SOURCE: The Scorsese Picture: The Art and Life of Martin Scorsese, Birch Lane Press, 1992, 254 p.

[In the following excerpt, Ehrenstein examines Scorsese's career and filmmaking techniques.]

Halfway through Taxi Driver, director Martin Scorsese turns up in an acting role, playing a fare picked up by the film's cabbie hero, Travis Bickle. As the cab comes to a stop at a street corner, Scorsese is seen in the passenger seat—neatly dressed in a dark suit, with carefully groomed beard and mustache. It is very late at night.

"Put the meter back," he orders Travis sharply. "Let the numbers go on. I don't care what I have to pay. I'm not getting out. Pull over to the curb. We're gonna sit here." Closing his eyes, he sits calmly for a moment, then continues his speech: "You see that light up there? The woman on the second floor? See the woman in the window? That's my wife. But that's not my apartment."

He smiles broadly and chuckles to himself, almost gloating.

He continues, "You know who lives there? A nigger lives there. Now what d'you think of that? Don't answer. You don't have to answer everything. I'm gonna kill her with a .44 Magnum pistol. Did you ever see what a .44 Magnum could do to a woman's face? Just fuckin' destroy it. Blow it right apart."

Leaning forward in a slightly conspiratorial manner, he says, "Now, did you ever see what it could do to a woman's pussy? That you should see!"

He again pauses briefly and smiles broadly.

"You must think I'm pretty sick or something," he says to the silent cabbie. "Do you think I'm sick?"

We get no answer; the scene is over. Neither the man nor the woman he claims to be his wife nor the "nigger" with whom she's allegedly committing adultery are ever seen or heard from again. We don't need to see them because the scene has served its purpose. It has cast over the film a pall of sexual violence that is almost palpable.

To say the scene is disturbing doesn't begin to describe the effect. Within that disturbance lies a shock of recognition of the terrible truths the scene discloses about racism, sexism, misogyny, and violence in modern American culture. It is a shock of recognition absent from almost any other American film one could name….

Martin Scorsese is the American commercial cinema's most controversial director. Critics and audiences are deeply divided in their feelings about his work. For every movie lover who passionately supports Scorsese, there's another just as angered by him. Often as not, violence is the principal objection.

The fantasy shoot-'em-ups of Stallone and Schwarzenegger may sport a higher body count, but the violence in Scorsese's films disturbs audiences as no other director's work has since Sam Peckinpah. But Taxi Driver, with its famous blood-splattered finale, may be among Scorsese's least disturbing films. In that study of the gradual mental disintegration of a lonely New Yorker, viewers are at least granted a form of catharsis. But while Raging Bull has a zero mortality rate, there's no escaping the physical brutality that runs throughout. And in The King of Comedy, where no punches land, the threat of violence is such a constant that the character's ostensibly humorous antics are unrelievedly tense.

In 1988, The Last Temptation of Christ, Scorsese's adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis's existential version of the New Testament, inspired worldwide protests. Without having seen the film, leaders of the radical religious right claimed grave spiritual offense and mounted a campaign to ban Last Temptation. In spite of well-organized demonstrations and several incidents of violence (there were fire-bombings at European theaters playing the film), the protests did not stop the film from being shown. However, the controversy led to Hollywood's increasing turn toward "inoffensive" movie subjects.

Making a controversial film is one thing; changing the course of history is another. Some observers feel Scorsese came frighteningly close to doing just that in March 1981. John W. Hinckley, Jr., the black sheep son of an upper-middle-class Republican family, attempted the assassination of President Ronald Reagan—seriously injuring Reagan press secretary James Brady in the process. Hinckley was obsessed with Taxi Driver and its star, Jodie Foster. Could it be that Scorsese pictures weren't simply contentious, but downright dangerous as well?

In 1989, polls conducted by Premiere and American Film magazines, disclosed that, by an overwhelming margin, film critics here and abroad considered Raging Bull to be the best motion picture of the decade. In light of the mixed-to-hostile notices the film received on its 1980 release, this was a remarkable critical turnaround. More striking still was the fact that, in the American Film poll, The King of Comedy, a 1982 box office disaster that opened to some of the most scathing notices of Scorsese's career, made the Top Ten of the decade's best.

These poll results underscore the most important thing about the films of Martin Scorsese—the lasting effect. The same critics who initially found the works disturbing, later discovered that they couldn't get them out of their minds. Scorsese's imagery was too powerful, his examination of character too deep, his storytelling methods too rich. They discovered that Martin Scorsese made pictures that last….

"Is it a great movie? I don't think so," said critic Pauline Kael about GoodFellas. "The filmmaking process becomes the subject of the movie. All you want to talk about is the glorious whizzing camera, the freeze-frames and jumpcuts. That may be why young film enthusiasts are so turned on by Martin Scorsese's work: they don't just respond to his films, they want to be him."

Considering the quality of much current filmmaking—plodding and unimaginative, slapdash and sloppy—it's odd to see a director criticized both for his technical prowess and for inspiring others to follow his example. Still, Kael can't be blamed for being taken aback by Scorsese's intoxication with the visual possibilities of the medium: The boxing sequences of Raging Bull, with its subjective shots that pull you into the ring; the camera's slow-motion prowling through nighttime New York streets in Taxi Driver; the bravura Steadicam take through the Copacabana night club in GoodFellas, one of the longest and most complicated and emotionally exhilarating tracking shots in movie history. To suggest that this technical flash is at the expense of other equally important filmmaking qualities isn't unreasonable. But it is unreasonable to imply, as Kael does, that there's a simple way to separate Scorsese's style from his film's content.

Generations of American critics of all artistic pursuits have found the word technique to be unprintable unless it's preceded by the adjective mere. In Scorsese's case, this prejudice has a special edge, inasmuch as he's never been interested in exploring uplifting themes of the Gandhi or Chariots of Fire variety. Neither has he been drawn to social themes for their own sake. His films may touch on "hot-button issues," such as feminism (Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore), organized crime (GoodFellas), wife-beating (New York, New York, Raging Bull), mental illness (Taxi Driver), and vigilante justice (Cape Fear), but they do so within the context of specific characters and unique circumstances. More important, the creative choices in Scorsese films aren't made to supplement the actors' performances or express a "message" that exists solely on a literary level. Scorsese's messages are inextricably tied to the means by which he conveys them. His methods are his message.

SCORSESE: I've always believed all the arts culminate in film. Camera movement is dance, lighting is painting. Camera movement is also a lot like painting—and like music. I feel it's always a combination of lighting, camera movement, the use of music and the impact of the actors on the screen. The way the actors move into the light and relate—or not relate as in The King of Comedy—is very important. In The King of Comedy it's all a series of frozen frames. The characters never penetrate each other's areas. They just can't get in.

The King of Comedy isn't the first work mentioned in discussions of Scorsese's technical mastery. Camera movements in the film are few and simply executed. In the precredit sequence there is a very brief bit of slow motion. But with the camera placed firmly in the middle distance, calmly observing the action, Scorsese would appear to be making a work in polar opposition to the pyrotechnics of Raging Bull. Yet because of this very simplicity—more apparent than real—The King of Comedy is central to any discussion of the methods and purposes of Scorsese's work.

One of the key scenes takes place in a Chinese restaurant where Rupert Pupkin, autograph hound and would-be stand-up comic, takes his date Rita, a barmaid. Rupert tries to impress Rita, first by showing her his autograph book, then by telling her that his signature will have greater value than any of the others in his collection, because he's going to make his television debut on the "Jerry Langford Show." With Rupert's overconfidence squared off against Rita's cynical bemusement, a basic comic conflict unfolds. Scorsese's method of filming the scene is equally straightforward. He uses a standard reverse-angle shot setup: a medium shot of Rupert, with part of Rita's head and shoulder on the right of the screen, alternating with a medium shot of Rita with part of Rupert's head and shoulder on the left of the screen. While three additional medium shots of the two of them facing one another in the booth (Rupert on the left, Rita on the right) are integrated into the editing of the sequence, the primary shot alternation is between two talking-head images in isolation.

In his book, The Filmmaker's Art, Haig Manoogian [Scorsese's professor and mentor at New York University] notes that, while the reverse angle is a valuable filmmaking tool, it must be used with care:

The technique of reverse angles has always been popular with filmmakers, because crosscuts in which fairly close shots are taken are an expedient method. Once characters are in a reverse-angle setup, there is a tremendous conservation of shots as the camera concentrates first on one, then on the other. But to conserve shots does not appear to be the objective so much as to maneuver the characters into set positions so they can talk, talk, talk. Reverse angles have been used so often in the manner described that they have become a visual cliché. It is often overlooked that staging and dialogue are not half so important as the action and reaction on which the reverse angles should be based.

In the Chinese restaurant scene, Scorsese takes his former teacher's lesson very much to heart. Instead of using the reverse angle setup to simply convey information through dialogue ("talk, talk, talk"), Scorsese draws our attention to the curiously tense atmosphere surrounding their conversation. The contrast between Rupert's self-conscious body language—rocking back and forth like a waterbird toy—and Rita's poised, relaxed demeanor plays a part in this tension. But the most important factor is Scorsese's awareness of the dramatic impact of editing.

A director working in the "talk, talk, talk" mode that Manoogian disdains would concentrate on Rupert speaking, and cut to Rita only when she replies. Scorsese nervously cuts back and forth between the characters at points not cued by anything specifically stated in the dialogue.

Behind Rupert, a man sitting at another table (Chuck Low) mimics the would-be superstar's every gesture. Does this man's appearance mean the scene, like several others in the film, is a fantasy? If it's "really happening," how does it relate to the rest of the story? Scorsese doesn't supply an answer. The man in the other booth is there precisely to create such a disturbance. Where Taxi Driver and Raging Bull brought us into its protagonist's view through subjective camera positions, The King of Comedy delineates Rupert's character through a deliberate avoidance of subjectivity. The flat effect of the screen is the mirror image of the flat effect of the face Rupert shows to the world. In underscoring this fact through a reverse-shot sequence, Scorsese uses Rupert's character not only to undermine assumptions about fame, show business, and romance, but the very nature of the way these ideas have been represented through techniques like reverse-angle setups. Scorsese makes The King of Comedy more than a simple piece of social criticism; it questions the nature of film narrative itself.

Martin Scorsese is hardly the first director to examine the nature of the medium. But over the past two decades few directors have been disposed to question the filmmaking process. What sets Scorsese apart from the run of the Hollywood movie mill, is best indicated by his preferred credit: "A Martin Scorsese Picture." Not "a film by Martin Scorsese," not a "Martin Scorsese film," or even a "Martin Scorsese Production." "Picture" emphasizes something quite different. For, while Scorsese is dependent on the talents of other artists and technicians to bring his films to life, his controlling vision of the film is the ultimate force that shapes it into a "picture" of a very particular kind.

SCORSESE: With Hollywood in the old days, being a director was like, "So-and-so has a project and you have so many days and you devise the shots and work out the themes in the script." That's being an interpretive artist. Well, I do interpret material to a degree, but it's not the same sort of thing. I can never bring myself to be just "the director." For example, The King of Comedy was an assignment, in a way, because it was a film that Bob De Niro wanted to do. I had to find something coming from myself—personally—in the film, in order to do it. I found it during the shooting, which is why the film took as long as it did. But I had to find it. It couldn't be any other way.

Though Scorsese has officially taken screenwriting credit only for GoodFellas (cowritten with Nicholas Pileggi), he has had a hand, to some degree in the screenplay of every film he has directed. Raging Bull, credited to Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin, was almost entirely rewritten by Scorsese and Robert De Niro before production began to accommodate their evolving vision of the film. Even when he's less involved with the actual writing process, his influence predominates, as in After Hours, where his rewrite requests to screenwriter Joseph Minion resulted in the alteration of several important scenes. On Cape Fear, Scorsese collaborated with screenwriter Wesley Strick in a way that was new to him.

SCORSESE: Wesley Strick was with me on the shooting of Cape Fear. It was the first time I ever had a writer on the set. He just had the right personality. Universal wanted the film made as quickly as possible, so I made a calculated risk of getting the script up to, say, the fifteenth draft, and then working through it scene by scene with the actors as they came aboard. Wesley was so sensitive to what was happening with the whole production that I actually had him standing right by the video monitor on the set to see everything that was going on.

Beyond traditional notions of the written, there is a "visual writing" that Scorsese executes on every film, translating words into meticulous storyboards of each and every sequence. Alfred Hitchcock used the same method, making his visual signature unmistakable despite a range of script collaborators. Hitchcock aimed to produce specific effects of suspense. Scorsese's visual signature is applied for a very different purpose. Rather than simply producing emotional responses, his films question the emotions they arouse. The sequence in Vertigo in which James Stewart stares at Kim Novak as she slowly walks through a restaurant toward him, establishes a feeling of romantic longing that Hitchcock wants us to share. By contrast, a similar sequence in Life Lessons [Scorsese's part of the three-film New York Stories—the other two parts were directed by Woody Allen and Francis Coppola], in which Nick Nolte watches Rosanna Arquette disembark from a plane, places the character's sense of romantic longing under a critical eye. Carefully constructed shots of Nolte's face, of the cigarette in his hand, and Arquette moving in slow motion as Procol Harum's "Whiter Shade of Pale" is heard on the sound track, are offered as material to be carefully analyzed, not simple scenes to be passively consumed.

Life Lessons was written by Richard Price, a well-established novelist (Ladies Man, The Wanderers) when he came to work with Scorsese. Paul Schrader also has enjoyed an independent career as a writer-director (Blue Collar, Mishima, Patty Hearst). Joseph Minion's brilliant screenplay for Robert Bierman's film Vampire's Kiss indicates he's developing a satirical vision of upscale New York life that is only hinted at in After Hours, Despite the independent talents of these writers, King of Comedy screenwriter Paul D. Zimmerman, said that seeing the finished product was "like having a baby that looks like Martin Scorsese."

Over the years, Scorsese has come to depend on a cadre of collaborators: editor Thelma Schoonmaker, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, musician Robbie Robertson, assistant director Joe Reidy, and, until his death in 1988, production designer Boris Leven, who designed the sets for The Silver Chalice. But Scorsese's work with Leven had little to do with film-buff nostalgia. Besides Chalice, Leven had executed remarkable designs for such diverse films as The Shanghai Gesture, Anatomy of a Murder, West Side Story, and The Sound of Music. When Scorsese needed to recreate the glamour of the set-bound films of the studio era for New York, New York, Leven was the obvious choice. Scorsese also used Leven on such unusual projects as the music documentary The Last Waltz (Leven created the sets for the concert sequences and the musical numbers shot, like New York, New York, on the sound stages of MGM), and The King of Comedy. Leven designed the sets for Scorsese's 1983 attempt at The Last Temptation of Christ. Because the 1988 version was a scaled-down production, Leven's designs had to be abandoned in favor of those by John Beard.

Scorsese's work with Leven highlights his interest in maintaining a continuity between the cinema's past and present, in forging a moviemaking tradition from which he can draw and learn. It's not surprising that he worked on Cape Fear with cinematographer Freddie Francis (Room at the Top, The Innocents, Sons and Lovers, and The Elephant Man) veteran production designer Henry Bumstead (The Sting, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Vertigo), and composer Elmer Bernstein, who adapted the late Bernard Herrmann's score of the first version of Cape Fear. Herrmann's last score was for Taxi Driver.

The artist who has had the greatest influence on shaping Scorsese's notion of film as a living tradition is Michael Powell. The British director whose most famous work, The Red Shoes, first opened Scorsese's eyes to the medium's possibilities, remains one of the most controversial figures in the history of the cinema. Powell first made a name for himself in the 1930s and 1940s, when he collaborated with screenwriter Emeric Pressburger to create a dazzling series of dramatically rich, visually stunning Technicolor films. In addition to The Red Shoes, these include The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus, and A Matter of Life and Death (released in the United States as Stairway to Heaven). Working against the British tradition of well-mannered realism, Powell strove to create a cinema of imagination and emotion. Most of his films met with audience approval, but they won few critical allies at the time they were made.

In 1960, Powell released his most daring film, Peeping Tom. Like Psycho, which debuted the same year, it featured a sympathetic murderer as a protagonist. However, Powell's antihero was also an amateur filmmaker. Using the filmmaking process to underscore the intimate relationship between films and their viewers, Peeping Tom drove Powell's critics into an unprecedented rage. One of them suggested that "the only satisfactory way to deal with it" would be to "shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer. Even then the stench would remain." Labeled a filmmaking pariah, Powell was forced to direct episodes of television series like Espionage and The Defenders. He emigrated to Australia and resumed filmmaking in the mid-1960s with the charming comedy Age of Consent. But by the 1970s Powell's career, by and large, was over.

In 1973 Michael Powell saw Mean Streets, and was so impressed by it that he wrote to Scorsese. Several letters were exchanged and, shortly after the completion of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, the two met. The result was both a friendship and a unique intellectual partnership of mentor and student that lasted until Powell's death in 1990.

SCORSESE: Michael became such a part of my life over the years it's difficult to talk about him. I remember our becoming especially close right after Raging Bull. He gave us some very important advice on that film. For example, originally we were going to end it with Jake reading something from Shakespeare's Richard III. It was a speech he actually read in his night club act. Michael said it would be wrong to have a literary reference of that kind come at the end in that way—that we'd really be criticized for it. So we changed it to a quote from On the Waterfront, and that worked perfectly. He did the same thing on After Hours. We weren't satisfied with the ending we originally had, where the hero, Paul, was just taken away encased in plaster. He kept pushing me to find a solution. It was his idea that Paul should somehow end the film back where he started, and that's how we came up with the ending we finally used.

Scorsese returned Powell's favor. In 1979 he sponsored the American rerelease of the long-unseen Peeping Tom, which spurred a revived interest in Powell's work. He helped in any way he could to put Powell back behind the cameras. Scorsese lent his acting talents to Pavlova, the Soviet-produced drama about the ballerina, for which Powell was hired to supervise an English-language version. In 1987, Cannon Pictures announced it would back a Powell-directed film of Philip Glass's opera The Fall of the House of Usher, but the production never materialized. However, Powell happily continued to serve as Scorsese's most important advisor, virtually marrying into the director's "family" when he wed Thelma Schoonmaker in 1982.

SCORSESE: Michael was a very direct man. He would tell you exactly what he thought about something. That's part of the reason why he found it increasingly difficult to work. He couldn't handle the diplomacy involved. I remember a dinner, right before the shooting of Raging Bull, when we'd just met. We all went out to eat with him—Thelma, Bob, and several of our other friends. Halfway through dinner, Michael turns to me and says, "When is Mr. De Niro arriving?" Bob was sitting right next to him. Now you must understand, this didn't have anything to do with any shortcoming of Michael's faculties. It's just that Bob, when he's not on screen, is so reserved that you wouldn't know him! In a social situation he's a completely different person, and that's one of his most endearing qualities.

The Scorsese/De Niro partnership is one of the most productive in film history. It has fascinated critics because of the high quality of their films and the air of mystery surrounding their work habits. Notoriously nonverbal, De Niro has had little to say about how and why he and Scorsese work so well together. Scorsese also finds it difficult to explain their working method, which has developed into an instinctual rapport.

It's become common to speak of De Niro as Scorsese's alter ego, but a closer look at the films doesn't bear this out. In Who's That Knocking at My Door? and Mean Streets, Harvey Keitel, who resembles Scorsese in physical stature, vocal intonation, and low-key demeanor is far closer to an alter ego. In Mean Streets, De Niro's first appearance for Scorsese, the actor is cast as Johnny Boy, whose emotional volatility is contrasted with the moral uncertainty of Keitel's Charlie. De Niro's subsequent work for Scorsese proceeds directly from this mold—not playing Scorsese's direct reflection, but a nightmare image of the worst side of himself.

Being the prime mover behind the decision to film Raging Bull and The King of Comedy, as well as the center of both films, De Niro qualifies as a kind of codirector. Scorsese concedes to the idea. At the same time, the differences that separate his goals and De Niro's are equally plain—signaled by the actor's establishment of his own film production facility in New York.

SCORSESE: It's the old story. One has to be very careful about such a strong collaboration, because at a certain point in time, one of the collaborators will begin to get more satisfaction out of it than the other. And that's when it's time to make changes.

The change is apparent in GoodFellas, where De Niro does not take the lead role, but plays what Scorsese has described as "a major cameo."

SCORSESE: On The King of Comedy Jerry Lewis was all there by the sixth take. It was great, because in a way he was Jerry Langford. But Bob was playing all these different levels of Rupert—seeing how far he could go with the aggressiveness, how far he could go "over the top." Like when he said to Sandra, "I gave you my spot! I live in a hovel and you live in a town house!" We shot that scene for three days. I saw Bob do that scene once in rehearsal and it was so funny that I had to get it into the film. But we had chosen the worst street in New York to shoot on, and when we finally started doing the scene it was five o'clock and the light was going. The shots had to match so we had to shoot the rest of the scene at five each day. Today I wouldn't do that. I would rehearse more and be ready to shoot a scene like that before lunch. But it was important because I think that it's one of Bob's greatest performances.

The only thing I have going with actors is to try as best I can to create an atmosphere on the set where they're as free and relaxed as possible. I've gotten to know a lot of them personally, especially over the past few years, and they know that with me they have to do their best work.

Scorsese's attentiveness to actors is the cornerstone of his Hollywood esteem. Ellen Burstyn and Paul Newman have won Oscars with his help. Other performers, including Nick Nolte (Life Lessons, Cape Fear), Rosanna Arquette (After Hours, Life Lessons), Barbara Hershey (Boxcar Bertha, The Last Temptation of Christ), and Sandra Bernhard (The King of Comedy), have turned major corners in their careers through Scorsese films. Despite his apparent ease with the various aspects of the filmmaking process today, Scorsese feels his shaky beginnings didn't suggest the director he would become.

SCORSESE: In some ways I don't particularly like my first feature, Who's That Knocking at My Door? because of all the problems we had making it. I know what I wanted to do when I started the film, but I couldn't do it with the amount of money I had. I was trying to learn about 35mm cameras. I should have shot the whole thing in 16mm and blown it up to 35. I made a lot of errors, which came about because of the very process of making a feature in a non-commercial manner. I didn't have access to the equipment on a daily basis. The crew was constantly blowing out the fuses in people's buildings. It was all stopping and starting. You start shooting a scene, then two months later, when you want to reshoot, the actors have cut their hair, or have other jobs and can't work. It's a nightmare.

Bad as this experience was, it prepared Scorsese for Boxcar Bertha, Roger Corman's low-budget variation on Bonnie and Clyde. Believing cost cutting to be the key to creativity, Corman gave Scorsese on-the-job training, but little else. It took the more professional production contexts of Mean Streets and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore to give Scorsese the sense of control he needed, and the freedom to let go in certain areas of his work.

SCORSESE: On Taxi Driver we had two or three editors, but basically it was supervised by Marcia Lucas. Tom Rolfe was one of them, and he was the person responsible for the "Are you talking to me?" scene. We had tons of footage of Bob playing around in front of the mirror, but I liked those "Are you talking to me?" takes and asked Tom to try to edit it. It was the first time I ever worked the old way with an editor—just leave the room and let him cut it himself. I wouldn't touch it. It was beautiful. But in another part of that sequence I added a little jump cut at the end where Travis says, "Listen, you screwheads," and seems to pop suddenly into the frame. Tom disowned that cut. He said, "I had nothing to do with it." But he is a great professional editor.

Scorsese enjoys the editing room more than the set, except on New York, New York. The most improvisational piece of filmmaking Scorsese has ever attempted, this musical drama of the unhappy marriage of a band singer and a jazz musician was shot on some of the most elaborate studio sets ever devised. It was a madly inspired attempt at wedding the irreconcilable extremes of a Vincente Minnellistyle fantasy with a Cassavetes drama. Unfortunately, the result was a mass of interesting footage, almost impossible to edit into a unified whole.

In the end, Scorsese's troubles come down to whether the should keep "Happy Endings," in the film. An elaborate production number designed to be placed at New York, New York's climax, "Happy Endings" was, on a narrative level, a means of underscoring the show business success of the film's heroine, Francine Evans (Liza Minnelli). It wasn't crucial to the story, but on a thematic level "Happy Endings" was very important. Both a parody and a homage to the production numbers from the golden era of Hollywood musicals, it symbolized everything connected to Scorsese's desire to make New York, New York in the first place.

SCORSESE: "Happy Endings" was the first thing we shot. It was beautiful—a little movie all to itself. Shooting it was the happiest time I had on the picture. But by the time we were into the rest of the film, everything changed. When it was all over, we had a very difficult time editing. It seemed that every week we had a different cut of the thing. It was a long film and, in some places, slow. We wanted to speed it up somehow. So sometimes "Happy Endings" was in, and sometimes it was out.

Toward the end of the shoot I was having personal problems, and a bout with drugs. One of my friends said, "Marty, you're thinking about this thing too personally." I said, "No, no, no. Next version, we'll cut it!" So we did, and the film moved faster. But was it better? No. "Happy Endings" made the film. It gave the audience the happy ending that it otherwise didn't get. "Happy Endings" made one side of the film complete and whole—the part connected to all the old Hollywood musicals that I adored. The real ending made complete the other side of the film—the Cassavetes-like story about creative people in romantic relationships. It was a bad experience, but thank God it happened, because after New York, New York I knew what not to do.

Scorsese felt he had failed with New York, New York because he'd let his imagination run riot. He also blames his own lack of discipline for the problems that plagued much of the shooting of The King of Comedy. His return to low-budget filmmaking with After Hours was a deliberate attempt to regain control. This lesson in cost-conscious film-making paid off on The Last Temptation of Christ when he was forced to film only three takes of any shot. In addition, the film's remote location forced him to shoot Last Temptation "blind." He couldn't see the daily rushes and had to rely on one telephone call per day to Thelma Schoonmaker in New York to find out if the shots were usable.

SCORSESE: I can't make every picture the way I made After Hours and Last Temptation, where it's all planned down to the smallest detail. But sometimes you're forced into those kinds of situations. Planning is always the hardest part of the writing of a film—figuring out what shots you're going to use. Sometimes it's so frustrating to try to figure shots out. I sit here with my dog, Zoe, and I end up turning to her and saying, "Come on, contribute!" The truth is, I'm lazy.

It's doubtful that Scorsese really is lazy. There are enough films now in the planning stages to keep him busy past the turn of the century; he appears to work at a feverish pace. The question is, "Why?" The answer can be found in one of Scorsese's most graceful films, Life Lessons.

Paulette, a frustrated young artist who has become the unwilling mistress of famous painter Lionel Dobie, asks him whether she has talent, or should give up painting entirely. Dobie is madly in love with her and fearful of driving her away, so he hedges his reply. Telling Paulette that she's the only one who can decide whether or not she's an artist, he adds that art is something "you do because you have to."

Nobody needs as much to make films as Martin Scorsese does. The carefully composed individual shots of The Last Temptation of Christ, the complex texture of sound effects in Raging Bull, the unusual camera angles of Life Lessons, the dynamic editing of The King of Comedy—none of it is needed by an industry that demands that directors produce simple, commercial, product. Martin Scorsese can't do that. He does what he does because he has to.