| Meeting With Martin and The Departed - Page 3 |
| Written by Brad Balfour | |||||
| Wednesday, 28 February 2007 08:13 | |||||
Page 3 of 3
Q: Matt, can you discuss going on a drug bust with police?  Martin Scorsese and his wife Helen Morris at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party in L.A.
 Vera Farmiga at the New York premiere of "Notes On A Scandal"
 Nicholson and Damon go at it in "The Departed"
 The fine performances of Jack Nicholson and Leo DiCaprio made "The Departed" one of the top films of the year
MS: I worked on that last shot a lot. It's an interesting thing. When I got to the end of the script, I didn't know Bill or who even owned the script, or who were the producers or the studio, I just knew the script. I took a long time reading it too, about three and a half hours. There were some plot issues, but it had to do with the way the characters were interacting and the dialogue that Bill had in there. The attitude and the stance against the world that they had, not only the main characters but the parts played by Mark Wahlberg and Alec Baldwin. When I saw the shoot-out in the elevator at the end, and then as Colin goes home and what happens to him there, I was pretty stunned by it. I thought it was pretty strong and truthful. Bill had written the phrase, "as written, and then a strange thing happens, comma, a rat comes out and starts to eat the croissants." And I said, that's really strange, that's interesting. It's like a comment from the filmmakers on the subject matter. This is the nature of filmmaking: when you try to interpret, and then a strange thing happens, one runs into difficulty--because the rat comes in from the left, suddenly, it all looks too literal. Why isn't it poetic like he wrote it? It took me a while on that shot. It's what's in the beginning of the frame and then as the rat is revealed, it's the statehouse itself, the gold dome. For me, it was a throwback to the old gangster genre films. At the end of "Scarface," Tony Montana is shot in the street, there's a shot of a sign that says the world is yours. I think the end of "Little Caesar" is the same way. Or the end of "White Heat": "Ma, top of the world." Well, the top of the world to Colin was Beacon Hill and the gold dome of the statehouse was near it, which represents that. But it also represents for me, as the film developed, a sense of paranoia and betrayal--one person never knowing who the other person is or what the other person is doing, or if you can believe anybody. It reflects the world now, the America that we know now, post September 11th. So all those elements are in there, but first on an entertainment level as a reference back to the old gangster films. Monahan: Well, what I was thinking at first was that after such an intense bloody ending, we could go out with a little bit of a joke on the simplest level. There's also the idea of the rat behind the wall of Colin's supposedly perfect world. It worked beautifully, I think. Q: Are the three actors here familiar with the Hong Kong film or the names Tony Leung and [actor] Andy Lau? LD: Yeah, we all watched it and we all enjoyed the film. But I think we had to separate ourselves from it to a certain extent. Certainly, the construct and the skeleton of the story are pretty similar, but it's an entirely different underworld. MD: Yeah, I echo what Leo said. I loved the Hong Kong film. I thought it was fantastic, and I loved those Hong Kong actors. But it's about such a different culture. Boston is different even from any city here in America. The structure was used from the Hong Kong version, but the world that Bill built around it was very specific to Boston. Vera Farmiga: I didn't see the film--I only saw it after my work was complete. I hear that [Madolyn] is a compilation of three female characters, which would have been altogether confusing for me. I think Madolyn was going to be used in this script to illustrate the differences and the similarities of these two characters, so I just read from the script. Q: Marty, Vera has a unique position in this cast of men. What drew you to her? MS: Ellen Lewis, our casting director, mentioned Vera to me. Then I saw a film she did called "Down to the Bone"--it looked like an interesting film, directed by Debra Granik. I had a very good experience watching that film.. I heard about how they worked on that film, that series of films in upstate New York, and it reminded me of the early days of working in New York, 1958, 1959, 1960, making independent [productions], rewriting, revising with actors, working with the people behind it. I thought this was interesting for a person to pursue. You [to Vera] put yourself on tape during the earlier scenes with Colin and I liked that. The next thing we do is meet and I think you read with Leo, and I was sold. I like Vera's attitude. I wanted someone to come in and enrich the part with Bill, with the actors, and again that's part of the process. The world I depict in these films that Bill wrote, it's male-driven, the action is male-driven. I've taken it down the line to the very, very last minute of working on this film so that I could get it right within the circumstances, and the female characters always seem to be adjuncts in a way to the main plotlines. She feels a certain way about morality, but she makes mistakes, she learns about herself, she's duplicitous too, in a way. We wanted someone like Vera who was able to come in and tell them what to do. VF: It truly was a collaborative process. I entered into this being prepared to meet megawatts of talent and you expect there to be a certain chasm between you [and them] and there wasn't. These guys were so nurturing and encouraging and inventive. We spent a lot of time, the four of us--Bill, Marty, Matt and I--and the process of working with Marty is he really [has] you bring your own tumults and your own idiosyncrasies, and it's a real workshopping. There was a point where we discussed, do we want to make her more unbalanced in the film or do we want her as duplicitous as the rest of them? I had met with a woman by the name of Debra Glasner who is a police psychiatrist for the LAPD and I gave her the script. She looked at and [said] "oh, dear, no, she's doing everything wrong. No way would she sleep with a client." This was the moment I found my character very interesting and this is when I said ah, something for me to play. I think it would have been a bore if Madolyn did things by the book. I think hardly anything in this world is done by the book. I think it's so much more interesting to play someone who thinks she's great at her job and may not be. She's as duplicitous as everyone else. She's pulled by her desire and pushed by her conscience. And I love the contradiction. I love that she is a woman who is supposed to rely on her instinct for what she does, but in her personal life does not rely on her intuition, and I found that very exciting to play. MD: I think Marty's right about a male-driven film. It's like when you're a young character actor and you have to do things that make no sense so that the lead of the film can look better. But if you hire a great actor to take a role, they can make everything work. In our rehearsing, our relationship got a lot deeper and it made a lot more sense thematically. Now you have a guy who's got sexual issues with this woman. She's a shrink, of course he's gonna go to her and of course he's gonna be with her because if he's got issues in his neighborhood, everyone's going to know about it. So he seeks her out and she of course would stay with him and tough it out because of what she does. Her first instinct is to try to help him, A lot of these scenes would happen off camera, but our relationship works because it makes sense why. Then it [also] makes sense why she would be susceptible to Billy's attentions because she is unfulfilled in certain ways. Q: What about the music? MS: I worked out with Howard Shore that all the characters are entwined in a web, and if they tried to get away from each other, they're tied together in a dance of death in a way. We tried many different songs in the back of that bar where Jack interrogates Leo with his combat boot, but the song "Let It Loose," had the right particular feel for that scene. We came up with this idea of a tango, a very dangerous and lethal tango which ultimately does in everyone in the story. I love guitars. Howard and I had worked out acoustic guitars and electric guitars, steel guitars, all sorts of different things. When the sound kicked into electric, it was very strong. For example near the end, when Vera finds the CD that Leo sends, there was a scene that preceded it with Matt on the bed and she tells him about the sonogram. We had that piece of music played on acoustic guitar and it was quite nice. Then Howard said he had another version of it on electric guitar which gave it a slight edge. But it started with this idea of the tango, something that they're all entwined with, and of course the references to movies like "The Third Man" you can't avoid--even the shot of him walking away from Leo at the funeral. All those sorts of references to betrayal that you can't avoid. I like them a lot. Q: Martin, what would Roger Corman think of you now, career-wise? MS: I did a couple films with Roger and was an editor in some of his films. Don't forget the real guys who started out with him are people like Jack Nicholson, Peter Bogdanovich, Monty Helm, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda. They created the beginning of the New Hollywood in the late '60s, we came in late a little after them. Roger always said "I made 100 films and not one film has been lost or died. I made money on every one of them." He had a whole different way of making pictures. It was like a workshop, and it was called an exploitation film and therefore it had to make money. It was interesting to make a film like that-- to go in and shoot in 24 days, it had to be out in a certain period of time and it only went to a certain circuit. There are certain films now that have replaced that. It's interesting because we appreciate Roger as an artist, especially his Poe films that he made in the early '60s. But I think he'd like to think of himself as a successful businessman in film. So it's maybe hard for me to say what he would think. Q: What do you think of the younger Martin Scorsese? MS: My younger Marty, I don't know, he's still there, I guess. It's almost like a dream. I don't know what's really happened. I'm trying to find a way to still be interested to be on a set and work with great people like this. It's not easy to keep the energy going, to keep the curiosity going, to continue to make films, but they have to mean something to me. That's always been a struggle for me. Now [it's] the nature of how film is made, independent cinema and that sort of thing, I'm still trying to find my way. Q: Was the decision to have one character want religion and have one push it away, was that originally in the script or was that added? MS: One embracing religion and one not, I never thought of that. A lot of work in this film was intuitive, I never really thought that out. But I did understand the corruption of power and havoc of Jack Nicholson's character Costello. He's beyond power, he's beyond God, he's got all the money, he's got all the drugs, he's got everything that he ever needs. But he's still not satisfied and ultimately he sets himself up to be taken in by his sons. William Monahan [writer]: There was an overt reference in the script to a Luciferian revolt. When Martin Sheen's character is followed, the cop who's following him says, what are we supposed to observe, the good Catholic life? So with Irish Catholics, you sometimes have to really take a big jump to get away from their formative environments. James Joyce [is] the best example--he based his whole career on the idea of Lucifer and the revolt, so there is an element of that there. Q: Is this a moral ending or a just ending? How does reflect on American morality? MS: I think that's a good question. What I immediately related to in Bill Monahan's script is that it's like a picture and I don't know what it is. It's like an obsessive behavioral pattern on my part to be dealing with this material, but this film is a little different. I felt a kind of despair that's reflected in the story, in the characters and how they all interact with each other, and particularly in the ending. How the whole plot is resolved in the elevator, in the hallway, and of course in Colin's apartment in the end. WM: I like the finality of the ending. I like the fact that it's a truly tragic ending in [that it] proceeds from the mistakes made by the people. And not just one, but two of the principal characters end up with a tragic death that has come about from the mistakes they have made and where they were in the world and what they were doing. Vera's character comes to an endless grief because of the mistakes her character has made. MS: That's what kept me going in depicting this world where morality no longer exists. Costello knows this. I think he's almost above it, he knows that God doesn't exist anymore in the world they're in. I think in order to know you have a problem, first you have to know you have a problem. As we were making the film I realized that we're in a moral Ground Zero in a way. For me it is a sadness and a sense of despair, and we've been in this situation since September 11th. thedeparted.warnerbros.com |
