Martin Scorsese looks inside filmmaking with Tel Aviv U. students
Scorsese's interviewers told him he would always be welcome at TAU.
By HANNAH BROWNMARTIN SCORSESE speaks with the staff of the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University and Israeli filmmakers.(photo credit: Courtesy)Martin Scorsese spoke about how he enjoys Israeli movies and grew up watching classic Yiddish films, in a wide-ranging conversation with the staff of the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University and Israeli filmmakers in a Zoom event on Monday night.The acclaimed director of such classic films as Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Raging Bull, Casino and The Aviator, who had a hit last year with The Irishman on Netflix, said he was speaking from “his room” and that he had barely been out since March.Speaking to Prof. Raz Yosef and Dr. Dan Chyutin of TAU and director Yona Rozenkier, Scorsese – who is so famous for talking fast that he has lampooned himself in commercials and voiced a tightly wound character in the animated Shark Tale film – said he had wanted to visit Israel for a long time. His interviewers told him he would always be welcome at TAU.The theme of his talk was how he found his artistic voice. He spoke movingly about how he was inspired by mentors early in life to become an artist. Growing up in Little Italy in Manhattan, the director, who is known for his gritty portrayals of gangsters and outsiders, said, “I came from a family of hard-working people who never had a book in the house, so I had to learn visually.... They needed work and they made a family and they had to put food on the table and that was it.”Yearning for something else, he was influenced by a young priest who opened his eyes to the world outside his neighborhood, especially movies, art and literature. In addition to Italian neorealism, the French New Wave and American avant-garde films, he said he was drawn to Yiddish films by such directors as Jacob Ben-Ami and Edgar G. Ulmer, and mentioned their best-known film, Green Fields. He also mentioned being inspired by Satyajit Ray’s breakthrough film, Pather Panchali, saying he was excited when he realized, “The people in the movie are obviously the people in the background of movies about India I saw by French directors.”He also spoke of being influenced by Haig P. Manoogian, a film professor at New York University.“He knew I had something but I didn’t know how to express it yet,” he said.Discussing how he began making movies and learning to “channel the personal through the rules of the genre,” he also spoke about the beauty of family and religious rituals and how they inspired him.Asked about two of his most famous scenes in which characters project barely controlled menace, the “You talking to me?” line spoken by Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver and Joe Pesci’s “You think I’m funny?” moment in Goodfellas, Scorsese explained that both scenes were originally improvisations he incorporated into the scripts. Speaking of the Taxi Driver scene, he said that the film was behind schedule and they had to work fast.“If we had had more time, I don’t think we would have gotten it,” he said.
The final question was whether he knew and liked Israeli films, to which he responded positively. He said he knew of Amos Gitai and Eran Riklis, as well as some others he had trouble pronouncing, mentioning that he liked Gidi Dar’s Ushpizin. He also complimented the Yiddish film Menashe by Joshua Z Weinstein, apparently thinking that the Brooklyn-set film was Israeli, and said he very much enjoyed “that movie about the young man who is supposed to be killed in a war and he comes back,” which his listeners knew was Samuel Maoz’s Foxtrot.While Scorsese said the talk had been fun, he held up a very thick screenplay, the title of which was not visible, saying he had to get to work. He promised to visit Israel some day after the coronavirus crisis ends.
