SOURCE: Scorsese on Scorsese, edited by David Thompson and Ian Christie, Faber and Faber, 1989, 178 p.

[In the following excerpt, which is drawn from lectures Scorsese delivered in London in 1987, he discusses Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, addressing his intentions and influences in each film as well as the details of their production.]

Brian De Palma introduced me to Paul Schrader. We made a pilgrimage out to see Manny Farber, the critic, in San Diego. [In an endnote Thompson and Christie add: 'Manny Farber coined the phrase "termite art" to cover the unselfconscious action cinema that he valued highly, alongside avant-garde work, as a critic working against the grain of respectability. One of the first to celebrate Fuller among other genre- and B-movie-specialists, he is also a painter and teacher and has latterly given up writing criticism in favour of allusive "movie paintings".'] I wanted Paul to do a script of The Gambler by Dostoevsky for me. But Brian took Paul out for dinner, and they contrived it so that I couldn't find them. By the time I tracked them down, three hours later, they'd cooked up the idea of Obsession. But Brian told me that Paul had this script, Taxi Driver, that he didn't want to do or couldn't do at that time, and wondered if I'd be interested in reading it. So I read it and my friend read it and she said it was fantastic: we agreed that this was the kind of picture we should be making.

That year, 1974, De Niro was about to win the Academy Award for The Godfather Part II, Ellen Burstyn won the Award for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, and Paul had sold The Yakuza to Warner Brothers, so it was all coming together. Michael and Julia Phillips, who owned the script, had won an Award for The Sting and figured there was enough power to get the film made, though in the end we barely raised the very low budget of $1.3 million. In fact, for a while we even thought of doing it on black and white videotape! Certainly we felt it would be a labour of love rather than any kind of commercial success—shoot very quickly in New York, finish it in Los Angeles, release it and then bounce back into New York, New York, on which we'd already begun pre-production. De Niro's schedule had to be rearranged anyway, because he was due to film 1900 with Bertolucci.

Much of Taxi Driver arose from my feeling that movies are really a kind of dream-state, or like taking dope. And the shock of walking out of the theatre into broad daylight can be terrifying. I watch movies all the time and I am also very bad at waking up. The film was like that for me—that sense of being almost awake. There's a shot in Taxi Driver where Travis Bickle is talking on the phone to Betsy and the camera tracks away from him down the long hallway and there's nobody there. That was the first shot I thought of in the film, and it was the last I filmed. I like it because I sensed that it added to the loneliness of the whole thing, but I guess you can see the hand behind the camera there.

The whole film is very much based on the impressions I have as a result of growing up in New York and living in the city. There's a shot where the camera is mounted on the hood of the taxi and it drives past the sign 'Fascination', which is just down from my office. It's that idea of being fascinated, of this avenging angel floating through the streets of the city, that represents all cities for me. Because of the low budget, the whole film was drawn out on storyboards, even down to medium close-ups of people talking, so that everything would connect. I had to create this dream-like quality in those drawings. Sometimes the character himself is on a dolly, so that we look over his shoulder as he moves towards another character, and for a split second the audience would wonder what was happening. The overall idea was to make it like a cross between a Gothic horror and the New York Daily News.

There is something about the summertime in New York that is extraordinary. We shot the film during a very hot summer and there's an atmosphere at night that's like a seeping kind of virus. You can smell it in the air and taste it in your mouth. It reminds me of the scene in The Ten Commandments portraying the killing of the first-born, where a cloud of green smoke seeps along the palace floor and touches the foot of a first-born son, who falls dead. That's almost what it's like: a strange disease creeps along the streets of the city and, while we were shooting the film, we would slide along after it. Many times people threatened us and we had to take off quickly. One night, while we were shooting in the garment district, my father came out of work and walked by the set. The press of bodies on the pavement was so thick that, in the moment I turned away from the camera to talk to him, it was impossible to get back. That was typical.

As in my other films, there was some improvisation in Taxi Driver. The scene between De Niro and Cybill Shepherd in the coffee-shop is a good example. I didn't want the dialogue as it appeared in the script, so we improvised for about twelve minutes, then wrote it down and shot it. It was about three minutes in the end. Many of the best scenes, like the one in which De Niro says, 'Suck on this,' and blasts Keitel, were designed to be shot in one take. Although every shot in the picture had been drawn before-hand, with the difficulties we encountered, including losing four days of shooting because of rain, a lot of the stuff taken from the car had to be shot as documentary.

We looked at Hitchcock's The Wrong Man for the moves when Henry Fonda goes into the insurance office and the shifting points of view of the people behind the counter. [In an endnote, Thompson and Christie add that 'Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (1956) has a rare documentary-style quality and sense of real New York locations amid his more flamboyantly theatrical works and is also one of his most overtly Catholic. An innocent man (Fonda) falsely accused of homicide is eventually vindicated after a religious experience in prison.'] That was the kind of paranoia that I wanted to employ. And the way Francesco Rosi used black and white in Salvatore Giuliano was the way I wanted Taxi Driver to look in colour. We also studied Jack Hazan's A Bigger Splash for the head-on framing, such as the shot of the grocery store before Travis Bickle shoots the black guy [In an endnote, Thompson and Christie add that 'Jack Hazan's A Bigger Splash (1975) took its title from the painting by its subject, David Hockney. A kind of fantasy documentary on Hockney, his work and his life, the film's lush colour photography and precise, clean framing reflected the artworks which, on occasion, it reproduced exactly.'] Each sequence begins with a shot like that, so before any moves you're presented with an image like a painting.

I don't think there is any difference between fantasy and reality in the way these should be approached in a film. Of course, if you live that way you are clinically insane. But I can ignore the boundary on film. In Taxi Driver Travis Bickle lives it out, he goes right to the edge and explodes. When I read Paul's script, I realized that was exactly the way I felt, that we all have those feelings, so this was a way of embracing and admitting them, while saying I wasn't happy about them. When you live in a city, there's a constant sense that the buildings are getting old, things are breaking down, the bridges and the subway need repairing. At the same time society is in a state of decay; the police force are not doing their job in allowing prostitution on the streets, and who knows if they're feeding off and making money out of it. So that sense of frustration goes in swings of the pendulum, only Travis thinks it's not going to swing back unless he does something about it. It was a way of exorcizing those feelings, and I have the impression that De Niro felt that too.

I never read any of Paul's source materials—I believe one was Arthur Bremer's diary. But I had read Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground some years before and I'd wanted to make a film of it; and Taxi Driver was the closest thing to it I'd come across. De Niro had tried his hand at scriptwriting on the subject of a political assassin, and he'd told me the story. We weren't very close at this time, I'd just worked with him on Mean Streets, but he read the script and said it was very similar to his idea, which he therefore might as well drop. So we all connected with this subject.

Travis really has the best of intentions; he believes he's doing right, just like St Paul. He wants to clean up life, clean up the mind, clean up the soul. He is very spiritual, but in a sense Charles Manson was spiritual, which doesn't mean that it's good. It's the power of the spirit on the wrong road. The key to the picture is the idea of being brave enough to admit having these feelings, and then act them out. I instinctively showed that the acting out was not the way to go, and this created even more ironic twists to what was going on.

It was crucial to Travis Bickle's character that he had experienced life and death around him every second he was in south-east Asia. That way it becomes more heightened when he comes back; the image of the street at night reflected in the dirty gutter becomes more threatening. I think that's something a guy going through a war, any war, would experience when he comes back to what is supposedly 'civilization'. He'd be more paranoid. I'll never forget a story my father told me about one of my uncles coming back from the Second World War and walking in the street. A car backfired and the guy just instinctively ran two blocks! So Travis Bickle was affected by Vietnam: it's held in him and then it explodes. And although at the end of the film he seems to be in control again, we give the impression that any second the time bomb might go off again.

It wasn't easy getting Bernard Herrmann [who had written the scores for many of Alfred Hitchcock's most famous films, including Psycho] to compose the music for Taxi Driver. He was a marvellous, but crotchety old man. I remember the first time I called him to do the picture. He said it was impossible, he was very busy, and then asked what it was called. I told him and he said, 'Oh, no, that's not my kind of picture title. No, no, no.' I said, 'Well, maybe we can meet and talk about it.' He said, 'No, I can't. What's it about?' So I described it and he said, 'No, no, no. I can't. Who's in it?' So I told him and he said, 'No, no, no. Well, I suppose we could have a quick talk.' Working with him was so satisfying that when he died, the night he had finished the score, on Christmas Eve in Los Angeles, I said there was no one who could come near him. You get to know what you like if you see enough films, and I thought his music would create the perfect atmosphere for Taxi Driver.

I was shocked by the way audiences took the violence. Previously I'd been surprised by audience reaction to The Wild Bunch, which I first saw in a Warner Brothers screening room with a friend and loved. But a week later I took some friends to see it in a theatre and it was as if the violence became an extension of the audience and vice versa. I don't think it was all approval, some of it must have been revulsion. I saw Taxi Driver once in a theatre, on the opening night, I think, and everyone was yelling and screaming at the shoot-out. When I made it, I didn't intend to have the audience react with that feeling, 'Yes, do it! Let's go out and kill.' The idea was to create a violent catharsis, so that they'd find themselves saying, 'Yes, kill'; and then afterwards realize, 'My God, no'—like some strange Californian therapy session. That was the instinct I went with, but it's scary to hear what happens with the audience.

All around the world people have told me this, even in China. I was there for a three-week seminar and there was a young Mongolian student who spoke some English following me around Peking; and he would talk about Taxi Driver all the time. He said, 'You know, I'm very lonely,' and I'd say, 'Yes, basically we all are.' Then he said, 'You dealt with loneliness very well,' and I thanked him. Then he'd come round again and ask me, 'What do I do with the loneliness?' He wasn't just weird, he was a film student who was really interested. I said, 'Very often I try to put it into the work.' So a few days later he came back and said, 'I tried putting it into the work, but it doesn't go away.' I replied, 'No, it doesn't go away, there's no magic cure.'

People related to the film very strongly in terms of loneliness. I never realized what that image on the poster did for the film—a shot of De Niro walking down the street with the line, 'In every city there's one man.' And we had thought that audiences would reject the film, feeling that it was too unpleasant and no one would want to see it!

I wanted the violence at the end to be as if Travis had to keep killing all these people in order to stop them once and for all. Paul saw it as a kind of Samurai 'death with honour'—that's why De Niro attempts suicide—and he felt that if he'd directed the scene, there would have been tons of blood all over the walls, a more surrealistic effect. What I wanted was a Daily News situation, the sort you read about every day: 'Three men killed by lone man who saves young girl from them'. Bickle chooses to drive his taxi anywhere in the city, even the worst places, because it feeds his hate.

I was thinking about the John Wayne character in The Searchers. He doesn't say much, except 'That'll be the day' (from which Buddy Holly did the song). He doesn't belong anywhere, since he's just fought in a war he believed in and lost, but he has a great love within him that's been stamped out. He gets carried away, so that during the long search for the young girl, he kills more buffalo than necessary because it's less food for the Comanche—but, throughout, he's determined that they'll find her, as he says, 'as sure as the turning of the Earth'.

Paul was also very influenced by Robert Bresson's Pickpocket. I admire his films greatly, but I find them difficult to watch. In Pickpocket there's a wonderful sequence of the pickpockets removing wallets with their hands, a lot of movement in and out, and it's the same with Travis, alone in the room practising with his guns. I felt he should talk to himself while doing this, and it was one of the last things we shot, in a disused building in one of the roughest and noisiest areas of New York. I didn't want it to be like other mirror sequences we'd seen, so while Bob kept saying, 'Are you talking to me?' I just kept telling him, 'Say it again.' I was on the floor wearing headphones and I could hear a lot of street noise, so I thought we wouldn't get anything, but the track came out just fine.

I was also very much influenced by a film called Murder by Contract (1958), directed by Irving Lerner, who worked on New York, New York as an editor and to whom the film was dedicated following his death. I saw Murder by Contract on the bottom half of a double bill with The Journey, and the neighbourhood guys constantly talked about it. It had a piece of music that was like a theme, patterned rather like The Third Man, which came round and round again. But above all, it gave us an inside look into the mind of a man who kills for a living, and it was pretty frightening. I had even wanted to put a clip of it into Mean Streets, the sequence in a car when the main character describes what different sizes of bullet do to people, but the point had really been made. Of course, you find that scene done by me in Taxi Driver.

..…

When I was doing Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, De Niro gave me the book Raging Bull. The book isn't really an autobiography; it was written by Jake La Motta, with Pete Savage and a guy named Joseph Carter. We never met Carter and for a while we didn't believe he existed, though somebody got the money! But Pete was a good friend of Jake's, and Jake's brother Joey and Pete were combined together in the script. Pete also became one of the co-producers of the film. In the book, they tried to give a reason for everything Jake did in his life, for his guilt and for his violence. It was very bad. But there were incidents in the book that were extremely interesting and we said we would make the film on that basis.

Right after New York, New York, during those two-and-a-half years from 1976 to 1978, I went through a lot of problems. The film was not successful, and I was very depressed. I finally came out of it when I was in hospital on Labor Day weekend in 1978, and De Niro came to visit me and he said, 'You know, we can make this picture.' There were three or four scripts which had been written in the meantime, and they had all been rejected. I didn't like any of them and didn't pay much attention, because I was in pretty bad shape. And Bob said, 'Listen, we could really do a great job on this film. Do you want to make it?' I found myself saying, 'Yeah.' I understood then what Jake was, but only after having gone through a similar experience. I was just lucky that there happened to be a project there ready for me to express this. The decision to make the film was made then.

I was fascinated by the self-destructive side of Jake La Motta's character, his very basic emotions. What could be more basic than making a living by hitting another person on the head until one of you falls or stops? Bob and I then decided to take Paul Schrader's script, with Paul's blessing, to an island—which is hard for me, because as far as I'm concerned there's only one island, Manhattan. But Bob got me through it, he'd wake me up in the morning and make me coffee, and we spent two-and-a-half weeks there rewriting everything. We combined characters and in fact rewrote the entire picture, including the dialogue. When we got back we showed it to Paul, who didn't care for it all that much but, as he wrote in his telegram to us when we began shooting, 'Jake did it his way. I did it my way, you do it your way.'

I put everything I knew and felt into that film and I thought it would be the end of my career. It was what I call a kamikaze way of making movies: pour everything in, then forget all about it and go find another way of life.

We had a version of Paul's script in which the 'Evening with Jake La Motta' came at the beginning and the end, making the whole film circular. Jake recited bits of Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, a speech from On the Waterfront; and I thought it would be interesting if he did a scene from Richard III. You can still see the billboard in the film which lists this whole string of authors. Anyway, we had already shown the script to Michael Powell and his reaction was that it would be wrong. 'You can't have him doing that, whether he did it in reality or not, for this film it's just wrong.' So on the island Bob and I were looking at each other, and he said that On the Waterfront was our iconography, not Shakespeare, so why don't we use it?

I pointed out that this would mean De Niro playing Jake La Motta playing Marlon Brando playing Terry Malloy! The only way to do it was to make it so cold that you concentrate on the words and you feel him finally coming to some sort of peace with himself in front of that mirror. And that's the way we did it, in nineteen takes. Sometimes Jake himself would really act it out in a very strong way which was quite heartbreaking, and Bobby did it that way three times. It was the last day of shooting, and I think we used take 13 in the end. One reviewer in America wrote that it's the most violent scene in the film. When he says in the mirror, 'It was you, Charlie,' is he playing his brother, or putting the blame on himself? It's certainly very disturbing for me.

Bob got to know Jake well and he worked with him a great deal just to be with him. I think he actually took care of Jake. When we shot the boxing scenes we had Jake there for ten weeks. After they were completed, Bob looked at him and Jake said, 'Yeah, I know, goodbye.' Bob said, 'That's right.' The dramatic scenes bear little relation to what actually happened. Mardik Martin's original script had various versions of the truth, rather like Rashomon, from which Bob and I extracted what was the essence of these characters, what made them interesting to us. Jake wasn't around for the filming of those scenes.

I always find the antagonist more interesting than the protagonist in drama, the villain more interesting than the good guy. Then there's what I guess is a decidedly Christian point of view: 'who are we to judge, to point out the speck in our brother's eye, while we have a beam in our own eye?' Jake La Motta acted much tougher in real life than he appeared in the film. The script originally showed much worse things about him, but I felt it was impossible to show them—you could over twenty years, but in the space of two hours there is a risk of forcing them out of context. Nevertheless, I find these characters fascinating. Obviously, I find elements of myself in them and I hope people in the audience do too, and can maybe learn from them and find some sort of peace.

Force of Evil was a great influence on me, because of the relationship between the brothers, showing what happened in the course of betrayal, and that strange dialogue written in verse [In an endnote, Thompson and Christie add: 'Force of Evil (1948) was screenwriter Abraham Polonsky's first film as a director (he had written the boxing movie Body and Soul for Robert Rossen the year before), but he soon fell foul of the McCarthy witch hunt, was blacklisted and did not work again in Hollywood under his own name until 1968, when he wrote Madigan for Don Siegel. In 1970 he directed Tell Them Willie Boy is Here. Force of Evil, now widely regarded as one of the greatest post-war American films, deals with the web of corruption surrounding the numbers racket and has stylized dialogue which dispenses with punctuation and plays upon repetition.'] I showed Bob Body and Soul on 16 mm during our preparation for Raging Bull, then he looked at Force of Evil and said that he found it more interesting. The numbers racket, which is the basis of the story, was going on around us all the time and here was a film which dealt with it honestly and openly and had a crooked lawyer with whom we could identify.

Kiss of Death I found fascinating for the wonderful look of the film—Twentieth Century-Fox under the Italian Neo-Realist influence—and, of course, Richard Widmark being so hysterical and totally uncontrolled. [In an endnote, Thompson and Christie add: 'Kiss of Death (Henry Hathaway, 1947) was one of the late-forties wave of crime films, based on actual cases and filmed on location, of which the most famous was probably the same director's Call Northside 777 (1948). Richard Widmark made his screen début in Kiss of Death with a memorable performance as a giggling psychopath, while Victor Mature played the informer Nick Bianco. Psychoanalytic perspectives on the criminal personality were another influence, alongside the gritty authenticity of Italian "Neo-Realist" films, on the post-war American crime movie.'] But it was told from the 'law side', with Victor Mature becoming an informer—well, where I grew up, the worst thing you could be was an informer, so I couldn't really sympathize with that character. The tough guys downtown really liked Cagney in The Public Enemy and White Heat. Certainly, I loved White Heat, although I don't particularly care for the Edmund O'Brien character. [In an endnote, Thompson and Christie add: 'William Wellman's The Public Enemy (1931) launched Cagney as a star and linked him permanently with the new tough gangster genre: it contains the famous scene in which he smashes a grapefruit into Mae Clarke's face. White Heat, directed by Raoul Walsh in 1949, marked the explosive climax of the Warners' gangster cycle, with Cagney as the mentally ill Cody Jarrett. Edmond O'Brien plays the undercover agent Hank Fallon who has infiltrated Cody's gang as "Vic Pardo", pretending to be his friend.']

There were a number of boxing movies coming out at that time: Rocky II, which was a blockbuster movie in bright colours, strong reds and blues; The Main Event, The Champ and even one about a boxing kangaroo called Matilda! All naturally in colour. But the one use of colour in a fight sequence that had really impressed me was the flashback in John Ford's The Quiet Man, when Wayne looks down and realizes he's killed his opponent, and I'll never forget the vibrance of his emerald green trunks.

During preparations for Raging Bull, we shot some 8 mm while Bobby was training in a gym and I remember we were looking at this, projected on the back of a door in my apartment on 57th Street, and Michael Powell was sitting on the floor watching it with us. Suddenly Michael said, 'There's something wrong: the gloves shouldn't be red.' Back in 1975, he'd written to me after first seeing Mean Streets to say that he liked it, but I used too much red—this from the man who had red all over his own films, which was where I'd got it from in the first place! But he was right about the boxing footage, and our cinematographer Michael Chapman also pointed out how colour was detracting from the images. A man named Gene Kirkwood, who worked with Chartoff-Winkler at the time and was associate producer on Rocky, used to walk into our offices and he talked about how much The Sweet Smell of Success and Night and the City, both in black and white, had to do with Mean Streets. We said, no, it's too pretentious to use black and white now. But then it clicked in my mind that colour wasn't going to last anyway—the film stock was subject to rapid fading.

There were so many boxing pictures being made in the seventies that I dreaded that moment in the future when I wouldn't be able to sleep and the only thing on TV would be the poorest of them and nothing else, and I'd be forced to look at it! A real nightmare. I was never a fight fan. I saw two fights at Madison Sqaure Gardens for research and the first image I drew was the bloody sponge. Then the second time I went, I was in the fifth row from the front, and I saw the blood coming off the rope. As the next bout was announced, no one took any notice of it. In Raging Bull, the camera almost always stays in the ring with Jake. When I'd seen boxing matches between double features on Saturday afternoons as a kid, it was always from the same angle, and that's why I became so bored. The only person who had the right attitude about boxing in the movies for me was Buster Keaton. [In an endnote, Thompson, and Christie add: 'Probably Scorsese is thinking of Battling Butler (1926), Keaton's seventh feature, in which he plays a spoilt young man who pretends to be a champion boxer to impress the girl of his dreams, and receives a brutal beating for his deception.']

I felt that Jake used everybody to punish himself, especially in the ring. When he fights 'Sugar' Ray Robinson, why does he really take that beating for fifteen rounds? Jake himself said that he was playing possum. Well, that may be Jake in reality, but Jake on the screen is something else. He takes the punishment for what he feels he's done wrong. And when he's thrown in jail, he's just faced with a wall, and so with the real enemy for the first time—himself. Jonathan Demme gave me a portrait of Jake made by a folk artist and around the edge of this piece of slate was carved, 'Jake fought like he didn't deserve to live.' Exactly, I made a whole movie and this guy did it in one picture!

The sound on Raging Bull was particularly difficult because each punch, each camera click and each flashbulb was different. The sound-effects were done by Frank Warner, who had worked on Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Taxi Driver. He used rifle shots and melons breaking, but he wouldn't tell us what many of the effects were; he became very possessive and even burnt them afterwards so nobody else could use them. The fight scenes were done in Dolby stereo, but the dialogue was recorded normally, and that caused us something of a problem. We anticipated about eight weeks of mixing and I think it took sixteen weeks. It was murder, mainly because each time we had a fight scene, it had to have a different aura.

One of the best things we did, though, was to drop the sound out completely at certain moments. Silence, then suddenly the punch goes flying—whack! It became like scoring music and that took the extra period of time. For the actual music heard in the film, I was able to use the songs that I grew up with and draw on my own collection of 78s. Each scene is set at a certain date and there's not a song in the background of the film that wouldn't have been played on the radio at that time. In the mix, I could also slip lyrics that I liked in between dialogue.

Bob is a very generous actor and he will be even stronger when the other guy's in close-up. Often I steal lines from the speeches we film over his shoulder, because some of them are so good. And he really gets other actors to act in his scenes. For example, when Jake asks Joey, 'Did you fuck my wife?' I had written a seven-page scene, the only full-length dialogue scene in the film. When he asks the question, you see Joey asking him back, 'What, how could you say that?' I told Bob I wasn't getting enough reaction from Joe Pesci. He told me to roll the camera again, and then said, 'Did you fuck your mother?' When you see the film again, look at Joe's reaction! I like that kind of help. You have to throw your ego out of the door: you can't take it into the rehearsal room and you can't take it on the set.

Bob and I would work together in our own way. One morning we would rehearse, then the rest of the day would be spent looking at clothes. Or else I'd be checking out locations and he'd rest, or be writing a scene. De Niro's not really a student of any particular method of acting. He took what he liked best from different teachers, from Stella Adler to Lee Strasberg and others. Actors scare you by going off into a corner to get into a scene and then beginning to scream. But I don't see Bob doing those kinds of things, except of course in a physically demanding role like Jake La Motta. In the fight scenes we would have a punch bag in the middle of the ring. Off-camera you would hear him punching at this thing, then he'd come flying into the frame, all sweated up and ready to kill. When I acted in Round Midnight, I found it a humiliating experience, but it has to be done to understand what the actor goes through. Even though I have a good time with it, I find it humiliating because I don't like the way I look or sound. Even though people might appreciate the performance, I still find it personally disturbing.

Raging Bull took a long time because Bobby wanted to put on all that weight. [In an endnote, Thompson and Christie explain that in order to 'appear convincing as the older, shockingly overweight La Motta, De Niro forsook the fakery of prosthetics and put on an additional 55 pounds himself.'] We had to shut down and pay the entire crew for about four months while he ate his way around Northern Italy and France. He said it was hard to get up in the morning and force yourself to have breakfast, then lunch, then dinner. After a while it became really uncomfortable for him. In the meantime Thelma Schoonmaker and I cut the whole film except, of course, for the fat scenes. We had to shoot those around Christmas 1979.