Martin Scorsese on The Gangs of New York

Richard Schickel: I suppose the most tormented project you ever did is Gangs of NewYork. martin scorsese Gangs, and Last Temptation. Last Temptation was the worst shoot.

RS: Gangs at least didn't present the same kind of powerful religious conflicts that Last Temptation did.

MS: What I'm referring to is the physical making of the production. Temptation was a matter of shooting time and the weather. We all had a kind of passion for it and just kept pushing through. Whereas in Gangs we had the sets and the actors—everybody was there. It was a different kind of pressure.



I'm too close to the pictures. A lot of them are too damn personal. I’ll always be negative at first, but then I'll talk to some colleagues and think, Well, this was pretty good, even on Gangs of NewYork, which, at times, was nightmarish. Still, some of it was the best time we had in our lives, for a lot of us who worked on it.

RS: Why was it the best time?

MS: Just the nature of what we were able to put together, the world we created, and the enjoyment on the set.

Everybody was exhausted. There were conflicts all around. We had language problems—there were stuntmen from Yugoslavia. We didn't know what was happening sometimes. Yet somehow it was a wonderful place to be at that moment, whatever you may think of the film.

RS: I think the film has brilliant stuff in it.

MS: But as you've said to me, If I could have finished the Draft Riots ... But we never got the money to do the Draft Riots [in massive opposition to the Civil War draft laws, which permitted the well-to-do to buy their way out of military service].

RS: I think it festered so long with you—well over a decade—that something got lost in the festering.

MS: Yeah, if I had maybe done it earlier. But in any event, even knowing that, still they were some of the best times we ever had. And some of the worst, really.

RS: What was so hard about making the film?

MS: The fact that we were running out of money. The pressure to finish. People were leaving, props were being taken away. Extras were leaving. We still had to shoot certain things and I wasn't sure we could shoot them with only three people or whoever was left. We managed, but it was hard. Did I use those shots? Maybe not, but still ... To be honest, I could've kept going. It was almost like some of the big films in the seventies where directors just kept shooting.

But I couldn't go any further. The studio and my backers tried to help me. But at a certain point they said to me, We don't have any more money. That's when I put my money in. And it was swept up within a few days. It was just an obsession for me. I think of the world that I was i n when I was making it. And that affects saying whether I like the film or not.

RS: Why did the movie take so long in the conceptualizing and writing stages? I mean, it became kind of a legend.

MS: Well, obviously, I grew up in that area. And when I became aware of St. Patrick's Old Cathedral and the graveyard around it, with the names on the tombstones, I realized the Irish were there before the Italians. I became fascinated by the history of the New York City downtown. The cobblestones talked to me. I started doing research on it in libraries—on the church, on Archbishop [John] Hughes, the power of the Catholic Church, the Irish at that time. And in 1970, on New Year's Day, I was house-sitting with some friends on Long Island somewhere and I found this book called Gangs of NewYork by Herbert Asbury, and I started reading it. Clearly it related to where I grew up. The section we took from the book was from the 1840s to the 1860s. There also were sections on the Bowery, where I grew up. Raoul Walsh drew on that for The Bowery with Steve Brodie jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge. Everybody still talked about that when I was growing up.

RS: Seriously? That was a long time before you were a kid.

MS: Oh, I remember, my father used to talk about Steve Brodie, some guy jumped off the bridge on a bet, and he lived. The whole struggle between the Irish and Italians was part of my youth in that neighborhood.

RS: So when you were growing up there were still Irish-Italian tensions?

MS: No. There were no more Irish—but we heard about it. We heard stories of how rough it was. My father was growing up there —he was born in 1913—and there was a lot of fighting, a great deal of tension. When we were living there, the Puerto Ricans were moving in. So it was a similar thing, but not as strong. Elizabeth Street at the turn of the century, after Gangs is set, was the street that had the highest infant mortality rate in the city—cholera, all kinds of disease. I didn't know that. Growing up, my father would tell me about different politicians, about Tammany Hall. My father would talk about Al Smith. My father was a Roosevelt New Dealer, until the fifties when he became more conservative.

What I’m saying here is that I never really was able to focus on how much of the story I wanted to tell, how much the story of that area reflected the overall city, the growth of New York, the growth of America. When I got together with Jay Cocks in the seventies and started working on it, Jay came up with a very beautiful script. It was almost like a novel: 179 pages. At that point, though, I was going through NewYork, NewYork, I was going through The Last Waltz, I was going through my own difficulties. I came out the other side through Raging Bull, even though I had thought I was going to come out of it with Gangs of NewYork. Maybe that was good, because I still hadn't gotten my hands around what Jay's story was, I couldn't quite grasp it. We became very influenced by the way Fellini did Satyricon. He said to Danilo Donati, his great costume designer, "We're walking in the streets of Rome and we lift one of the stones on the street, and underneath you see crawling around the ancient Romans.” Fellini said about Satyricon, "It's science fiction in reverse.” And there's a similar thing with aspects of [Sergio] Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. All these styles were converging in our minds, and there are aspects of them in Gangs.

It eventually straightened itself out about 1990, when Jay and I worked on the script again and shaped it down to the story of Bill the Butcher and the young boy, Amsterdam, whose father Bill murdered and who wants to gain revenge. Then we came up with the idea that, for some reason, he can't kill Bill. But we knew that at the end we had to have the Draft Riots, and we moved the killing of Bill back to that part of the story. We made all kinds of adjustments—streamlining the story, developing set pieces depicting the anthropology of the time, the way people lived. There had to be, for instance, a scene in which there was a theater riot. Because there were theater riots all the time. The working class and the gangs had no recourse to newspapers, so they all showed up at the theater to make themselves heard. There was a famous Astor Place riot where something like a dozen bystanders were killed.

RS: You've said to me that however horrendously you portrayed those times in your movie, you can't touch the reality of it.

MS: No. Even Dickens, when he came here, in his American Notes, said it was worse than anything in the East End of London. And I don't think we can even begin to fathom what it must have been like, what was going on in those cellars, in those caves below the streets—the pure evil of that criminal life. There were tunnels under 253 Elizabeth Street.

RS: Really?

MS: They're probably closed off now. But if you go into what used to be old Chinatown, there are still sweatshops below the ground.

RS: I had no idea—

MS: You can go there. Jay will tell you, he went with a policeman one night, because he was doing research on something and they took him through these sweatshops—illegal immigrants working there. I mean, that's a very old part of the city. It's filled with all these things.

What if you were really poor and there was no money, there was no work? The girls were dying at fifteen, drunk and having been prostitutes at twelve years old. People were just being washed away like garbage in that world.

That world was also reflected in the politics of the time, with Boss Tweed and others. So we had to fit those characters in, ending with the Draft Riots, which destroyed a lot of the city. Soldiers came in, howitzers were used. The soldiers had just fought at Gettysburg, you know. Nobody knows how many were killed in the riots.

RS: It seems to me that Gangs is harmed in a curious way by its greatest scene, which is that huge fight—

MS: —at the beginning. That was in the script from the very beginning in 1979. You never know where you are, and then finally you realize it's New York City.

RS: That fight is one of the great sequences—

RS: That's what I was going to say. The Draft Riots just can't compare to that fantastic scene.

MS: Yeah, I know. But as I said, when it came to the Draft Riots, there were tensions with the money. We had focused on violence at the Colored Orphans Asylum in the script and then we couldn't shoot it. That's not an excuse; we just didn't have the dough, and we had to drop it, and it's therefore flawed. Maybe we should have shot the Draft Riots differently. But somehow it fell together that way, and that's all we were able to get. We knew it all had to end in some sort of conflagration of the whole city, like the volcano erupting in The Last Days of Pompeii. We did not get enough of that done.

RS: Whereas I've never seen anything better than that opening.

MS: That was shot at the end of January 2001, and after that, the money ran out. The studio said to just finish up the movie. I'm not blaming them. If I had planned it differently, if I’d rewritten it right, we could have done more. But I took a chance. I wanted to get the opening the way I wanted it, and the pagoda scene, too—the center of the film. That had been shot around Christmas 2000. I knew we would have to fill in the rest and try to get as much of the Draft Riots as possible.

RS: Is it right to say that intensely action-oriented scenes are much better done in a limited area, and that the Draft Riots are— MS: Massive.

RS: So that's almost an endemic problem in doing the Draft Riots?

MS: Right. We had specific incidents—it is all very well documented. But we were only able to shoot a few. That's not an excuse —we chose them. We had to have the elephant go by, for example.

RS: Right!

MS: Harvey Weinstein was very funny about that. At a certain point he said, "Marty, out of these ten scenes, we can only afford three. What do you want to do?” I said, "Three, okay.” But I squeezed another two out of him. He turned to me and said, "Okay. You can have the elephant, although we don't really need the elephant.” I said, "Yes, we do, because it's probably the most surreal shot.” When Barnum's Circus blew up and the animals were running in the streets [an event that occurred two years later but was incorporated into the film]. Can you imagine? But it reminded me of the bombings of Berlin in '45, when the zoo was hit and the animals ran out. Civilization in Berlin was gone. That's what it must've felt like in the Draft Riots.

RS: Earlier, you said this was manifestly a movie you just had to do. You said it reflects the history of your people—

MS: Well, New York. And how it reflected the country overall. As I did more research over the years, people kept saying that if democracy didn't work in New York, it wasn't going to work anywhere else in the country. Urban areas such as Philadelphia and Boston had similar gangs and troubles.

RS: I know you sometimes develop scripts for many long years, everyone does. But this one seemed to go on forever. Maybe it's just because I knew Jay so well. I think the first time I ever met him I asked, "What are you doing?” And he said, "Oh, I'm working with Marty on Gangs of NewYork.” And thirty years go by and he's still—

MS: It's a good point. I don't think I ever wanted to finish it.

RS: Really? Why?

MS: I was obsessed with the story of the city. There were so many wonderful elements to it, so many anecdotes, different characters, so much I wanted to show. It just never settled satisfactorily in my mind. I felt I had to sacrifice too much of all that, and I never felt comfortable about it.

RS: Is it fair to say, no matter how much money you had, how much time you had, that it just had to be some kind of giant epic?

MS: Yes. It would have been a good five-hour picture. It's not that odd today. People see things in two parts. There are television shows like that. I mean, The Sopranos goes on and on and you have an almost endless film, really. People like that.

RS: But Gangs was conceived before the possibility of doing a Sopranos-like development, which might have satisfied you better.

MS: It would have satisfied me more. When television films started to be made in the sixties, especially things like Don Siegel's The Killers, we thought they would explore character: there would be a chance to do a twelve-hour film when needed. But it became a different medium. And, in a sense, not a director's medium.

RS: I was thinking of something like Rome on HBO.

MS: Yes, exactly.

RS: That has the sweep, and it's telling the story of that particular place and time.

MS: Or I, Claudius on the BBC. That would have been ideal for Gangs of NewYork. You'd just have to conceive the picture differently, like a television film where you shoot ten pages a day. I mean, the amount of money that was going into the costumes, the shooting, the extras, bringing people in from Ireland and from England—this could only go on for a certain amount of time. You have to be incredibly schedule-conscious.

But I still have part of my mind back in the seventies—when you were able to do an epic film, maybe a three-hour film, and the marketplace accepted it. Apocalypse Now, for instance. That's what I had in mind. I think The Departed is longer, actually.

RS: It is.

MS: There's nothing that I cut out of Gangs of NewYork that I would want to put back in the picture. Whatever I cut out I did better in another movie anyway. It's just very simply, as I said, that I never finished the script.

RS: It's almost as if you get trapped in projects. You want desperately to make a given film. You keep thinking of compromises that could get it made. But there's some part of you that doesn't want to make those compromises, you hold on to some unrealizable dream.

MS: Yes. There's no doubt of that. I mean, you actually said it. The other thing is that at that point we were able to do it, we were able to actually build a lower Manhattan in Rome, where we shot. And it behooved me to try to find a way to pull it together.

RS: Absolutely.

MS: Or at least, Part One. In my mind it was sort of like Part One. In a way, whether it's good, bad, or indifferent. There are some interesting scenes.

RS: There's a lot of good acting in the movie.

MS: The acting is wonderful.

RS: Particularly by Daniel Day-Lewis.

MS: He's great. I loved him in There Will Be Blood. He was amazing. At first, I didn't even know it was him.

RS: Those last minutes in the bowling alley are beyond the beyond. [It's a scene in which Daniel Day-Lewis—playing perhaps the most misanthropic character in film history—bloodily beats to death the preacher-son of his longtime business rival.] I've never seen anything quite like it in a movie. You're following this interesting story and then suddenly this outburst of insanity happens.

MS: I went with it, you know. It's pretty wild.

RS: It's astonishing. I said to Day-Lewis when I met him, "I’ve just never seen anything like it. I couldn't imagine where that came from.” And he said, "It's funny, my mother said the same thing to me.”

MS: They asked me to do the Q and A for an event in New York with Paul Thomas Anderson. There was only one other movie from my generation about oil discovery—Giant. And I said, I guess for your generation it's more Chinatown. He goes, "No, no, it was Giant.” He had seen Giant a number of times and loved it. And I said what I love about the picture is that it eschews the epic conflagration at the end which seems like it always has to happen.

RS: Right.

MS: In Giant there is this great scene where Jett Rink [James Dean] is fighting with Rock Hudson in the basement of the hotel, where he gets drunk and all the shelves collapse. And then, of course, the fight in Sarge's restaurant.

RS: That's a great scene. It's corny as hell.

MS: It's corny as hell and he loses the fight. Anyway, what was interesting here is that instead of exploding, the scene implodes. In this ridiculous bowling alley!

RS: A mansion having a bowling alley—it's almost the ultimate in conspicuous consumption.

MS: Oh, boy.

RS: I imagine you're drawn to There Will Be Blood in part because it's another father-son drama.

MS: In part, I suppose. But I have to emphasize again that by the last thirty years of my father's life, we became friends. I'm dealing with it still in the Kazan documentary Kent Jones and I are finishing, which is really more of a memoir, almost a eulogy. And it has, again, to do with Kazan's film East of Eden, which is a great exploration of the love and hatred of a son and his father.

RS: But your father wasn't anything like Raymond Massey's father in Eden.

MS: Not at all. But in the child's mind, I may have conjured up images of God the Father in the Old Testament.

RS: Well, if you see him in the documentary you made [Italianamerican], your dad is very silent, though kind of amiable.

MS: At first very secretive. And then he opens up, you know. It seems to be a well that I keep drawing from. There seem to be some primal feelings that I kind of feel comfortable with, and enjoy. Maybe not enjoy, but that seduce me into certain projects.

RS: Talking about Daniel Day-Lewis: There is the character in Age of Innocence, and then there's his character in Gangs of New York. It seems as if he is some sort of go-to guy for you when it comes to father figures.

MS: There's an element of my father in Gangs. Because of a kind of strict way of thinking, and, as I told you, my neighborhood was like a little medieval village.

RS: Daniel Day-Lewis is a fastidious man who's an absolutely great father, in a certain sense, in Age of Innocence. I find it fascinating that you would even think of the same actor for Bill the Butcher.

MS: Look at My Left Foot—the way he controls his body; the energy it takes to play that character, the energy it took for him to do a painting with his feet. He actually did one then.

RS: Did he?

MS: It's hanging in Jim Sheridan's house, the director's house, in Dublin. There's a kind of determination in that work. More than that, there's an anger that you certainly could tap into—a good, healthy kind of anger, not a self-destructive, King Lear-like anger, as there is in There Will Be Blood. He's shouting at the elements by the end of the movie. There's definitely that in him. I saw it in My Left Foot and I saw it in Last of the Mohicans. And the great sense of humor in Room wth a View. So I said to myself, Well, the guy can do anything.

RS: From some things you've said, I gather that even as late as your parents' young years, some of the Gangs architecture and atmosphere still lingered in your neighborhood.

MS: When my mother was a girl, the horrible tenements still existed. You looked out at nothing. The first man who did a film there was Raoul Walsh. He shot some of Regeneration there.

RS: I’ve never seen that movie.

MS: It's magnificent, incredible. It's unrelenting, a tough movie, because he knew the people at Five Points, what was left of the Five Points. He put some of them in that film.

RS: Raoul was born in New York.

MS: His The Bowery is like my Goodfellas in a way. You know what I'm saying?

RS: Not exactly.

MS: Because he knew those people, knew their folklore. He knew how they went in a bar and how they ordered a beer, how they moved, the kind of clothes they wore. He understood Chuck Connors, the famous racketeer, who coined the phrase "rackets.” He threw big dances the police would come to. There's something about all that that was second nature to Raoul—similar to the way I grew up around that area of Italian Americans. He was Irish. He really had the line on post-Civil War to turn-of-the-century New York—of the New York Tenderloin (up in the Chelsea area), the New York underworld. I think he had it down cold.

There's something about the way my parents described their lives—I have that script that Nick Pileggi and I are working on, "Neighborhood” it's called now, and it's about them and that period of time. It's partly the way they described their lives and the way they lived and the way they dealt with just the basics of living—how everybody would take care of each other in the tenements, where the toilets were, where they had to wash, a sink, one faucet, if they had any at all. The way people lived, and the way they had grocery stores, the kind of food you would get, that really had ties to the way people lived in early New York. It's the same as Orchard Street, the same with the Jewish area. I felt—

RS: Some living connection there—

MS: Yes, absolutely. You could feel it in the walls of the tenements. There were ghosts. It had a history and it had character. We knew so much of what had happened in that area.

RS: It's as if that history didn't exist when the official history of those times was written.

MS: Well, I guess it's like picking up The NewYork Times, the Metro section, where you see small articles that are front-page news in the tabloids. I remember back at NYU, people used to say, Read the tabloids, because they talk about real life. Because poor people don't have educations, that doesn't mean they don't struggle and suffer.

One guy I knew made page one in the Daily News. He was a nice kid across the way, maybe sixteen or seventeen. He was the son of the lady who ran a soda fountain at 240 or 238 Elizabeth. She was really nice, let us hang out there. And he was always very quiet. In 1950, '51 maybe, he took part in a robbery, had guns, and got shot. It was on the front page of the Daily News. And, you know, his mother was in that luncheonette for another thirty, forty years—next to the butcher. It's just you get into situations.

RS: Why?

MS: No education. That kid probably needed money. Probably there was peer pressure. He was very quiet. He wasn't an aggressive kid. The next thing you know, they were going in with guns. They come out, the cops are there. They see a kid with a gun, they start shooting.

RS: It's obvious that that kid—or the modern mobsters in your other films—are in some way the inheritors of the world you portray in Gangs.

MS: I was always drawn to a world that seems so strange, almost like the ancient world, yet still filled with the same kind of people. We haven't changed.

The Bowery was the last dregs of the Five Points. You lived with people dying in the streets. It was what the Five Points must have been like.

RS: But how different was the Gangs underworld from the underworld you saw glimpses of?

MS: Very different. There was anarchy, more tribalism in the past. My grandparents were tribal, but not like what we showed in Gangs, where somebody would turn on you and betray you.

RS: You've said you feel Gangs of NewYork isn't as violent as some of your other movies.

MS: Nowhere near the violence of my other pictures. It does go on and on, a continual cycle of violence, though. It's as Daniel Day-Lewis's character says: A man robs me, I cut off his hand. He talks against me, I cut his tongue out. He tries to harm me, I cut his head off and put it on a pike so everybody can see it.

Maybe if I’d made the film earlier, it would have been horrendous in terms of graphic violence, but I don't really want to do it anymore—after doing the killing of Joe Pesci and his brother in Casino, in the cornfield. If you look at it, it isn't shot in any special way. It doesn't have any choreography to it. It doesn't have any style to it, it's just flat. It's not pretty. There was nothing more to do than to show what that way of life leads to. Not only what it leads to, but that it leads to this being done to you by your closest friends. It's brutal, it's nasty, it's humiliating, to say the least.

It speaks to some people. Joe Pesci was playing golf, and a couple of older men were on the same course. Afterwards, they were all in the locker room, and when they changed into their street clothes, it turns out that the two gentlemen are monsignors. They went over to Joe and said, We admire your work. Joe figures they are going to compliment him on Home Alone. But they said they really liked him in Casino. They said they really felt bad about how he died in the film. They really felt for him in that sequence.

And Joe said to me later, That's exactly what you wanted to do, right? I said, Yes—as mean and nasty as he gets throughout the whole picture, he deserves his fate.

RS: It's pathetic.

MS: It really is pathetic and sick and terrible. I remember I showed a rough cut to John Kennedy Jr., and it upset him very much. When he got out of the screening room, he was walking in the hall. I said, What's the problem? He said, I just got a little nauseous.

But Gangs of NewYork is stylized, like choreography, I think, so the violence seems held back to a certain extent.

RS: It was more mass violence. The violence in Casino was pretty much one-on-one.

MS: It's happening right now as we speak, all around the world. In Iraq, in Afghanistan—the breakdown of society, the breakdown of civilization. We'll be reduced to chaos again.

We bombed Afghanistan into rubble, where, you know, warlords have taken over. Kids today don't know what happened in China in the 1920s. Just look at the beginning of Lost Horizon. The Chinese warlords. They cut off heads just for the equivalent of speeding. Read Edgar Snow's books.

RS: What you're saying is that we're witnessing a kind of fraudulent nationalism that's masking sheer chaos.

MS: You give a seventeen-year-old kid a gun and put him in a firefight, it's going to be rough. Kids often don't think they can die. Kids can easily become like animals, you know.

RS: By which I guess you mean a reversion to primitive tribalism?

MS: Yes. Definitely. The old genie is out of the bottle. We're in for hundreds of years of it. I read ancient history to learn how the empires fell. The barbarians at the gates. Take Gangs of NewYork—their gods are Celtic war gods. It's not Jesus suffering on the cross. They're tough bastards. They're going to kill and maim. The reality is that the war gods are the ancient gods. The history of God, the development of monotheism, is warlike.