Book review: Scorsese on Scorsese

by Michael Henry Wilson

Cahiers du Cinema, 320pp, £45

Restraint is no more a mark of this project than it is a keynote of the work of its subject, Martin Scorsese. For one thing, this is a vast tome. You could definitely deploy it to beat the life out of someone if they looked at you funny, insulted one of your close relatives or behaved in the manner of a mook. Then there is the tone of the introduction, which more or less knocks on your door and asks you if you have yet accepted Martin Scorsese as your personal saviour.

And then the interviews themselves, which run the full gamut of Scorsese’s career from his first shorts and earliest features to 2010’s Shutter Island and the HBO television drama series Boardwalk Empire, and spare no detail along the way. In author Michael Henry Wilson, we are in the hands here not of a hired biographer or jobbing journalist, but a fan, a scholar and, indeed, a friend of the book’s subject. This is, of course, the appropriate approach for a Cahiers du Cinema collection; the eminent French journal was, after all, the birthplace of the auteur theory, which privileged the director as the creative engine of a great film and sought to comprehend film texts through the values, repeated motifs and underlying obsessions of their directors.

Whether or not you quite buy into this approach (screenwriters might quibble; so too might those who see films as the products of a creative alchemy that is by definition collaborative and multi-perspective), the rigour brought to bear on these interviews and the sheer abundance of knowledge at play is truly gratifying. These are not the sort of interviews that hinge on queries such as “What was Sharon Stone like to work with?” or even the dreaded Q&A standard “What was your budget?” Discussion of cinema has come to focus somewhat obsessively on the status and behaviour of stars, and the industrial mechanics of getting a movie made. Neither element is much dwelt on here: though the process of putting a film together is discussed – particularly the selection and planning of a project, and the editing – the vast bulk of the content concerns ideas, narrative preoccupations, characters and visual approaches.

That’s not to say that this is a dry read. Not all directors are able – or indeed, willing – to articulate what makes their films happen, but Scorsese is a scholar as much as a maker: endlessly voluble, interested in self-exploration and open about his influences and his creative processes. Not for him the David Lynch approach that positions the director as a sort of mystic receiver channeling ideas that issue from the cosmos.

Scorsese acknowledges his work as a repository for his own psychological debris (the effects of his raw upbringing and youth on the mean streets of New York City are a particular obsession of this book), and as a stage on which he pays homage to his own cinematic antecedents. Nor are the interviews – which begin in 1974 and conclude in April of this year – overly slavish or hagiographic in tone.

As the relationship between interviewer and director develops, an intimacy evolves which permits Wilson to challenge his subject on certain choices and directions. Since that first meeting in Cannes, the two have met and spoken regularly; in 1995 they worked together on Scorsese’s epic documentary and book project, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies.

Their discussion is one between mutually respectful creative collaborators, not the off-centre relationship of a powerful creator and a Dictaphone-clutching hack with half an hour to get something meaningful before a publicist cuts things off.

Perhaps the fact of a friendship, and the slightly fastidious avoidance of discussion of commercial concerns and box office fates, limits the project a touch. Fans of Scorsese’s earlier work might wish for him to be challenged more on why he got so grandiose with stars and budgets, and why the Oscar-baiter has seemed to win out for him over the grittier and more confrontational art film. Still, to see even the weaker films analysed in this sort of depth is instructive even for the casual or disillusioned fan – and the trajectory from the rough, passionate scramble of Mean Streets to the operatic scale and gloss of Gangs of New York and The Aviator is an intriguing one for aspiring filmmakers to observe. Colour photographs, reproduced storyboards and script pages and other beauteous miscellanea from Scorsese’s long career round out an exhaustive and lavishly beautiful volume.

Are there enough devotees of expensive and weighty printed matter left to justify the production of such a thing as this? Who also want to know in exhaustive detail about every film made by Martin Scorsese? It’s hard to measure with confidence the Venn diagram crossover between “serious, obsessive film geek” and “person who invests in extremely glamorous-looking coffee table books” – but whatever the rationale for its existence, this is a beautiful thing. It’s the perfect fetish object for those who prefer printed matter over scrolling screens, and authoritative, informed text over the endless scrappy multiplicity of online voices. Just be prepared to give up a lot of time to rewatching the Scorsese back catalogue in the light of what you’ve read. And be sure you have a sturdy coffee table to take the weight.