For Scorsese, it’s all about forgiveness
Forget the ghosts of Christmas past. Martin Scorsese has been thinking lately about dearly departed friends from another holiday celebration, a Los Angeles Thanksgiving at the small home off Mulholland Drive he was sharing with musician Robbie Robertson. It was an “extraordinarily joyous” occasion, Scorsese remembers, 45 years after the fact, as he had just been released from the hospital, a surprising turn of events, seeing as he very much believed he was going to die.
So, to celebrate, he hired someone to cook a Thanksgiving dinner — he barely knew how to boil water — and invited a bunch of friends over, including an Italian producer working on Michelangelo Antonioni’s next movie. Is it OK if I bring Mr. Antonioni to your house, the producer asked. Of course. The more, the merrier. But as the evening wore on, Scorsese recalls that Antonioni, a filmmaker adept at conveying estrangement and emotional alienation, could not understand why Scorsese and Robertson kept laughing so much.
“Really, we could just not stop ourselves,” Scorsese says. “I was alive, for one thing. And I had started working on ‘Raging Bull.’ I was back on track after a long period of trying to find a way to continue, a reason to be excited about the prospect of going to a movie set. For a long time, I doubted if I still had enough to care about to make a movie. Now I did.”
It’s a rainy winter day in L.A., and Scorsese is collecting his thoughts for a speech he’ll give later this night at a celebration of Robertson’s life and music. Robertson died in August, not long after his final musical collaboration with Scorsese, the score for the filmmaker’s latest masterpiece, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” had been heard by audiences at the Cannes Film Festival. After our conversation, Scorsese delivered a moving, 17-minute remembrance of his friendship with Robertson, which began with the concert film “The Last Waltz” and continued through collaborations on such movies as “The King of Comedy,” “Silence” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.”
Given the circumstances, our thoughts couldn’t help but drift to Robertson and the years Scorsese spent in Los Angeles in the ’70s. Scorsese arrived early in 1971 at the behest of Warner Bros. executive Fred Weintraub, renting an apartment off Franklin Avenue in Hollywood because it reminded him of his native New York.
“Freddie said come out for two weeks, try it and it won’t mess you up too badly,” Scorsese says. “I spent the first year acclimating, learning how to drive. It was a new world.” He smiles. “I started wearing jeans.”
Actor David Carradine told Scorsese he needed a flashier car than the rental he was driving and found a 1960 Corvette, white with red leather interior, for him to buy for $500. It was hard to handle — “you had to be a real hotshot to do it,” Scorsese says — particularly since he didn’t know how to work the clutch. But Scorsese learned and began to enjoy driving the Corvette around town, if only to crank the radio and listen to new music from Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Eric Clapton and the Grateful Dead.
“The music always created images that precipitated dramatic scenes and ultimately became ‘Mean Streets,’ ‘Taxi Driver,’ ‘Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,’” Scorsese says. “Driving on the freeway at 2 in the morning with no cars and listening to the Allman Brothers could inspire so many thoughts. My first connection with creativity was always music, going back to the 78 records my father would play me when I was 5, 6 years old — Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and Django Reinhardt in the Hot Club of France. Images would come into my mind as I listened. They were abstract, but they made me move in my head.”
The early years in Los Angeles essentially allowed Scorsese