Mr. Scorsese – S01E01 – Stranger in a Strange Land – Transcript

Mr. Scorsese
Season 1 – Episode 1
Episode title: Stranger in a Strange Land
Original air date: October 17, 2025
The series had its world premiere at the 2025 New York Film Festival, followed by its global digital release on Apple TV+ on October 17, 2025.

Plot: The child of immigrants, young Scorsese is shaped by the Catholic Church and the violent streets around him, with cinema as his escape.

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Mr. Scorsese – S01E01 – Stranger in a Strange Land | Transcript

[“Sympathy For The Devil” by the Rolling Stones playing]

They shot me! Help! Help!

[Martin Scorsese] Who are we?

Uh, what are we, I should say, as human beings?

Are we intrinsically good or evil?

[man] Come on, come on. [grunts]

[Scorsese] What could be termed evil in you, uh, could be termed good.

But I think anybody’s capable of evil, given the right and wrong circumstances.

‘Cause all we care about is getting fucking rich!

[Scorsese] I could see the allure of it.

I could see the power.

I can even understand the passion.

What are you doing?

Ah! Ah!

[Scorsese] This is the struggle.

[song intro continues]

Yeah, I struggle with it all the time.

[“Sympathy For The Devil” continues]

[reporter] The life of Martin Scorsese is the stuff of legend.

[reporter 2] Made some of the most compelling feature films in movie history.

[reporter 3] Leading poet-anthropologist of the contemporary landscape.

[reporter 4] It has mushroomed into one of the hardest-fought battles in movie history.

Is the film blasphemy or an affirmation of faith?

[news anchor] Do filmmakers have a right to make a film like this?

[gun shots]

[reporter] Shots have been fired at President Reagan.

[reporter 2] John W. Hinckley may have been trying to act out the plot of the movie Taxi Driver.

[interviewer] Is there a fascination on your part for violence?

Scorsese?

I’m a filmmaker, I make movies.

[reporter] Some of the people making news this morning, movie director, Martin Scorsese.

Our guest tonight is Martin Scorsese.

Marty.

Marty.

Marty.

Dad.

Martin.

Marty.

[laughing] Mr. Scorsese.

[Steven Spielberg]

There is only one Marty Scorsese.

And he is a cornerstone of this entire art form.

There’s been nobody like him, there’ll never be anybody like him again.

Do you love her?

Do you?

[crying] Do you?

Karen.

He’s the master of exploring the dark side of the human condition.

Don’t you tell me what to do, Alice.

Why’d you do it?

‘Cause these things are within all of us.

Yeah!

Yeah!

Yeah!

We need to talk about this darkness.

We need to bring it to light.

[female screaming] No, don’t shoot him!

[sobbing]

[blood dripping] Marty is one of the few directors who understands there are fundamental questions that you have to ask.

Ah! [yelling] No!

[Principe] What is good?

What is beautiful?

What is sin? What is virtue?

What is justice? What is mercy?

Why am I here?

How must I act? What can I know?

[song continues]

Marty is a… a saintsinner.

There’s something saintly in him.

In the sense that he asks the questions, like God asks the questions, Jesus asks the questions.

[TV host] You once said, “I am a gangster, and I am a priest.”

[Scorsese] I said to Gore Vidal one day, “There’s only one of two things you can be in my neighborhood. You can either be a priest or a gangster.” He says, “You became both.”

[song fades]

[Rebecca Miller] Did you slate?

[crew] No.

Let’s slate.

Okay.

Oh, God. You need slates?

[crew] We’re not rolling.

[Miller laughing] I know.

You need sla…

…but first you gotta roll.

Then you get the slate.

[Miller] Okay.

[crew] Okay.

[crew 2] Mark.

Second marker, excuse me.

That’s a technical term, Rebecca.

[Miller] Thank you so much. [laughs]

[Miller] What’s your first memory?

Uh… Being fed in a high chair, actually.

Really? So early?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

We lived in a small, Italian enclave in Corona, Queens.

People may see photographs and they think, “Well, he came from a place where there was greenery and that sort of thing.”

But in reality, what had happened was that my grandparents, they all came over around 1910 from Sicily, and they wound up in the Lower East Side.

My mother was born at 232 Elizabeth Street.

My father was born across the street in 241 Elizabeth Street.

And they had maybe ten people living in three and a half rooms.

And you had that in Italian-american. My mother explains how they lived.

So, my aunt occupied the bedroom.

The kitchen was in the middle.

And, the… My mother, father and the children were in the living room.

[Charles Scorsese] Three rooms.

Worse than us.

The bathroom was in the hallways, in those tenements, that’s the way it was.

We were lucky to have it in the hallway.

Some tenements had them in the backyards.

[Scorsese] They got married very young.

The roof scene of the marriage in Raging Bull is based on their wedding, because it was so hot they went up on the roof.

Their eye was not to live there, their eye was to get out.

So they moved to Corona, Queens.

Kind of a… sub-working class area, but at least it was a little house, where there was some grass.

There was a little grass, there was a tree in the backyard.

There was a little yard.

My brother was born.

And then I was born.

[baby laughs] Around the corner was my mother’s parents.

And my cousins would live down the block.

My mother’s sisters were there.

This, in my mind, in child’s eye…

Corona for me was like… paradise.

I think… didn’t I meet you in kindergarten?

You’re from Elizabeth Street, so naturally.

Elizabeth? No. I met you, it was 1950. We moved back.

Okay, you came back.

We were ostracized from Corona.

They had this thing going, I don’t know exactly what happened.

All I know is my father had to fight the landlord, uh…

In the street.

Wow.

Yeah.

The landlord got into a major fight with my father.

Which I witnessed.

[Miller] A physical fight?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, these are…

I don’t come from some…

[chuckling] These are people who live on the edge.

[Scorsese] I remember violence.

There was an axe involved.

I remember seeing an axe.

I remember my mother’s sister breaking it up.

She got in there and said, “Don’t hit my brother-in-law.”

But I remember very well the, uh, extraordinary trauma of the whole thing.

It’s a… [sighing] strange thing.

I mean, it’s hard to talk about here, because that world, people…

It was very unlikely they could trust government institutions, City Hall.

Particularly, if they’re not Italian.

Or if they were Italian but not Sicilian.

And so, even if you’re not a person of crime, the crime families…

Or whatever they are, I didn’t know such things existed, I just knew there were these powerful people around us.

They were the ones who were like, I guess, an old ancient village, where the village elder… would help settle issues.

Apparently, the landlord, he had his certain people, and my father had his.

And they all talked it out and we lost.

We were cast out of paradise.

[Miller] Right.

Cast out.

[“Vivere” by Carlo Buti playing]

And we were thrown back into the tenements.

[song continues]

The only place he can go back home to was the room he was born in.

At 241 Elizabeth Street.

We lived with our grandmother and grandfather in the three or four rooms, where everybody bunched together.

And all the other Scorseses were around.

You see, in Corona, my mother’s side of the family had a sense of humor about themselves.

My father’s family is…

Everybody had a problem with my brother, Frank. Everybody.

Always a kid running about, causing mischief.

People would complain.

You know, like, “Charlie, you let your kid do that?”

“For God’s sake. Look at him.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

And people would criticize, so he’d get up and punish the kid right there for everybody.

It was extraordinarily tense.

Eventually, we found rooms down the block.

However, that neighborhood, it was very different from Corona.

Behavior and the tone of it was radically different. Radically.

These are the kids I’m gonna have to hang out with.

They were running and throwing garbage pail covers at each other.

Fighting in the streets.

People coming out and chasing them.

We were… pretty much on the Bowery, the old Bowery, with the derelicts, and the… call ’em bums.

In Lionel Rogosin’s film, On the Bowery, I know some of them.

I grew up with them, because when they were sober they worked.

In the grocery store, or, you know, vegetables, that sort of thing, loading stuff.

So we knew them.

And when they were drunk, it was different.

You’d go downstairs and they’re struggling along the street.

It was like Night of the Living Dead. And so, it became a place of, um, fear.

And worse…

I had contracted asthma when I was three years old.

And the asthma was serious.

You just think you’re gonna suffocate.

I remember that, late at night, trying to get one extra breath… and feeling like you were just gonna pass out.

So, you just pull one more breath.

[whispering] You try one more, try one more.

A couple of times to open up my sinuses, they made a tent.

And inside the tent was steam.

So, you’re sitting in there… in the dark.

The medicine was constant.

I just remember being shielded from everything.

One who had to be protected.

Can I just say one thing?

[Miller] Yeah.

Thank God for asthma! [giggles] That he was cooped up and couldn’t go outside.

[Catherine Scorsese] He wanted to play.

He wanted to get out.

Especially when it would snow, he wanted to get out and play in the snow like other kids, but he couldn’t.

He used to watch from behind the window.

[Scorsese] In the front.

Third floor front.

I’d look out the window.

And see, you know, the world below.

I’d be always looking out the window.

That’s why I like high-angle shots.

Seriously.

It’s like a fresco coming to life.

[Nicholas Pileggi] If you ever went to the apartment, they were old windows with small panes, so he has to watch pane by pane.

What does that remind you of?

It’s film.

And then in the summer, they couldn’t afford air conditioning, his asthma got to be really bad, so Marty would just cough all night and had difficulty breathing.

When he got those attacks and you can’t help him…

You wanna break the walls apart.

[Catherine] It’s terrible.

[Pileggi] His father would take him to 42nd Street and they would go from movie theater to movie theater.

There was no air conditioning at all, anywhere.

Except a movie theater.

Movie theaters had cool by refrigeration.

People would just go in there to be cool.

They didn’t care what film it was.

[Pileggi] And that’s how Marty saw movies.

Marty’s life depended upon going to movies.

That’s where he could breathe.

[Scorsese] I would just go up there.

Whatever was playing.

B-films, a noir like The Big Heat. Musicals in the late ’40s, early ’50s.

[instrumental from “I Got Rhythm” by George Gershwin playing] The rerelease of Wizard of Oz, when she opens the door and it’s Technicolor.

You really are taken into another world.

There’s no such thing as disbelief, you’re there.

And I’ll never forget the intensity of the lurid masterpiece, Duel in the Sun.

[female sobs]

They had the two lovers at the end who shoot each other.

It was really an extraordinary experience for a child.

I had to do it, Lewt.

Of course.

I had to do it.

Of course you did.

[straining] Let me… Let me hold you.

[gasping] [Pileggi] He told me once, he said that’s where he got his first glimmer…

[laughing] of sexual arousal.

He sees it in a movie.

[Scorsese] The deepest feelings came from the neorealist films.

Every Friday night on television, they showed Italian films.

For the Italian community.

Francesco!

Pina!

[Scorsese] All my family would come over.

And my uncles, they’re there too.

And they had been in the war in Italy.

[speaking in Italian] People were talking all the time over the movie.

And they were answering in Italian, they were talking, and it was like, I didn’t see, as a five year old…

[speaking in Italian] …I just didn’t see the difference between those people on the TV, with the ones who were my family.

There was… So then, in a way, movies or cinema became something else.

[overlapping chatter in Italian]

[Scorsese] Particularly in Bicycle Thieves. Towards the end of Bicycle Thief, the father is caught stealing the bike.

[all shouting in Italian]

[Scorsese] He’s humiliated in public.

The little boy who observes this is really shaken.

[all shouting in Italian]

Papa!

That film for me was so powerful.

And had a… had a foundation of truth to it.

And I realized that it somehow relates directly to the expulsion from Corona.

[overlapping chatter in Italian]

With the humiliation and the shame of my father.

And my mother, and all of us.

All of us.

People were watching us put our furniture on a U-Haul.

People were shouting at us.

And having to live with it and to go on with life.

The depth that those pictures reached, in terms of the heart, it wasn’t just watching a movie.

And I guess it’s affected me since then.

I became obsessed with all kinds of films.

And I used my imagination, I was making up all these stories.

So I started drawing these little pictures that showed the impression of movement.

Like the storyboard for a film.

These images move.

This is a boom

a tracking shot here.

Here’s the wall of Rome, and you got the trees here.

And the camera’s on a crane.

And the camera comes all the way down over the backs of the first group of men, and the doors open.

And it’s a big crane shot.

As you go from here and then it goes behind, and you go down–

I’m still doing this shot.

I’m still doing it.

It doesn’t quite work all the time.

So, I was 11 or 12 when I did this.

My father, he walked by the doorway one day, “What is it you… What are you doing?

Cutting up paper dolls?”

[Miller] And was it because he was sort of implying that you were girly?

Yeah.

Can’t have that in that world.

A man showed himself, in the world I came from, um…

Strength, open to violence, can be violent, you know.

In charge, in command, et cetera.

[Robert Uricola] It was really the hub of the five mafia families.

So all of them…

were in that neighborhood.

[Pileggi] They were an infinitesimal part of the culture.

But they carried so much weight.

[Uricola] If you were in the barber’s chair, you had half a haircut, one of these guys walked in, you got off the chair.

I mean, there was no way they were gonna wait.

[Scorsese] You had to deal with them.

My father had to take a job during the ’30s, in the depression.

He had a very good job in the garment district.

Well, that was worked out.

Once you take that favor, you owe favors.

And it goes on like that for years.

He always told me, he said, “Don’t ever let them do a favor for you.

They’re nothing but bloodsuckers.”

And then somebody walked by, they goes, “Hey, how are ya?”

“Fine, how ya doing?”

“Can I… Hey, you got five dollars on you?”

He’s, “Five dollars?”

“Yeah.”

Says, “I dunno, I can’t…

I’ll give you what I have in my pocket.”

He takes out… It’s a dollar.

“It’s a dollar.

What’s the matter with you? I said five.”

“It’s all I have. You want it?”

“No, no, no.”

Put his hand, he had the ten dollars here.

Where we come from you have to be careful, you know what I mean?

You know, gotta be careful.

To me they’re good people.

They don’t bother me.

They were brought up in a rough neighborhood.

And they saw plenty and they didn’t say anything.

Because we used to tell them, “If you see something, you don’t say anything.”

So they were brought up like that.

I did see serious stuff.

That’s, you know…

Violence was imminent all the time.

I never forget one night, we’re standing outside and there was a guy lying in… Jersey Street.

Yeah.

Remember?

Uh-huh.

And we start looking, we’re talking by the graveyard and we’re going,

“What the? Guy’s not moving.”

Missing his hands.

Yeah, yeah. I say, “Guy’s not moving.”

Yeah, he’s dressed. Nicely.

And no hands.

You would kind of, go over, Robert,

you were going over, looking around…

[chuckles] You came back and said, “Jimmy just put a pencil in his head.”

[Uricola] Yeah?

To make sure that it was a…

Yeah.

…a bullet hole.

That was when Mulberry Street was still the place…

The dumping ground.

…where they dumped the bodies.

They called it “Murder Mile.”

Yeah.

Used to be called.

And the Bowery was called “Devil’s Mile.”

So we were in between Murder Mile and Devil’s Mile.

[“Can’t We Be Sweethearts” by The Cleftones playing]

[Uricola] But for the most part it was harmless.

They were gambling and stuff like that.

I mean, nobody thought of, you know… organized crime as being wrong or bad.

They were your father, your uncle.

[song continues]

[Scorsese] My father’s youngest brother, Joey, uh, was called Joe “The Bug”.

He half raised me, so to speak.

He was on the second floor, we were on the third floor on Elizabeth Street.

He started working with these wise guys and got into that life.

But he was not a made man in any way, he was not…

He was like a rough and tumble person.

My uncle, Joe “The Bug”, was considered the best bootlegger.

Had the best formula.

What’d they call him? Nickname?

Joe “The Bug”.

Joe “The Bug”, yeah?

I remember that name.

He was not representative of the entire family.

Just wanna make that clear.

State your case now.

My mother…

I used to say, “Where’s uncle Joe?”

She goes, “He’s back at school.

He’s back in college.”

[song ends]

[Pileggi] You gotta remember, in those communities, a lot of these mobsters were daily communicants.

In Marty’s world, St. Patrick’s church is here, and across the street is the Ravenite Social Club, which is the mob’s social club that goes all the way back to Prohibition.

And it was the place that John Gotti took over after he murdered Paul Castellano.

You wanna talk about the connection between those two worlds, and here’s this little kid watching that happen.

How is that not gonna affect you?

The retreat was into, uh, Catholicism.

The strongest impression I ever got was going into a church.

I was around seven years old when I went into my first church, St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

It was a relief from what I sensed around me.

Suddenly, I walk into this beautiful place…

and it had serenity.

It had ritual.

And I was part of the ritual.

There were moments when I was an altar boy, and I would ring the bells.

That’s a moment where, you know, the whole world stops.

The presence is there.

The presence of God, right there.

[Catherine Scorsese]

He decided to go to Catholic school.

He went to St. Patrick’s, graduated from there, and then everything after that was religious.

Then he entered the priesthood.

[Scorsese]

There was a preparatory seminary and that was on 85th Street, somewhere.

I did okay for the first few months but… something happened.

I began to realize the world was changing.

It was early rock-and-roll, and the old world was dying out.

♪ Bo Diddley bought his babe

A diamond ring… ♪

[Scorsese] I also became aware of life around me.

Falling in love or being attracted to girls.

And so, not that you’re acting out on it, but there were these feelings.

And I suddenly realized it’s much more complicated than this.

You can’t shut yourself off.

[Bo Diddley continues to play]

[Joe Morale] I know him forever.

Him being a priest, that would’ve been nice, I guess.

But I don’t… Never saw that finishing.

You know, I didn’t see that.

He had a heavy eye for the ladies, you know.

[Scorsese] The idea of priesthood, to devote yourself to others, really, that’s what it’s about.

And I realized, I don’t belong there.

And I tried to stay, but they got my father in there, and they told him, “Get him outta here.”

[Miller] Really?

Yeah.

Because I behaved badly.

But I had to find my own way, because there’s no way I could have survived in the streets, so I had to find a more intellectual way of existing for the future.

But there were no books in the house, it was not in the culture.

Luckily, I had kind of a mentor, Father Francis Principe.

He was about 22 years old, 23.

[Uricola] He was a young guy.

He was like 23, 24 years old.

Tough, tough guy, too.

He took on a couple guys in the neighborhood and uh…

[Miller] How so?

Fought them. Knocked the hell outta them.

I mean, serious guys. [laughs] You know.

They told him, “Take your collar off.”

He said, “Okay.”

He took it off.

Oh, he was tough.

He should have been a cop, he was tough.

Yeah, he was tough. Good man, though.

If he liked you, he liked you.

If he didn’t like you, you knew it.

Father Principe would do things with us.

He’d pick a bunch of guys, take you to see a film.

[Scorsese] He was intelligent and loved films, loved music, and literature, Graham Greene, Dostoevsky, James Baldwin.

There’s so many beautiful, incredible, magnificent creations of the human mind and spirit, that if they come in contact with, they have to grow.

Here you are, you know, this is it?

Mott and Mulberry Street?

There has to be more.

Principe was the one who really hit us in the head and said, “You don’t have to live like this.

You don’t have to live like this.

You know, get an education.”

“Get out, you know, try and get out of the neighborhood.”

[Scorsese] And I became close friends with guys who had aspirations to go to college, and also, tough street kids.

Like Robert Uricola, used to call him “Curti”.

He was wonderful, but he was a tough street kid, too.

He… Nobody could get anything over him.

Knock you down.

I was fascinated by a guy in the neighborhood who had a different thought.

And I would go up to his apartment and he would do all these storyboards.

Stories, like little… almost comic strips.

[Bivona] I remember being up to his house and him showing us the things that he had drawn.

[Miller] And what was all your reactions?

[splutters] I mean, none of us could do that.

He was so focused.

Your camera we used for the Vesuvius VI, which we did on the roofs…

Yeah, yeah. Yep.

…of your… of Bivona’s building.

We had the idea of a private eye in ancient Rome.

Uh, I played Julius Caesar in it, so I get killed in that one.

And I played Rocco Gunnius, the private eye. [laughs] It was incredible, because he had a bunch of guys in the neighborhood to do this.

With togas, everybody had togas on.

[Scorsese] And we would have, like, a Saturday evening.

My parents were out and we’d have a party, and have a few drinks and present the film.

With music.

We had a way of working by switching the records.

So all the eclectic soundtrack was already there.

I wanted to make movies, but you don’t make movies where I came from.

Saying “I wanna go to film school.” was like…

[laughing] “What are you talking about?”

Most of us went to Fordham College, and Marty enrolled in business school.

And then there was a kind of cathartic event that happened.

[Scorsese] I had a friend of mine who died at 18 years old from cancer.

And that turned everything upside down.

[Bivona] One of the guys in our group had cancer.

He was operated on, initially.

They cut off everything from here to here.

And then he died, six months later.

When they buried him, we were all at the funeral, and it was out in Queens.

And all these tombstones packed on top of each other.

I look up and there’s the Continental Can Company.

And I said, “That’s what it comes to?”

You die and they bury you in front of the Continental Can Company.

And I was thinking, “What is life?”

You get a good job…

Screw you.

I’m not gonna work for the Continental Can Company.

Who the hell are you?

Who the hell you think you are?

And then what?

Bury me right there. Nobody even sees it.

I couldn’t do it.

I wouldn’t do it.

[no audible dialogue]

[Scorsese] Of all things, for some reason I wound up with a catalog from NYU.

I asked my parents, I said, “Maybe I should just go and see what that is.

It’s down the block, really.

Down Houston Street to the West Side.”

It may only be five blocks away, but it was another world.

It was the Village of the ’50s, you know.

The beatnik.

And then at NYU, and there was an orientation day.

And this one guy got up, Haig Manoogian.

And he spoke so fast. He had such passion for cinematic narrative.

That… “That’s where I’m going.

I’m gonna be around this guy.”

So, in a sense, from my father to the priest to him.

[Miller] So your first film, where did the idea come from?

It was really an exploration of the medium and having fun with the filmmaking process.

[man] …that I just got in town, my friends told me about a place where I could stay for cheap and all. And, well, I liked it. The neighborhood was nice. The building was nice. The landlady was nice.

[Scorsese] What it really is, was using film itself, cutting, as humor.

[man] So, I fixed it up. But what happened was that my editor cut the negative the wrong way, and it was destroyed, practically.

My professor says, “I think this young woman knows how to help this.”

[Schoonmaker] I said, “Well, I’ll try.”

So, I went over, Marty was sitting like this, with his eyes open, but I think he was asleep.

I don’t know. He had been up late, cutting his movie.

And she came in, and we fixed the negative shot by shot.

He says I stayed up for three days.

I don’t remember that.

I don’t remember a lot of it, maybe that’s why.

[Scorsese] But she saved the original negative.

And the film.

We all knew, when we saw his work at NYU, that he had it.

It’s Not Just You, Murray! has the most amazing ideas in it.

[Murray] See this tie?

Twenty dollars.

See these shoes?

[Schoonmaker] The actor raises the camera up with his hands.

Fifty dollars.

See this suit?

Two hundred dollars.

Remember, at that point the French New Wave hit.

All the films broke as many rules as possible.

[in French] If you don’t like the shore…

[Scorsese] Talking into the camera.

[in French] If you don’t like the mountains…

[Scorsese] To the audience.

[in French] All she thinks about is fun.

Who are you talking to?

The audience.

[Scorsese] To address you.

[Murray] See this car?

Five thousand dollars.

[Scorsese] To take you in…

Wanna ride?

…directly, you know.

Um, to seduce you.

Hi, I’m Joe.

[Scorsese] The style, it just came to me.

With all the input of French New Wave, Italian New Wave, the New York underground the New York avantgarde.

And standup comedy.

Well, you’ll have to excuse me, I was talking…

[laughter] [Scorsese] Comedy was breaking through and experimenting.

Oh, yeah.

The It’s Not Just You, Murray!, Murray, of course, comes from Mel Brooks and The 2000 Year Old Man. Murray!

[Reiner] King Murray, was it?

No, just Murray.

Everybody was named Murray at the time.

There was…

There were Italian guys named Murray, Jewish guys named Murray.

I forgot to introduce myself.

I’m Murray.

[Schoonmaker] There’s so much humor.

Marty’s mother feeding Murray through the bars of the prison cell.

Or Murray, when he’s testifying before Congress.

Is this thing working?

With the use of narration coming out of everywhere.

From… Jules and Jim… [in French] A small, happy smile played on Jules’ lips and told the others he held them in his heart. …to Kind Hearts and Coronets.

[baby crying]

[man] I was a healthy baby. Born of an English mother, and Italian father…

[Scorsese] The influence was coming in from everywhere.

[man] …who succumbed to a heart attack at the moment of first setting eyes on me. And so it broke everything open and you could combine it all, and it’s a movie.

[Murray] I mean, I was really going places. You know, going places. All over.

[Scorsese] And that structure and that tone is very much reflected in Goodfellas.

[Henry] I could go anywhere, I could do anything. I knew everybody and everybody knew me.

[Scorsese] Pacing of the cutting, the rhythm of the cutting.

The narration, the overflowing of words.

Words and images.

I mean, the same instinct hit me there, too.

Let’s wipe away everything.

Let’s go and make something completely, uh… free.

[Brian De Palma]

I was aware of Marty at NYU, when he won the Rosenthal Award for the best short made by a director under 25.

So, of course, he was immensely talented.

I met Marty when I was a young…

journalist at Time magazine.

And I got an assignment to do a story about this peculiar new phenomenon, student filmmakers.

And I had to find a student filmmaker.

And his name was Marty Scorsese.

His work was incredible.

[Scorsese] The film became pretty successful.

But right around that time, a professor talked to me about my films. And he said, “Good, you have the technical stuff, now you need a philosophy.”

[Scorsese] Shadows, John Cassavetes, is the key.

How ya doing?

Good.

[Cocks] Shadows made Marty understand you could go out on the street, the streets that he knew, with light cameras and make a movie… from your heart and your life.

I could take what I was experiencing in life and… create a cinematic narrative.

[“Jenny Take a Ride” by Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels playing]

It became something called Who’s That Knocking. And this was going to be my first feature, uh, thesis film.

I cast Harvey Keitel.

[Harvey Keitel] Looking to get experience as an actor, I auditioned along with a number of people… and I got the job.

He understood the streets and the characters.

All it was, was hanging out in the street.

We were just making a street movie.

We were up on the roof, I remember, once, on the roof of his tenement.

You had to get permission from the mafia to shoot up there.

And the boss came up to check us out at one point.

[Pileggi] Chalutz is the major mob guy on Elizabeth Street.

He’s a killer.

Pats Marty on the back, kisses him on the head.

Gets every

anything he wants, he…

So he had total access to neighborhoods that nobody [laughing] would have access to.

[Scorsese] And part of it was not, you know, organized crime, part of it was just street, tough kids, West Side Story type.

And we used to have these little, called after-hour clubs.

Should I say this?

We used to pay the cops off.

We were serving liquor at 16.

[Morale] I had a club.

[Scorsese] It was private, members only.

I was paying rent, like, forty dollars.

It was like nothing.

Nothing, at that time.

But it was a place to be, it had a bar.

We were drinking there, things happen, a few things.

Play cards, gamble, there were crap games in them.

And there was business.

[Scorsese] A lot of business.

[man] You lose, ’cause you’re playing with my money!

Ah! No!

[Scorsese] But I, in a funny way, wanted to step back… and observe.

[Ferraro] Marty hit it right on the head.

He remembered everything.

One time, we went to the club on the West Side.

Ten minutes later, they gave us a beat.

Like, my head is swol…

…bulging out.

[indistinct shouting]

Marty turns around and says, “I wish I had a camera.”

I said, “This fucking guy wants a camera, I want a gun.”

[laughs] He said, “I wish I had a camera.”

I couldn’t believe it.

[“El Watusi” by Ray Baretto playing]

[Scorsese] It was shown once at a screening for NYU and it didn’t work.

It was terrible.

And so I shot new scenes with a young actress, Zina Bethune.

And Harvey Keitel came back.

[Miller] One of the things about Who’s That Knocking, ’cause it’s being created in a time where there’s sexual liberation all around.

And yet you feel like he’s leaving…

Not… Not with us.

Marty still had the view of Catholicism that he had as a kid.

Where if you had some sexual type of relationship with a girl, I think Marty thought that would destroy her.

But that was something that probably, uh, we all felt.

And you’re a good girl or you’re a broad or… you know?

I think I’m gonna have to tell you something.

All right, go on.

[Miller] That scene the girl tells him about being raped, and his reaction to it.

And I thought, “How did you come up with that idea?”

Well, that’s the way…

[chuckling] That’s where we come from, in that, um… in that world.

I can’t…

I can’t understand.

I mean if anyone else hears the story…

[Schoonmaker] Marty made it quite clear that it wasn’t her fault, she was raped.

But for someone coming from this… culture, to be with a woman who’s not a virgin is just not on.

It just doesn’t make any sense.

[Schoonmaker] Harvey is fighting against it here, but he just can’t let go of it.

How do I know you didn’t go through the same story with him?

[Scorsese] The idea was, marriage, virginity, children.

That culture coming to…

How should I say?

A kind of conflict.

And tell me something else, while you’re at it.

Who else is gonna marry you while you’re at it, huh?

Tell me that, while you’re at it, you whore.

‘Cause that’s what you are if you don’t know it by now, you whore!

[Cocks] It was a problem with the movie.

Because a lot of people turned against Harvey’s character and Marty wouldn’t change it, because that’s the way that guy was.

That’s the way those guys were, in that time, in that place.

He was being honest about that.

[Scorsese] Harry Ufland, he was my agent, showed it at the William Morris Agency.

And I think it was 1968, and guys in the agency were laughing.

They were going, “Here we are in the middle of the sexual revolution and here’s a guy who won’t make love to the girl because he loves her.”

[Miller laughs softly]

[Miller] You got married pretty young.

[Scorsese] Yeah, because of that. Yeah.

That’s the way we thought.

That’s what you did.

Well, at 23, you’re supposed to be an adult.

From the world I came from.

Laraine Brennan, I think she was in the second film.

I think she was one of the dancers.

[Bivona] I remember meeting Laraine on the shoot of Murray. It was interesting because, of course, she was certainly very different than a lot of the girls that we knew, you know, from the neighborhood.

She came from a… affluent family.

[Miller] Were you surprised when Marty decided to get married?

Oh, no. It came kinda quick, if I remember it.

[Miller] What’s the reason do you think that he got married so quickly?

[laughs]

[Cathy Scorsese] They were young and crazy in love.

She was an actress and a model.

And she left the business really to have me, raise me.

[Scorsese] We adored her, you know?

And then we moved to Jersey City.

‘Cause it was a big apartment and it was very cheap.

[Miller] He moved, really, from his home. His family home.

Yeah… And he didn’t move as quickly as she did, I think.

She’d be home and she’d call my grandmother’s and she’d be like, “Katie, is Martin there?”

“Yes.” He was there. Like, he’d go to my grandmother’s to eat every night.

Or most nights. Like–

And so he was still going home to his mother.

He was around, but he was younger and still trying to, you know, get his career going.

And I know that when they were young, it was a very intense time.

[Scorsese] The break in culture was happening. New music…

the Vietnam situation.

I was not a very political person at all.

But what was going on, and what we saw on the TV at dinner time…

And this horrible, horrible situation…

I realized we shouldn’t be doing this.

And so, I wrote this idea down in two pages.

And it was for the Angry Arts Week in New York.

[“I Can’t Get Started” by Bunny Berigan playing] I had this idea.

And it was right at the height of the Vietnam War.

[music continues]

A man, he goes to shave.

And, you know, does himself in.

The person would be blonde hair, blue eyed.

Be white American, you know?

And it had to have that piece of music.

Of an America of the 1930s.

[Miller] How did you think of that one?

That was in my mind.

That’s how I think, you know?

That’s how I think.

Suicide. American suicide.

I remember being in a church on a Sunday, and the priest saying, “It’s a holy war.”

And I never went back in.

[song ends]

The behavior of the people, the representatives of the church, didn’t feel right to me in the ’60s.

It just didn’t.

Did the behavior of, you know, bohemians or hippies feel right?

The hippie thing, I gotta say, and I wasn’t a hippie but I felt very comfortable around them because they were… kind.

It’s really amazing, man.

It looks like some kind of a biblical, epical…

unbelievable scene. [laughs]

Look at all those people!

I know, right?

[Joplin cackles]

[Scorsese] And then the summer of ’69 became the Woodstock thing.

We all started working with a group of people who had been at NYU, to make Woodstock. It’s me, Michael Wadleigh and Marty.

They were codirecting.

[Scorsese] It was a codirecting thing with Michael Wadleigh, who had shot the scenes for Who’s That Knocking. They drove us up and then you couldn’t drive anymore.

You just left the car in the road.

[Schoonmaker] We were sleeping on the ground. I had ticks in my hair.

We were covered in mud.

Marty went up with his cufflinks because he thought we would be going out to dinner at night.

There was no going to dinner, but he had brought his cufflinks.

[Scorsese] We were there day and night.

♪ I want to take you higher ♪

[Sly and the Family Stone performing “I Want to Take You Higher”]

♪ Uh! I want to take you higher ♪

♪ Higher ♪

And it was so exciting.

[The Who performing “Summertime Blues”]

♪ I’m agonna raise a fuss

I’m agonna raise a holler… ♪

[Scorsese] I actually hallucinated.

I thought… I thought at one point, that they were charging the stage.

I had been awake… three, four nights, you know?

Everyone, “Well, you were drugged.”

No. No, no, no.

This is, uh…

It was before drugs. You know?

They may have been. I have no id–

You know, what was going on, was going on.

But we were young enough to stay awake and be able to do it.

It’s the only time I’ve ever been in a place that… that actually acted out… acted out compassion and love for other people.

[Wavy Gravy] If you’ve got food, feed other people. Keep feeding each other. It could’ve gone pretty bad, because there was no food.

There were 500,000 people.

And then you see Wavy Gravy there saying, “What I have in mind is breakfast in bed for 500,000.” That’s what he did.

We’re all feeding each other.

[cheering and applause]

We must be in heaven, man!

[Scorsese] It was a… uh…

It was very special.

[feedback]

[cheering] When we came back from Woodstock, I got involved in the cutting with it.

[Santana performing “Soul Sacrifice”]

Santana, the ending…

At the end, on two screens, all these images go very fast.

I got fascinated by free association of images.

The thinking process, I wanted to visualize it.

But as the producer told me, he said, “Marty, there can only be one director.”

[Schoonmaker] He was supposed to codirect, but Wadleigh didn’t allow that in the end.

And I think that was very hard on Marty.

[Scorsese] They took it back to California.

I was told I couldn’t go with them to finish the work.

They were gonna take it. Him and Thelma.

Basically, for me, it was losing being part of a group and being ostracized from the group.

[Miller] Right.

And, uh…

[Miller] It must have been hard, though.

It was devastating.

And the winner is…

Woodstock.

[applause]

[Scorsese] At that point, Harry Ufland, who was my agent, got me a first feature to make.

Kind of a strange noir film called The Honeymoon Killers. And I started designing this simple noir film into something that was quite extravagant.

I lasted five days.

[Miller chuckles] And I was told, “You have to leave.”

You’re hired to do a film, you can’t impose other things on the subject matter itself.

And I was trying to make something much more of it.

But I was putting myself there, rather than the material.

I was putting myself over the material.

This was when my marriage fell apart.

Because the more I dealt with trying to get films made and that sort of thing I, um… It fell apart.

And that was all there was to it, you know.

I remember also when I did…

I was thinking about it in the car coming up.

When, um… I had made Nice Girl, and won these awards, you know, then I would go meet these people for advice.

And one old man named George K. Arthur.

George K. Arthur was an actor in Josef von Sternberg’s silent film, The Salvation Hunters. He said, “You have talent.”

He said, “You married?” I said, “No.”

He says, “Oh, good.

Then you won’t hurt anyone.”

I didn’t quite know what he meant.

[Schoonmaker] He was so driven.

He really wanted to make movies.

He wanted to go to Hollywood, and bust in.

[Scorsese] I went out to LA to work on this thing called Medicine Ball Caravan for Freddie Weintraub.

He was an old-time bohemian hustler.

He made the deal for Woodstock for Warner Bros. to buy it.

Called me and said, “Would you come out to California?

I have a rock-and-roll documentary that needs an editor.”

[Sandra Weintraub] My dad hired Marty to edit a really terrible film [laughing] called Medicine Ball Caravan, and I met Marty.

He was smart, he was funny, he was cute, he came up to about here on me.

And I just said, “If I borrow some money from my father, can I take you out for dinner?”

All that I really remember is that Marty was going to parties as much as he could.

Meeting as many people as he could.

[woman] I want everyone to look at Mr. Spielberg who came in to…

[Spielberg] I met Marty for the first time because we had a mutual friend, and he had decided to invite everybody up to his house and bring our short movies with us.

He brought a movie called The Big Shave. It’s a very close shave. [laughs] Then Brian De Palma, who was a friend of mine, and was one of Marty’s best friends, started getting all of us together.

[Scorsese] I met so many people.

So many different actors, writers and Schrader was there.

[Weintraub] The one I remember the most is John Milius.

On New Year’s Eve, John was shooting off a gun.

[cheering]

[Milius] It’s 1970… [giggles]

[gun shots]

[manic laughter]

[Miller laughs]

[Scorsese] I met George Lucas there, too.

And Lucas was doing THX 1138. Everybody was making these first features and they were being shown.

[Spielberg] And at that time, in Hollywood, is the Easy Rider breakthrough, giving respect to longhaired filmmakers who smoked marijuana.

All of a sudden, independent filmmakers were being taken very seriously by parochial Hollywood studios.

[Weintraub] Marty was looking to connect and try and make a career out here.

Until finally, I met Roger Corman who said he’d give me an exploitation film to make.

[Cocks] Roger Corman who was employing/exploiting young filmmakers in order to make these genre movies.

[Scorsese] He had this film, Boxcar Bertha. It’s the ’30s, and they’re running around in cars.

It’s like a Bonnie and Clyde takeoff, basically, a genre.

“Would you wanna do it?”

I said, “Absolutely.”

Hi.

What happened out there? We get robbed?

Why? You got something to rob?

[Scorsese] Corman came down to Arkansas where I was shooting.

Wanted to see my preparation.

And I showed him the first two scenes, all drawings and every scene was drawn.

And then he looked at the volume of paper and he said, “Wait a minute, you have every scene done this way?”

I said, “Yes.” He said, “All right.”

And he walked out.

Boxcar Bertha, that was learning how to make a film on a budget, when working with actors whom I adored.

[woman] Not my tiara.

Aw, it ain’t so special.

[Scorsese] I finished on a schedule and on a budget.

And getting it done without getting fired.

Seriously.

I was so happy I didn’t get fired.

It was a milestone.

But my friends didn’t like it. It’s as if I had caught a disease or something.

[Miller chuckles]

Really. They looked at me and moved away from me.

[“Season of the Witch”, by Donovan playing] Most people I wanted to work with, they said, “Get away from me,” you know.

In so many words. In some cases, very clearly, “Get away from me.”

What they didn’t like was that I made the film, is what it was.

[Miller] Do you think it’s ’cause you betrayed yourself as an artist?

That’s what they think, yeah.

That’s what they think.

Right around that time, Brian De Palma also gave me the script of Taxi Driver and I wanted to do it.

But Michael and Julia Phillips, they had made a number of films.

They wouldn’t take it seriously at all, because I had done Boxcar Bertha. [Cocks] In Hollywood…

Marty always had feelings of he didn’t fit in there, socially.

There was a beach house that Margot Kidder and Jennifer Salt had together and a lot of young people used to like to go out there.

What I do remember is that my friend Peter Boyle pulled Marty out of the ocean because he was drowning.

Marty went out in the surf, not an outdoors guy, but he decided to be the good guy and try to mix it up and fit in and be congenial and everything.

And he got caught in the waves.

He couldn’t get back in.

I mean, he was drowning.

[song continues]

[Uricola] Marty was sort of lost in Hollywood.

I mean, he was like a stranger in a strange land.

And he was trying to make some sense out of it.

I had gotten to know John Cassavetes, and I talked to him about Marty.

And he said, “Yeah, I’d like to see his movie.”

I mean, I’m sorry about…

about before.

[Scorsese] And I was embarrassed by the film.

But he really believed in it.

And he told me, “That’s the kind of film you gotta make.

You don’t make any of this other nonsense. Do that.”

[Cocks] He saw, in that movie, Marty’s amazing gift.

John became Marty’s patron saint of cinema.

His conscience.

[song ends]

So, he looked at Boxcar Bertha, I saw him afterwards. He looked at me… and…

He was like ten feet away from me, and he goes, “Come here.”

And I went up to him and he embraced me.

And he held me aside.

Pushed me aside and he goes, “You just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit.

Don’t do this again.

Don’t do this again.”

He said, “Don’t you have something you really wanna do?”

“Well, yes, I have this thing, Mean Streets.” Because all the things that I really wanted to get clearer in Who’s That Knocking really were in Mean Streets. And he said, “Well, get it going.

See if you can get an actor to play in it.”

[Miller] You said that Verna introduced…

She introduced them. My wife was in a play with this wonderful, wonderful actor.

They said, “Yeah, you gotta meet this guy.

You gotta meet this guy.”

I said, “Who is he?”

[“Jumpin’ Jack Flash” by The Rolling Stones playing]