All right, lock and load, you guys.
Let's do it.
You got notes?
Oh, come on. My God.
I'm talking to the greatest living director,
I gotta come prepared. No, but see
you're supposed to be talking.
Well, I also have some anecdotes
about the weather, in case.
Excellent. All right.
[upbeat piano music]
Hey, come on, everybody, move on out.
I still feel, whenever I'm on a set, I start yelling,
and I'm not directing this.
You could direct it.
Let's get a crane.
Come on, boom up.
First time I saw him was in Luca's film.
Call Me By Your Name. Yeah.
And so, you know, and I'm great admirer of Luca,
and I loved the picture.
I always talk about performances,
but they aren't really, they're like behavioral,
where you don't see the acting, you know what I mean?
Yes.
And so I connected there, and I saw Dune, you know,
which I enjoyed, and I started to see a sense of range.
And then Chanel asked me to do this spot for Bleu.
Which you had already done.
I had done years ago, yeah. Right.
The first one.
They said they had this young gentleman
named Timothee Chalamet,
and I said, Ah, that one I know.
And we had some kind of a dinner and talk, et cetera.
We had a plan for the, I guess you'd call it a commercial.
I don't know what it is.
It's like a little narrative.
I feel it's not evocative of other commercials
and perfume commercials, in a good way.
In a good way, I think it's somewhat different than that,
and so it's a story, in a way. Yeah.
But how to break it through, you know,
my latest film's over three hours.
This, 60 seconds
And it's, Oh, Marty, it's only 60.
Only 60 seconds.
The thing about 60 seconds is, it's harder.
Condensed.
Condensed, and every frame counts.
Every frame.
I know we're talking digital,
but there's still frames in digital,
but, I mean, one frame more, two frame,
that's the way we're editing this thing.
Add two frames, take away a frame,
you know, juxtaposition of images,
all this sort of thing.
So it's not a facile way of working.
It's actually, I find these much more intense.
And they're real workouts.
More challenging in some ways?
Yeah, more challenging. Yeah.
The narrative itself was about the film actor
and being on the road.
One of the things we referred to was
the great short film by Federico Fellini.
Toby Dammit.
Toby Dammit, yeah, and I showed it to you,
and I said, Let's capture some of that feeling, you know.
That's one of my favorite interactions with you,
is you said, You've seen 'Toby Dammit,' right?
And I thought, This Fellini short,
this obscure Fellini short, no I haven't.
But I quickly, quickly got onto it.
With that as an inspiration,
we came up with a story somehow,
it developed into a kind of a story,
and how that happened, I'm not quite sure.
No, but I'm so grateful that it developed.
But I love, I felt so honored that you brought,
because this didn't feel like a commercial.
And I guess the fear as an actor,
that's why I was so excited that you agreed to do it, too,
is that, you know, you don't want it to feel, you know,
whatever, like a product.
I know.
This was a total dream, total short film.
What I walked away with the most,
we haven't even gotten a chance to speak about it,
but I was just so shocked about how
unprecious you were about setups
and how quickly we would fly.
Not to say there wasn't enormous attention to detail.
It was just so fascinating, when filmmakers start out,
and I've worked with a lot of young filmmakers
that are enormously precious and maybe plodding sometimes,
and here we were just like, going, you know.
Well, it was planned beforehand.
Yeah, I like that.
Well, not to fly like that, but I was glad it flew.
But, no, the shots were designed,
or at least the, I like to call it, like,
a philosophy of a shot.
Should this be a moving shot at all?
Or should it be static?
And if it's static, what the hell size are you in the frame?
Right.
Is it from the waist up?
So that was all basically planned?
Yeah, I mean, then when you get into the,
like looking out the window and you see the-
The billboard.
The billboard, I know you're gonna walk towards camera,
but where do you stop?
I didn't know there was a shot list, basically.
I have it myself.
Do you always work like that, basically, or not?
On features?
Yes, back when I started doing my first films,
I would draw everything.
Wow, that sounds time intensive.
Yeah, well, I was by myself anyway.
I was always by myself.
Oh, God, that's another story.
That's another, so I was always in a room by myself.
And Taxi Driver was literally there.
Literally across the street.
I designed the whole picture
and drew all the pictures right across the street
at the St. Regis hotel out that window.
I spent a lot of time doing that because, first of all,
I liked the idea of how to tell
a story with pictures, right?
But it also, because it was so low-budget,
I had to really-
Have a plan?
Have a plan so that it could be changed.
Had you had an experience where you didn't have a plan
that informed that? Yes, later on I tried.
I tried another film, but I seem to work better with a plan.
I really do.
It's like showing up memorized or showing up unmemorized.
Yes, yes, yes, exactly.
You probably don't have to work with
a lot of people that are unmemorized.
No, it's true.
But, you know, memorized is one thing,
knowing it's another, right?
Yeah.
As long as you know it. Exactly, well said.
You know, you could start fooling around with stuff.
Yeah.
But I tried a different experiment once,
and it didn't work for me,
but, over the years, the drawings became notes
and little drawings in the margins of the script,
or let's say in Goodfellas,
it actually was put into the script.
How so, like shot lists? Pretty much.
Or that the actors would go off of in some way,
or no, it's irrelevant?
No, no, as long as I had actors who could,
if I had a specific shot I wanted to get,
which was complicated,
as long as he or she would be able to
behave unencumbered in the frame.
You know, if I'm asking them to look backwards
and walk forwards at the same time,
and I found that to be a problem,
then I may have adjusted the shot.
You follow? Right, right.
Depending on what's more important,
their faces and what they're doing,
or this particular move to the left or right.
But it's amazing in After Hours and Goodfellas,
there's shots sometimes that push in rapidly on someone
and they're doing something very natural, behaviorally.
Obviously De Niro is one of the greatest ever,
but a camera's flying at him and he's, like,
picking his teeth or something and he's not disturbed.
That's why I was so seriously inspired working with you,
is that it was so unprecious and the commercial's quick.
It's really gripping.
Everyone I've showed it to,
the four or five people, whatever,
they go, Oh my God, this is, like, this is fast.
Well, the thing is, the situation was perfect for that.
Yeah.
If it was something else, like if you see
Killers of the Flower Moon, as you saw,
I mean, in certain cases you just hold the camera.
Don't move it. Right.
Now, I was shocked with Killers, too, though.
It's very engaging.
I'm shocked only because of the runtime,
but you're gripped the entire time.
That was our big gamble.
It's amazing pacing-wise, all those characters
feel out of that era, Leo most of all.
I know, well, I tell ya, well, you know what it's like.
You're in a place like that, you learn to live in it.
Yeah.
And you become part of it. Yeah.
And, I mean, yeah, it was a long shoot,
but a lot of my pictures lately have been long.
That's why I wanted to do this.
I wanted to change the style right away
I had to freshen up. Right, right, right.
I had to change.
It doesn't mean go faster.
I had to think differently, you know,
to force myself to think differently.
No, I loved it.
It was lean, it was muscular,
and it was like way more run and gun
than I ever would've thought.
I wanted it to be free and open.
It was constructed, as I say, and designed.
Yeah, but there's room to play.
Yeah.
That's what I loved, from my perspective,
sometimes direction can be really explicit,
and then when something's really explicit,
it's quite hard to get to.
I can't imagine how how you do it.
Yeah. 'cause you kinda lose your mind, you know?
And I felt you nudging, which is really the best,
because if you're getting sort of gently,
and then if you don't get there, I felt that, too.
If I was like, If it ain't gonna work,
f*ck it, we're gonna go do something else.
Well, but you see, the nature of this spot
lent itself to that because of the spontaneity
of the show, let's say, or the backstage chaos, you know.
Look, being specific and blocking specifically,
it's another way of artistic expression.
Right.
And there are times when I have to do it.
Right.
But this particular story didn't need that.
Yes.
We hit the pacing right.
Getting in the van was hard, and we hit you with the camera.
But that was used. Yeah.
I was laughing the first time I saw the spot
'cause I thought, Oh wow, this is, again, unprecious.
It's like, Well, this works, great,
we're gonna throw it in.
The thing is that it really hit nicely.
I mean, not the camera, it was like, bang.
That makes me think it was on purpose.
No, I'm kidding.
And then suddenly you're thrown
on the back of the car, you look up,
and, you know, it kind of indicates to the audience
that what you're gonna see for the next minute,
minute and a half, whatever it is,
is something very different and special.
Yeah, I shot a movie in New York
seven years ago on the streets, whatever,
it was so wonderful to wrap and then walk home.
It feels more like a creative exercise, I guess.
Well, the city has, and they always
use the cliche of the energy,
but it does have the energy.
Right, right.
It simply does because everybody's on top of each other.
I mean, look at it, all the buildings on top of each other.
It's different from L.A.,
L.A.'s spread out, you got the car.
Back in 1971, when I learned to drive,
I had to learn to drive out there.
It was wonderful, it's made for cars.
[Timothee] Yeah.
And you just turn the music up.
Your edge rots out there, though.
Yeah, it tended to,
but luckily I was able to do films like Taxi Driver,
and then, mainly because they saw Mean Streets
and they wanted De Niro and myself together on that film.
Right, but it was a different New York.
Oh, that was the New York of, you know,
Ford to City: Drop Dead.
We shot in the summer of '76.
It was the most, apparently, the most-
Violent?
Well, violent, yes, but, you see, for me,
violence here is always the same.
I grew up here.
I'm always walking in the street a certain way,
Yeah, you're always checking your shoulder.
[laughs]
So the thing about is, now I just know.
I could see a person coming down that may not,
because I grew up downtown in a rough area.
Lower East Side, right?
In the Lower East Side when the Bowery was the Bowery,
and it was pretty scary growing up as a kid.
Right.
But what had happened was that
the city was gonna go bankrupt
and they asked, long story short,
they asked for federal-
The Bronx was on fire, insurance schemes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, buildings were collapsing.
That was that famous building
that collapsed that we put in Vinyl.
It was apparently the lowest ebb
that the city has ever been in,
was when we were shooting Taxi Driver.
Perfect cinematic background.
Yeah, but for me it was normal.
Right. I was used to that.
Well, I grew up in Hell's Kitchen,
and Hell's Kitchen's changed a lot
from when I was growing up.
'Cause when I was growing up,
it was still a little bit on the edge,
and the Port Authority bus terminal,
and that, the Port Authority's kept its edge, by nature,
I guess. Yeah, it has.
But the rest of the neighborhood
is much more dressed up, yeah. Come up a bit.
Come up a bit, but the Port Authority was,
I used to use that a lot.
I was living in New Jersey, actually,
in the mid-sixties it was very cheap
to live in Union City or Jersey City,
and coming in and out of that
Port Authority bus terminal,
what I saw in there in the '60s,
my God, it was horrifying.
[Timothee] Right.
The only place is, I think, probably, in Alphabet City,
still has a sense of the old tenements that I grew up in.
Yeah, that's what was weird
working on this commercial, too, is, it's not tropes,
but so much of the iconicism of New York
has stemmed from your work,
so it's bizarre to all of a sudden be, you know, in it.
The only thing is, like,
when you're down in the street in Soho,
that you're walking along at the end.
When I was growing up,
that street is where you went to steal hubcaps.
And now it's- And also other things.
Not that I stole the hubcaps,
and I was with guys, you know, kids.
Now it's like being in Provincetown, Connecticut, I guess.
I never was there. It's fancy as hell.
Yeah. Yeah.
I love, in Taxi Driver, having just watched it again, too,
I feel like you see so many things about
moody or people on the edge.
Watching it again, the opening shots
are, like, super beautiful and serene
and the music's playing and the movie's not lecturing you.
No, I just saw the city that way all the time.
One of my favorite things in the city
is the steam coming up out of the street,
and so I had to have the car go through the steam.
That opening shot, yeah.
Yeah, I had to.
And that was done on 22nd Street somewhere late at night.
That was criticized at one point
by certain snobby critics saying,
And that's the level of the metaphor of the film.
Hell, you know-
[Timothee] On Earth.
The cab is coming from Hell.
I said, No, that's New York.
It's just steam in the streets.
It is what it is.
And when you see things come through that steam that way,
you could think of, if you want,
you could think of the Inferno, you could think of Paradise.
Right. You don't know.
Right. You know.
It's a beauty, the city, late at night that way.
When just pipes of smoke coming up
all the way up Second and Third Avenue.
Oh, man. Yeah.
Absolutely beautiful.
And the red lights, the taillights of the cars.
It was always raining, too, that summer.
But you guys got lucky.
It was always raining. It's amazing.
We were waiting for the rain,
and we started to go two or three days over schedule,
and they were really mad at us.
The studio was screaming and I got in a lot of trouble
because they were gonna pull the plug on the picture.
And so I said, Oh, we're shooting in the rain,
so it's not gonna match.
We'll have to figure out how to, well,
we better shoot fast then.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, get it done.
I still go back to basics, you know.
Normal lens, long lens, wide-angle lens.
And then, from there, you could go infinite.
Right.
And so movement or no movement.
Movement of the frame,
or movement of the camera in the frame.
'Cause a pan is different from a track, right?
So I stay with those basics,
and then if there are new things
that could be implemented in there,
and using focal length in a certain way,
but I do find that after all these years,
and with all the new technology, there are more choices.
And it's kind of good in a way,
except that more than two-thirds of those choices,
you don't need to make.
Right, because they end up wasting time or something?
It's wasting time.
Yeah. Yeah.
So it always goes down to the basic, the basic.
As an actor and as a director, what do you wanna say?
Right.
And what's in the way, something's in the way.
What the hell is it?
Is it the technology or is somebody, you know,
in front of you and you're trying to do something
and they're distracting you.
It's that simple. Right.
And there's few filmmakers that have
a command of both, right, to me.
[Martin] Yes, yeah.
And to not get sucked into just the cutting edge.
Well, I think a lot of those filmmakers are recent,
in a way, because they grew up with the technology.
I did not.
It's another generation. Yeah.
It's gonna be interesting what you guys do.
Well, that's why I'm, and I don't wanna be cynical,
and I don't wanna take myself out of being
a member of my generation as I have in the past,
but I just think boredom is a good thing.
And the way I was intensely bored growing up
and had to read books,
or if I could get my hands on a movie
at my grandma's house, you cherish that movie.
And with too much information, too much access,
you know what I mean? Yeah.
You can't, you're not gonna-
Well, it was a similar thing,
what you're talking about, boredom, in a sense,
because, in my case, when I was three years old,
1945, I contracted asthma,
and my parents were working class,
they didn't have books in the house and that sort of thing.
They would just take me to the movies a lot
or let me eventually go by myself to the movies,
and I had this little tiny area in the apartment
before everybody came back from work.
Wow.
Then I learned how to read novels.
And this priest was a interesting guy, Father Principe,
he was the one who gave us Graham Greene and James Joyce,
and that's when we were about 13 or 14,
and I started to read, and that was a whole issue.
Right
It was piecemeal, in some way.
Yeah, yeah.
But what happens is that it's the old
take the horse to water, you know,
and if the horse drinks, you know.
I had had a couple of people who were doing that for me
and we were sustaining ourselves, we were continuing.
We took advantage of those suggestions and guidance,
and it wasn't always friendly, these were tough guys.
But they weren't telling you what to think
or what was good. No.
They were kind of giving you the keys in some way.
Giving you a basis of morality, too.
Right.
And somebody had pointed out and said, like,
in Killers of the Flower Moon
or a number of the films I've made,
where the level of corruption is so deep
because it's not, the society is not
rooted in morality or any kind of spirituality.
That's what human nature might be.
That without that guidance or without that even dialogue
between people about morality and spirituality.
It becomes-
It becomes pure corruption. Right.
I mean, in the movie, because the Native Americans
don't understand the value of money,
if I charge you a dollar for this glass of water,
they pay it, and then you realize,
they don't really understand paper money
or anything like that.
They're rich, but they don't know why.
And they don't know know what money is,
so when they come in again,
I'm gonna say it's $10 and they pay it.
Right.
So I'm gonna say, next time, $25, I'll keep 15.
Meantime, we're friends, we take care of each other
and just, you know, you got the money anyway.
I have to work for the money, you're not,
I mean, but that's an interesting moral issue.
If it's only a dollar, charge a dollar.
And so that's the interesting thing
about how we could become complicit
in, absolutely, a genocide.
Yeah, and a genocide not told about, really.
No. I wasn't educated on it.
But the movie's still very spiritual, though.
Like almost all your films. I think it is.
There's a spiritual core to it.
It's interesting how corruption
just infiltrates every aspect of your life,
and you could learn to live with it
because you don't react against it, you don't speak up.
That's what's so great about the Leo character in it.
You know, without giving anything away,
this guy's a complicated figure, to say the least.
But it's handled so delicately.
You don't feel that you're taking him, you know,
you're not instructing the viewer how to feel either way.
No, no, no, no, not at all.
Like in the case of Wolf of Wall Street, for example.
I only learned the other day from an interviewer who said,
You're not aware of the war of Wolf of Wall Street?
So I said, What are you talking about.
Said, Well, there was a big screening
at Paramount of the picture,
for the critics in New York.
Apparently, I was told this,
there were two camps, one camp that loved the picture
and the other camp that was furious,
saying I didn't take a moral stand on Jordan Belfort.
And one of the critics from the other group
that liked the picture said,
Do you really need Martin Scorsese
to tell you that that's wrong?
Right. [Martin laughs]
Yeah, it's well said, that's well said.
You really need him to tell you that's wrong?
Well said. He knows it's wrong.
Does that moralistic attitude
bore you a little bit now or no?
Well, it's beyond boring, I think.
You know, it's always been around.
Well, 'cause American's a Puritan country.
Well, says it is.
Right, well, that's what's confusing
to me as a young person, is how much-
But there's a difference
between religion and spirituality.
Okay.
And religion could, taken the wrong way,
could become something that is restricting
and becomes intolerable and becomes judgmental.
Judgemental, keyword there, yeah.
So you have a big problem.
Good example is Killers of the Flower Moon.
Yeah.
They're all Europeans who are Protestants.
You know, I'm not condemning Protestants,
I'm just saying that was the-
The moral code.
They had a morality, but, you know,
when a guy like Bill Hale, played by De Niro, who says,
I love these Osage people, and he's killing them.
But he does love them.
Now, what is that?
It's fantastic, 'cause you don't feel,
and there's no music cue that says, This guy's evil.
No, no, he's just gonna do what he's gonna do.
But that's the the thing, I think,
ultimately about concentration for younger people,
and taking the time not just to
make a movie to become famous.
That's good too, if you can.
Yeah, yeah.
But, I think, ultimately, if you have something to say,
if you're really burning-
And not just the party line.
[Martin] Yes, exactly.
The most important things are things
that are new and fresh, point a way forward,
point you to how people are feeling.
It's harder to know now.
There's great, there's less mainstreaming of things now.
I think things are a little more-
I was gonna say, the other night
we were at this big event, people were talking about
that the news is different now, and this and that.
I said, Look, back when I was growing up,
there was CBS, NBC, ABC, it's gone.
Right.
I said, In effect, the mainstream is going.
Does that shock you, having been so representative
of your generation to feel now, like,
what the hell am I looking at kind of thing or no?
But you're so young in spirit.
I mean that, I'm not just saying that to blow smoke.
Yeah, oh, thank you.
That's nice, but I like keeping that youth,
and I like keeping an open mind.
But an open mind means less restrictions,
and these days, for good reason,
and for good intent, there's a great deal
of a closing of the mind.
Right.
Well, Killers, Killers walks that line incredibly
because it tells a story of a moral injustice.
More than a moral injustice, a human injustice,
but you still have characters
that are wonderfully complicated.
Yeah. Yeah.
And that's hard to achieve.
Well, because, because there isn't such,
it isn't as simple as suddenly,
you go into a world that's all moral and just
and everybody's very serious and they're all villains.
No, it's the guy next to you, it's you, even.
Catholicism has confession.
You have an examination of conscience,
or a Maoist, it was Maoist self-criticism.
You know what I mean? Right.
But not to be afraid to criticize yourself.
And don't become cowed by what other people think,
and what they want you to think, I should say.
Right.
Do you feel like the story around your life and your work,
you know, impacted the kind of movies you were making?
I don't know, the story of my life was, I guess,
wound up in the movies in the mid-seventies.
That was a little rough period.
Pretty rough period 'til about '78.
'76 to '78 were pretty tough,
and came out of it at the end of '78.
I just embraced myself from where I came from
and did this film that De Niro really wanted me to make
over the years, but I had resisted.
And that was Raging Bull.
I think I read that you hadn't wanted to do it at first.
Well, for many different reasons.
He saw it sooner than I did.
He knew it was me, he knew it was in me.
The Jake LaMotta character that we were making.
And so then I felt comfortable and I realized,
Oh, I know what to. You didn't see it at first?
No, I was blind.
Because you thought you didn't relate to it?
First of all, we hadn't really consolidated the script.
Well, it's a huge story.
[Martin] Yeah.
And the last 30 minutes are
a different movie in an amazing way.
Yeah, yeah.
But there were different things.
The relationship with De Niro was changing, too.
Because of his stardom?
Yeah, and other things.
Do you wanna work again with him?
Oh, wow. You know what I'm saying?
I had to really think about that.
Well, some of the best collaborations
happened with, you know.
Yeah, but we went through that period
and we came out the other side, it was Raging Bull.
[Timothee] Right, there you go.
Then we did it again in King of Comedy.
Then I wanted to go off into Last Temptation of Christ,
to other films that I wanted, Gangs of New York,
and things like that.
And, ultimately, when I say embraced where I came from,
Raging Bull was, you know, it's the '70s,
and where I came from, people were still alive.
My parents were still living down in the tenements.
A lot of the stories I was putting in my movies
had elements of truth in them.
A lot of people down there were still alive,
names you couldn't mention.
So, yeah, there's a sensitivity around these.
So I, you know, I was in L.A.,
I had long hair, I had cowboy clothes.
I saw a picture of you
at the Cannes Film Festival recently,
and it's not the Marty I met.
Yeah, yeah.
I had to grow the beard because I looked so young,
everybody was laughing.
[Timothee] Okay, okay.
You know, they thought I was 12 years.
I said, okay, so I grew a beard.
But what I'm getting at is that
I couldn't really talk too much
or embrace too much my background.
But by the time I did Raging Bull, I said the hell with it
and I went back and my mother and father were in the film,
and we shot it downtown.
Yeah, 'cause you started using your mom
and she's in it.
Was it simply a respectful fear or more than that?
It was a caution.
It was a caution, well said.
No, no, a lot of people were still alive.
It was before the Little Italy
became the Little Italy that it is now.
Right.
It was a closed society, no names mentioned, ever.
Right.
It's nice when you come back to directors.
There's a dialogue, there's a rapport.
Also, on the acting side, you feel like,
Oh, this guy, this person really likes me
because I'm back again. I'm back.
Exactly. He didn't throw me out.
Yeah, exactly, it gives you confidence.
But you've done that, I mean,
legendarily with De Niro and DiCaprio.
[Martin] Yeah.
And we'll do Chanel commercials every three years.
Yes, exactly.
No, but with them, though, it's just a different thing,
'cause De Niro knew me from Lower East Side
when we were 16 years old. Which is insane.
He knew the people I grew up with.
Right.
Still does, there's a few of them left.
He was in with another group up on Kenmare Street.
We were on Prince and Houston.
Prince and Houston Street, Elizabeth, Mott, Mulberry.
Every now and then we met in these
after-hour bars, late at night.
Respectful and always very, very nice to each other.
Some of the guys he was with, we didn't like.
I'm talking about myself and a couple of my friends.
We said, Oh. These guys.
Stay away.
Was he already acting?
I couldn't tell, I don't think so.
I lost track of him is what happened,
'cause Brian De Palma had been
working with De Niro in Hi Mom,
and so they said, You gotta meet him.
And after the dinner was over,
we were sitting in another room
and he looked at me, he says,
You used to hang out with Curty, right, and Joe Morale?
And you were with, remember Alby Eyes?
I said, Yeah.
He said, I'm Bobby.
I said, Bobby, you mean Bobby from Kenmare?
He says, Yeah. Wow.
I said, I didn't realize.
And that's how we came back together.
That's how you relinked, my God.
And now you live five blocks from each other or whatever.
I don't know, he seems to be around the corner.
Yeah, you see him all the time.
I can't tell.
In between roles, he looks anonymous.
I have no idea who it is.
He could be right next to me.
He's at B&B Bagels on the line behind you.
Yeah, you don't know what's going on.
I mean, one night we had dinner with Michael Powell,
the great British director,
we were preparing for Raging Bull,
and he wanted to ask him questions about gaining weight.
There's a sequence that Powell does
in his film Colonel Blimp.
I said, Well, we'll meet Bob tonight at dinner.
And it was a apartment I had on 57th Street,
and we're up there eating,
and Bob's next to him and everything's fine,
and after the main course, before dessert, he said,
I understand De Niro will be coming tonight?
I said, He's right next to you.
Oh my God, he didn't realize the whole time?
Because he's very quiet
and anonymous. Sort of demure.
You feel it in his work.
You feel someone that's not vain, basically, I don't know.
That's the key.
He goes, Hey, listen, if the shot plays best on my back
and on somebody else's face, play it.
[Timothee] Right.
Whereas, other actors, they need eye light.
They need to look a certain way.
He's not talking about me, by the way.
He didn't need any eye light.
And with Leo?
Leo, it is interesting, a 30 year difference,
but he has similar sensibility and a curiosity.
Curiosity's the key thing, you know.
Man, is it ever, that's the biggest thing.
There's a Bob Dylan quote from Chronicles, his book.
I might butcher it a little bit, but he says,
If your ability to inspire, be curious
or observed is compromised in any way,
then your creativity is compromised.
That's right. Yeah.
And that's the danger of today, too.
Yeah, because, what, there's an answer to everything?
Yeah, an answer, and there's, understandably,
a sensitivity, you know,
which has to be balanced with art somehow,
because the art should be free.
I just read, for Taxi Driver,
that there was some, like all the directors
had come up with some rule or something,
I'm gonna butcher this, too,
but to to be moralistic,
to not put violence in movies or something.
That's right, yeah.
I still got that, I got that, oh my God,
I was shunned for Goodfellas.
I was shunned in certain Italian restaurants,
they wouldn't let me in.
But do you feel like over the years,
that perception changed?
I mean, look, violence is, in the ancient Greeks,
violence usually took place off stage,
and it was described.
Right. It was off stage.
A messenger comes in and says,
You should see what happened.
Right, right, right, right.
You should see what they did to, you know,
Pelias, he was up there
and they tore him apart in the bache.
Oh my god, you know.
Also helps the fight budget and the stunt budget.
Yeah, yeah.
But it was just as scary and just as disturbing.
Highly stylized.
I guess I've had this kind of question about violence
going all the way back to Mean Streets.
But I grew up in a place that was, you know,
violence was a form of expression.
Right.
And communication.
Yeah, and it was serious.
There was a difference between a friendly slap and a slap.
And that was up to you to determine.
You could see that in Goodfellas,
when he says, You think I'm funny?
Was that scripted? No.
Yeah, that wasn't scripted.
No, something happened to Joe in his life.
It's scary, man.
And he told me, and he said, he got himself out of it.
He got out by saying, Ah, you're f*cking with me.
You're screwing with me, you're screwing with me.
The guy said, I had you there, you bastard, I had you.
And I said, That's the story.
It wasn't even the script, we put it in.
That reminds me, when I was in middle school
on 108th and Amsterdam,
and I saw one of my good friends, Jordan,
the week before, someone said to him,
he got in basically a tussle, in an argument with a guy,
and he said to the guy, Oh, you're so tough,
punch me in the face, and he leaned in,
and the other guy was terrified and he backed down.
So, you know, a week later,
I was getting hassled by some kids.
I leaned into the guy and said,
You're so tough, punch me in the face.
And you got punched. One of the few times
in my life, I got punched so badly.
That really hurts [laughs].
One of the few times in my life
I got really rocked in the face.
It's a good lesson, though.
Yeah, no, I found, luckily I had the asthma
because they'd leave me alone. It protected you.
They're some of the toughest guys.
They would fool you around and get mad at you,
and then say, Oh, that's all right, the kid's sick.
Then they would take you in, Come here.
And they took care of me.
Well, I love in the spot when you say,
Well, I'd be kinder to myself.
Wait, I haven't seen, I don't remember that.
This must be a new version.
Yeah, we put that in.
Anyway, thank you.
Thanks for letting me chat like this.
Oh, thanks so much-
[Director] - Can we settle?
We're just getting the last lines right here
and we're ending.
Hey, you guys settled or what?
It can't be that bad.
Are you guys just trying to get the-
He's good looking, what are you talking about?
He's a big deal, this kid.
[crew laughing]
[Director] Sorry, guys.
It's gonna be take two, let's see how sincere this is.
Thanks again for chatting about your work.
Well, thank you, Timothee,
and I guess I'll see you later, right?
I'll see you tonight. Okay.
We'll celebrate this. Terrific.
[tinkling piano music]
