MICHAEL HENRY - Robert De Niro brought you Jake La Motta’s autobiography when you were preparing Taxi Driver. What attracted you to this character? Did your vision of him evolve in the years preceding the shooting?
MARTIN SCORSESE - I remember having read the book in California when I was finishing Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. I also remember long conversations with Bobby during the night in my office at Warner Brothers. Honestly, it wasn’t like bolt of lightning. No matter what anyone claimed later, I didn’t even notice Jake’s opening sentence: “When my memories come back to me, I have the feeling that I’m watching an old film in black-and-white.”
The iconography of Mean Streets keeps popping up: the home movies, the holy pictures and the statue of St. Francis of Assisi in the father’s apartment, the relation between Joey and Jake, which is the same relation as the one between Charlie and Johnny Boy.
Absolutely, and I was very aware of that, even if I didn’t want to remake Mean Streets. The cross in the apartment is my mother’s. It was in Knocking, and the statue, too, I think, Jake shot them in 16mm. 16mm in the forties! He must have been rich. In Mean Streets, I only had 8mm, the format that less rich families had to use. We reshot Jake’s little bits of film with an Éclair. We had some problems with this because the original negatives were very dark and were often only three of four feet long! The Technicolor expert did great work, desaturating the colors, even putting color on the perforations, like in the scene of the wedding on the terrace in the Bronx. […] One of my favorite moments is there, when the camera reframes, on the right, on an extra who’s sitting apart, on the edge of the roof. That’s how I see myself, with this feeling of being a stranger, of being completely lost.
The progression of Jake La Motta toward self-consciousness, toward a certain powerful decision, even if it’s schizophrenic, doesn’t it reflect your own attitude toward the project and more generally toward cinema itself?
I don’t know. The film really doesn’t help me to see these things more clearly, nor does it help me understand others or myself. What really interests me is hope. In the pit of his dungeon, Jake doesn’t have anything, he’s lost it all. Vickie, his brother, his house, his children, his championship belt. Before, we saw him undergo a terrible punishment from Dauthuille. He let himself be massacred, then, in the last seconds, he had a surge of pride and demolished his opponent. In other words, he’s never really gotten what he deserves. He hasn’t paid. After which, he meets Robinson. What does he see there? He sees his blood squeezed out of the sponge, his body that they’re preparing for the sacrifice. For him, it’s a religious ritual and he uses Robinson to punish himself. As I told you, everything happens in his head.
Intervista rilasciata a Michael Henry l’11 febbraio 1981, tratta da Peter Brunette (a cura di), Martin Scorsese Interviews, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 1999.
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