Ghosts of Scorsese's past

THESE days in Times Square you're more likely to meet an actor dressed as a Disney cartoon character than a shady peddler of illicit substances. Yet Martin Scorsese shot many scenes for his gritty new paramedics drama Bringing Out the Dead (imagine ER crossed with Taxi Driver), his best movie since GoodFellas, close to what was once a seedy interzone area for hustlers, pimps and thieves but which is now patrolled more by trademarks than trade.

Denying the changes are anything more than "cosmetic", Scorsese is sitting with me in the Museum of Modern Art not far from these former mean streets insisting "you can't let your guard down in New York". So does his movie have any chance of being a Taxi Driver for the Nineties now the sex-shops are closed, the graffiti artists have graduated to directing MTV videos and Mayor Giuliani is basking in the success of his zero-tolerance regime? Is New York still really bad enough for Scorsese?

His new film - about the drivers and paramedics of a New York City ambulance who tend the city's addicts, dying and homeless - is full of the ghosts of his past, even though it is set in the present. There's a famous quote that Scorsese made years ago, about his early ambition to be a parish priest. Was it going too far to say that Bringing Out the Dead described a childhood experience of the homeless and despairing that kindled in him thoughts of a seminary?

"No, that is the case," he agrees. "You couldn't get any lower, believe me, than what I saw every day. As kids we were told never to touch the alcoholics and to ignore them, and the guilt of that is still with me in some respects. I'd go to St Patrick's School round the corner and we were told about compassion and love, but when we got out on the streets we were told not to have compassion."

It's actually Scorsese's voice you hear in the ambulance, directing Nicolas Cage as the paramedic to these scenes of despair, black humour and urban turmoil (how post-modern is that?) like a sardonic voice of God.

As he makes clear to me, this is a movie about one step below the criminals, a film he always intended to make for himself after becoming famous for his movies about criminals. "I was attracted to the material because I didn't want to see it any more."

Today Scorsese, who celebrated his 57th birthday last week, has every reason to sit back and smell the roses. He was married for the fifth time last July to his book editor Helen Morris, who earlier this month gave birth to a daughter, Francesca (his eldest daughter Cathy is in charge of props rather appropriately - for that post- Scors-ese piece of TV brilliance The Sopranos, which, rather implausibly, Scorsese claims he's never watched). He plans "maybe two more movies with De Niro" but in acknowledgement of the current trend for post-modern Mafia satire in Analyse This, The Sopranos and Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog, says a straight mafiosi drama is out of the question "though I must say people living that life always was satire - people get killed, but it's funny".

To cap it all he's just been given his highest budget by far to make his dream project ($83 million for The Gangs of New York), to be filmed next March in Rome, with Leonardo DiCaprio already signed as a young gang leader back in the 1840s "who takes revenge for his father's death. I feel DiCaprio is on the level of a De Niro, Pacino or Hoffman: no doubt about it." But the truth is that New York has mellowed since then. Actually, Scorsese has mellowed a little too. His last movie, Kundun, was a paean to Tibetan Buddhism. So why, with all this good news in his life, has he just delivered his most personal, cathartic movie in two decades?

"This was a very, very painful film for me to make," Scorsese confesses in that amazing high-speed delivery of his. He's still a bundle of anxious energy, with a highly kinetic face, frequent big flashes of smiles that last a millisecond before his extraordinary, wheezing, GoodFellas laugh. He wants to make a point about the "gallows humour" of the movie; it's easy to forget that one of Scorsese's greatest movies, The King of Comedy, proved a talent for frightened and ambiguous laughter, though like Bringing Out the Dead it was not immediately hailed as a classic. It was, quite frankly, a bit baffling to his American audience, who still remain pretty indifferent to the scale of the (currently) Oscar-less Scorsese's artistic genius.

"I still haven't gotten over making Bringing out the Dead one year on," he tells me, leaning forward, ever the professional, to make sure my tape-recorder picks his voice up crisply. "I was up all night for 75 nights filming on busy streets, and that may be all right when you're 25 but not when you're my age. I still can't sleep properly."

NOT only was the movie emotionally cathartic ("this describes my childhood in the Bowery from the age of seven: I saw everything in the streets as I grew up") it was also physically gruelling. Ironically he relied on constant police escorts to protect his cast and crew in busy public locations. "But it was dangerous because we looked like a float in a parade going down Seventh Avenue, and every few minutes we'd lose our police escort because they were going off to deal with some incident. There was a riot on 54th and 11th one time - a gang war, I think and another time there was gunfire at a nightclub just a few blocks away and some tourists got slashed."

As for those Times Square loony tunes, Scorsese isn't fooled by Giuliani's sweep-up.

"You know you look at those cartoon actors in Times Square after about 3am and suddenly they look tired and unshaven and they hunch in doorways, because the spirit of the place is still there. This is my Manhattan! In the movie there's a scene where fireworks are exploding and this guy is impaled on a railing through his butt on the 20th floor, and it's my tribute to Woody Allen's Manhattan because to me, you know, that place doesn't exist. This is the Manhattan I come from and I love this city. Manhattan: what a great place!"

lBringing Out the Dead goes on general release in the UK on 7 January.

Copyright 1999
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