Martin Scorsese is still drawn to a bleak world where there is no morality and no redemption - which is probably why he has never won an Oscar. He talks to Ed Pilkington about making a man of Leonardo DiCaprio and coming to terms with 9/11
For a director who commands such respect, it is surprising what a rough ride Martin Scorsese has had in recent years. But, even with Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull to his credit, the going has not been easy. There have been run-ins with the studios, such as Disney's decision to pull out of Gangs of New York because of its violence, and Paramount's surrender to the religious right in pulling out of The Last Temptation of Christ just weeks before the start of filming.
When he didn't have the studios on his back, he suffered the opposite problem: an uninterested public. Both New York, New York and The King of Comedy were box office casualties. And sod's law decrees that when he does make a successful film, The Colour of Money for instance, he's accused of selling out to the studios.
Nor have his peers offered him formal recognition. Despite the superhuman efforts he has poured into his most intimately conceived films (Gangs of New York took him 23 years to wrestle on to the screen), he has not won the Oscar for best director, an honour he has unashamedly coveted and for which he has been nominated five times (for Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York and The Aviator). When Goodfellas lost to Dances with Wolves in 1990, that hurt.
The common thread in these disparate troubles is the dilemma of the movie director: how to combine commercial success with artistic integrity. Several of his 1970s films were both hugely popular and lauded for their art. More recently, he's ticked one or other box, seldom both.
So has Martin Scorsese come any closer to combining commerce and art with his new film, The Departed? Given the record of the past 30 years, he has reason to be nervous about its reception, and, sure enough, he is puffing on his asthma inhaler as our encounter begins. His body language is not good. He has pressed himself tightly into the corner of the sofa, both arms and legs crossed, in a textbook portrayal of Anxious Man.
AS SOON AS the first question is asked, though, he relaxes, like someone coming up for air. He starts talking in a broad, slightly high-pitched New York accent and grows more and more animated. What's got him going is the acting of his current cinematic muse, Leonardo DiCaprio.
The Departed is Scorsese's third major film in a row with DiCaprio, and the relationship between the two men has clearly grown into a central element of his work. For so long the world of Martin Scorsese revolved around Robert De Niro, from his first major feature, Mean Streets, in 1973 to Cape Fear 18 years later. But the Scorsese noughties belong to DiCaprio.
The baton has been passed, as Scorsese implicitly recognises when he talks about the intense experiences he has had with DiCaprio over the past seven years: "Having worked with Leo in Gangs of New York and The Aviator, I sense something about him. There's a great deal emotionally going on inside of him. For me it was interesting - I felt comfortable with the emotional process he was going through, and it reminded me very much of De Niro. It was a different frame of reference: I'm 30 years older, but he approached emotional subjects in a very similar way and he also thinks about things in life the way I do."
The Departed, the latest product of the Scorsese-DiCaprio years, as they may come to be remembered, is a cop-versus-gangster movie set in contemporary Boston. DiCaprio plays an undercover police officer who has infiltrated one of the city's most notorious gangs. He gives an intense performance, thoroughly putting behind him the baby-faced Leo so beloved of teenaged girls and replacing it with a mature Leonardo capable of conveying layers of anger and darkness unthinkable in the younger man.
In short, DiCaprio has grown up, and he has done so under Scorsese's tutelage.
"I didn't realise that at the time," Scorsese says, when I ask if he was aware of this coming-of-age. "There's no doubt that he was a boy when we did Gangs of New York, which is what I wanted. But when he did Howard Hughes in The Aviator, that changed everything."
By now Scorsese is flying. His hands are moving as excitedly as he is speaking. One second his fingers meet as if in prayer, the next he is open-armed and embracing the world. He is conducting the conversation as he might, well, direct a movie. And then there are his eyes, which have their own power, framed by two shockingly black eyebrows set behind his red and thick-rimmed glasses. Even in a blank hotel room you feel his force. He is a hurricane of energy, a breaker of levees.
So when did this transformation in DiCaprio take place? Scorsese's flurry of words is briefly halted, but after a pause he starts to talk again at bullet speed about the moment of metamorphosis. It was during the filming of a key scene in The Aviator, in which Hughes has locked himself into his movie screening room and is descending into madness.
"By the time Leo got into that room where he had to face himself, naked, in that white leather chair, we had got into a whole other realm and I knew he could go further. Something happened that night." On the other side of the locked door Cate Blanchett, playing Katharine Hepburn, is pleading with DiCaprio to let her in. They filmed take after take of the scene, Scorsese explains, but something just didn't feel right. "About the 12th take I said to Leo, maybe you are thinking too much about yourself, think about her at this point. What do you want her to do? 'Cut her off, cut her dead,' I said. 'She shouldn't be part of that life.'"
The result was formative: Scorsese's intervention helped propel DiCaprio's acting to a new level. His part in the process was crucial, the mark of a great director, though he plays that down by implying that it happened almost by chance: "We just stumbled upon it. But it made him more aware of how to play other things too."
THE ANECDOTE IS telling. Scorsese is known as an actors' director because he nurtures them and gives them space to grow. And this fluid style of directing is stamped over The Departed, despite its origins and evident commercial appeal.
The film is a remake of the cult 2003 Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs. Screenwriter William Monahan has transferred the storyline from Hong Kong to the ganglands of South Boston, or Southie as it's known to locals. A cop (DiCaprio) infiltrates a notorious Southie gang in order to expose its ruthless leader (Jack Nicholson), while a gang member (Matt Damon) is sent by the same ruthless leader to infiltrate the cops. Two moles, negative images of one another.
Their paths collide and a get-the-other- mole-before-he-gets-you struggle to the death ensues. In the process everyone is compromised, good and evil converge, darkness reigns.
"Good and bad become very blurred," Scorsese says. "That is something I know I'm attracted to. It's a world where morality doesn't exist, good doesn't exist, so you can't even sin any more as there's nothing to sin against. There's no redemption of any kind."
The script follows the Hong Kong original quite faithfully, and yet the final product is quintessential Scorsese. The Catholic elements of the morality tale are accentuated by him, as befits a man who came close to entering the priesthood in his teens but chose instead to take up film studies at New York University.
Sexuality and male virility - also favoured Scorsese themes - are teased out through the role of the woman therapist (Vera Farmiga) who loves both moles, and through Jack Nicholson's improvised use of an enormous prosthetic penis.
Movie addicts will find their cravings richly satisfied by Scorsese's allusions to past greats. Watch out for the letter X that he scatters through the film in a homage to the 1932 gangster movie Scarface (producer: Howard Hughes) or the cocaine scene with Jack Nicholson that nods its head to the 1983 film of the same name.
Like Scarface, violence is integral to The Departed, another of Scorsese's calling cards. By my count, the film depicts at least 10 executions, one garrotting and the graphic splattering of a body that has fallen from a great height. Being Scorsese, there's a Catholic take on the violence, too: "It's about the reality of being a witness to violence. Let's say you have a close friend who you have known for 25 years. Even if you are not in the underworld, if they are hit by a car they are dead, gone, finished, over. Death comes in a flash, and that's the truth of it, the person's gone in less than 24 frames of film."
BUT WHAT MARKS The Departed out as core Scorsese above anything else is the anger. Not that of an angry young man, though, which is best seen in Mean Streets, Taxi Driver or Raging Bull. Instead, it's a more reflective, public anger with the current state of the world, which he reveals in our conversation quite unexpectedly.
You could view The Departed as a commentary on America today, in which good and evil have become so intertwined they are now inseparable and mutually self-perpetuating: a US president commits an act of violence on a foreign country in the name of good against evil, thus unleashing dark forces which can only be controlled through yet more acts of violence.
When I suggest that to him, he leaps on the thought with alacrity. He says his feelings about this were crucial to his decision to make the film in the first place - they sustained him even when he had (here we go again) difficulties getting the movie off the ground.
"There were a lot of big names getting involved, a lot of different schedules to marry, a lot of pitfalls we could have fallen into. And yet I stayed with the film," he says. "Because I guess there's an anger, for want of a better word, about the state of affairs. An anger that hopefully doesn't eat at yourself but a desire to express what I feel about post-September 11 despair. My emotional response is this movie. It became clearer and clearer as we did it, more frightening. It came from a very strong state of conviction about the emotional, psychological state that I am in now about the world and about the way our leaders are behaving."
So all the elements are there. The Departed will surely be no box-office flop, but neither can it be dismissed as a studio sell-out. In it, Scorsese comes closer to achieving that elusive compromise between art and popular appeal than he has in years, arguably since Goodfellas.
There's just one bit of unfinished business remaining. Without it Martin Scorsese cannot lay his ghosts to rest. Come on, Academy, give him his blasted Oscar.
The Departed is on general release