long he has left directing movies, being the mentor and the master. He says that he wants to do it right until the end. He taps the wood of the coffee table in front of him as he says this. “The thing is, it’s a very physical profession, and one has to be in good shape,” he says. “I wish I could make a film every year about four people in a room, but unfortunately they don’t come out that way. Not for me, anyway.” And with that, and as if suddenly reminded by the greater task at hand, he shoots up from the couch and back into action. He marches out of the room, across the corridor and into the editing suite, prepared finally and fully to put the thrills into a thriller.
A Week Alone screens at The Times BFI London Film Festival on October 28 and 30. Tickets are available at www.bfi.org.uk/lff
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