The Big Picture - Top Five Martin Scorsese Movies. Plus: Edward Norton! | The Big Picture

Episode Date: November 1, 2019

'The Irishman' opens in theaters this weekend, so Sean has convened two Scorsese fanatics, Chris Ryan and Adam Nayman, to share their top five favorite Marty movies. The trio discuss Scorsese's signature themes and visual style, his approach to genre, and what makes him such a historic figure in the world of filmmaking (3:00). Then, Edward Norton joins Sean to discuss the making of his latest film—which he wrote, directed, and stars in—'Motherless Brooklyn' (61:00). Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Chris Ryan, Adam Nayman, and Edward Norton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I released the book of basketball in 2009. I swore I was done. What else was there to say? The book was 704 pages long. I figured out the secret of basketball with help from Isaiah Thomas, then used it to rank the top 96 players of all time. I blew up the basketball hall of fame

and turned it into a five-level Egyptian pyramid. I figured out the 33 greatest what-ifs ever. I solved every MVP debate. I made the case for Russell over Wilt. I explained why MJ was the greatest ever. I wrote hundreds of pop culture references, at least 250 inappropriate jokes, and God knows how many footnotes.

I even drove to San Diego for the epilogue to spend time with Bill Walton. And when the book reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list, that was all I ever wanted. I was done. I swore to myself I would never do a sequel. Well, I kind of lied.

So much has changed in the NBA these past 10 years. I couldn't help going back. Who could have seen the three-point boom coming? Curry's Warriors going 73-9, the hardened trade, the player empowerment error, the process, advanced metrics, the decision, Cleveland winning a title. I repeat, Cleveland winning a title. Well, why write a sequel when I could turn that book into a living, breathing podcast,

something that juggled interviews and pyramid podcasts and rewatchable game podcasts about famous games. What's my top hundred now? What's my pyramid? What's the new biggest what if of all time? Could the 86 Celtics have handled the 17 Warriors and all those threes? What did I learn from spending so much time

over the last years with people like Bill Russell, Magic Johnson, Kevin Durant, Jalen Rose, Isaiah Thomas, and so many others? Think of it as my basketball book coming to life in audio form, reinvented, reincarnated, retooled,

recreated for 2019 and beyond. It's the book of basketball 2.0. It's launching on November 6th presented by State Farm. See you there. I'm Sean Fennessey and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about Martin Scorsese. The time has come for The Irishman. This weekend, Netflix's big-time Martin Scorsese. The time has come for The Irishman. This weekend, Netflix's big-time Martin Scorsese epic, three-and-a-half-hour epic, hits theaters, not yet the streaming service. And so to celebrate the movie, I've convened two Marty heads, two Marty bros, Chris Ryan and the

ringer contributor Adam Naiman. What's up, guys? Hey there. Hey, Sean. Later in the show, I will have a conversation with Edward Norton, who is, of course, a famous actor and the writer and director of a new movie called Motherless Brooklyn. But first, we go deep into Scorsese. So we're talking top fives today. And we're talking top fives because Martin Scorsese's got about 7,000 films. And it's ranking them as something that we do here on this podcast. But before we do that, I think we should talk a little bit about

what Martin Scorsese means to the culture of movies. This is a bit like asking, what does Jesus mean to Catholicism? You would appreciate that. He certainly would. I think we should talk a little bit about not just his place in the hierarchy, but kind of what makes Martin Scorsese Martin Scorsese. How did this person who we accept and understand as such a significant figure in the 20th and 21st century of movie making, this figure? in Scorsese. How did this person who we accept and understand as such a significant figure in

the 20th and 21st century of moviemaking, this figure? Chris, when you think of Scorsese, what do you think of? The camera. I think about, you know, I always think about this part of the documentary Visions of Light. I think we've talked about this documentary before, but if you have a chance to, if you listen to this podcast, you should watch this documentary. It's a documentary about the history of American cinematography. And one of Martin Scorsese's collaborators, Michael Chapman, who worked on Raging Bull, is being interviewed for the documentary. And he talks, to paraphrase him, about nobody understands how the movement of the camera elicits emotions like Scorsese does. And I think that when I think about what he's done outside of how he's arguably the most influential filmmaker of the

last 40 years, with the maybe possible exception of Spielberg, how he has done so much to inform our ideas about crime and punishment and masculinity over the last 40 years, the thing that I always think about is how he moves his camera and how it makes me feel. And no other filmmaker has ever done that for me. Adam, what about you? What does Scorsese kind of mean to you as a person who's dedicated his life

to watching and trying to understand films? Well, I mean, I'm personally boycotting him until he makes a 12-part documentary about Thor, The Dark World. Just until he's contrite, I'm just not going to think about his work. No, I mean, he's... You an influential American filmmaker the last 40 years. I mean, that's very arguable. ridiculousness over the superhero movies has served to clarify that insofar as people who have

tried to argue against him or who are frustrated with his views try and peg him as a crime filmmaker. And that's not to discount what Chris was just saying about ideas about crime and punishment. I think he's put those ideas in our consciousness. But when I really look at his career, when you actually lay the films end to end, he's one of the more versatile filmmakers of the last 40 years. He doesn't repeat himself. He has core themes and preoccupations that he's drawn to, and you can call them predictable or you can call them durable. But he's incredibly ambitious in the range of things that he's taken on.

And I would extend that to Chris's point about style, which is that, yeah, he can move the camera in ways that make you feel. And it's an incredible range of feeling because in some ways I wouldn't say that he's bound to a single style. He's a tremendously dynamic filmmaker. He's evolved a lot. And, I mean, how many filmmakers can you argue have had masterpieces in something like five different decades? It's absolutely true. It's a short list. I mean, how many filmmakers can you argue have had masterpieces in something like five different decades? You know? It's absolutely true.

It's a short list. I think of a lot of things when I think of him. In particular, the fact that what we now understand to be tropes of modern movies were his signatures. Things that he didn't necessarily invent, but things that he has kind of brought into the consciousness. Now, there's obvious things like his heavy use of popular music, soundtracking his films, slow motion, freeze frame, these sort of heavy tracking shots. Changing film speeds. Film speed, voiceover, all of these things that we come to understand and appeared previously in other films. of the gangster genre and go into films about spirituality and films about childhood and comedy and drama and all sorts. He touches every genre, every style of filmmaking in many ways. Obviously,

he's made almost a dozen great documentaries at this point in his life, but he has invented a kind of consistent cinematic language that people just take. They take and they use as their own. We'd spent the previous month on this podcast talking about the movie Joker. And Joker, of course, is just one long homage slash jerk on so much of what Scorsese did in the 80s and in the 70s. So it's a fascinating thing. I mean, he is the kind of person who, I don't know, he's a little bit like candy to me. Where candy, if I eat too much of it, is bad for me, but for the most part, it makes me happy every day. And I could just watch one of his movies every single day of my life and revisiting his work is so fun. The Irishman, I think is going to be, I don't know,

it's going to be seen as kind of a capstone and, and we're not going to talk about the movie too much here because very few people have seen it. We'll talk more about it next week on the show. I look forward to talking with you guys about it too. But I wonder if you could, with the Irishman in mind, talk a little bit about his relationship to genre. You know, Adam, you're writing about this for the site. Chris, you think about genre all the time as somebody who loves movies. Adam, what do you think of when you think about

what genres Scorsese leans into and kind of how he interprets them? Well, I mean, it's interesting. This idea of genre is also what's come up in the in the marvel confab and people sort of trying to draw comparisons between you know the superheroes movies of today are like the westerns of your you know which is just so silly just in terms of how movies are made at studios and how movies are marketed and the the the continuity of making all these movies that are meant to tie together.

Genre, I think, now means something very different than it did at the time that Scorsese was a film viewer, even before he was a filmmaker, right? So, his love of genre was informed by when he grew up and the kinds of movies that he watched. He's talked a lot about that, about certain genres that were formative for him, gangster films to some extent, westerns. But I also think that as a film viewer in his youth and in his early 20s, he was drawn towards movies outside of American genres, to some extent movies that were just made out of the United States in general. You know, he came of age in that time when foreign film distribution was kind of picking up and he watched that stuff so voraciously. So by the time he's making his early movies, especially the ones that we might consider to be crime films, I mean, Mean Streets is a hard movie to call a genre film, but let's go with it. Let's say Mean Streets is a

genre movie. He's bringing so many things both from inside that frame of reference and outside that frame of reference to it at the same time. So Mean Streets is a movie that to some extent is maybe informed by B films or crime films, but it's also informed by Italian melodrama. It's got this kind of operatic intensity to it, even for such a small scale story. I think that he was actually less obviously renovating and playing with genre in the early 70s than someone like Coppola was with The Godfather. I mean, with Scorsese, this idea of him as a genre director, a crime director, a gangster director doesn't really actually start to happen honestly until when? Until the late 80s, the early 90s with something like Goodfellas. fellas. Later on, I think what he's done is quite remarkable in integrating aspects of horror and integrating aspects of musicals and certainly bringing parts of comedy into his work. He's not

bound to any one thing. He's sort of a great synthesizer. And that's where I think a lot of his originality comes from. I think there's this conflation of Italian American and gangster movie. And a lot of those films in the 70s and 80s are very much about Italian Americans. Robert De Niro is the star of almost all of his movies for a 10 or 12 year stretch there. And so because of that, we kind of confuse the two things. But I think you're right, Adam. I think Goodfellas is when it kind of calcifies. And then as time goes on, we get Casino and we get The Departed and we get now The Irishman and these movies that are part of this broader story of gangsterism. What about for you, Chris? Yeah, I think I would almost make the argument that until Cape Fear,

with a few exceptions, his genre is New York. And it has had a lot to do with the modern concept of what New York City is and how it feels and what it's like to live there and what it's like to try and eke out a living there or what it's like to be a king there. And so that's really, when people say, oh, he's a genre filmmaker, I think they just get the genre wrong. Yeah. It's an interesting thing. If you look back at his sight and sound top 10 list from 2012, it's very much in the spirit of what Adam is describing. I mean, this is his list of 10,

which he actually listed 12. Like any good list maker, he knows that the rules ultimately do not apply. And we'll get into that a little bit as we do our list. But 2001 A Space Odyssey, eight and a half, Watched as Ashes and Diamonds, Citizen Kane, The Leopard, Paisan,

The Red Shoes, The River, Salvatore Giuliano, The Searchers, Ugetsu, and Vertigo. Half American, half foreign film.

Yeah. Mostly transcendentalist, spiritualist visions of filmmaking and not at all bound by genre. So it's an interesting thing to kind of see his lens of genre just as a way into the psyche of the characters that he is most interested in. When you're mentioning that list, this is one thing that maybe you'll come up in your own discourses but it's definitely part of mine the other idea of what does he mean and what do we associate him with is he's the great cheerleader of cinema right yes very much in ways in ways that are both no i don't mean superficial in a bad way like in some ways it's a very friendly funny idea

of like oh you know marty likes this movie as a producer, as someone who's helped films find distribution, as someone who's helped promote cinema, package cinema, his World Cinema Foundation stuff, it's not a contest, but a lot of that Easy Rider, Raging Bull generation, even though they're all cinephiles, I don't think any of them can equal Scorsese in terms of what he's tried to do with other movies. Not just his films, but as an advocate, as a critic, and as someone who works even with younger filmmakers to help them get their work out there. It's a huge part of who he is. Chris, before we get into our list, I want you to take this opportunity to convince Martin Scorsese that Marvel movies are worth it. I don't have to because Bob Iger did the

Ned Beatty from Network speech on him already. So if that doesn't work, nothing I say is going to change his mind about it. Did you see that he recently commented on this again? Bob or Marty? Marty in the aftermath of Bob's comments. What did he say?

I'm going to read his comments. Adam, please bear with me. I know this makes you want to hang yourself. For them, my concern is losing the screens to massive theme park films, which I say again,

they're their own new art form. Cinema now is changing. We have so many venues. There are so many ways to make films so enjoyable. Fine, go. And it's an event and it's great to go to an event like an amusement park, but don't crowd out Greta Gerwig and don't crowd out Paul Thomas Anderson and Noah Baumbach and those people just don't in terms of theaters. As we see, as time goes on, the vision of the comments are sort of slowly changing and changing and changing because nobody

wants to be seen ultimately as a grouch. And it's so funny in contrast to what Adam is identifying about Scorsese which is that he is the ultimate champion of film he's got at least three documentaries that are purely about films that he thinks you should watch and he has dedicated his life there was an incredible supercut on Twitter of Scorsese on various talk shows over the last 25 years just mentioning other films. And there are upwards of a hundred films in this five minute clip. And he takes on this kind of, I don't know, he's like this barrister of movies, of film culture. And I find it wonderful. I mean, I've probably picked up a dozen, two dozen, three dozen films just from hearing him talk about things over the years. Isn't that ultimately what this comes down to?

Is that nobody, look, I don't think anybody is sitting around being like, the reason I got into filmmaking is because of Guardians of the Galaxy 2. You know, but people get into filmmaking because of Martin Scorsese's movies, because of what he does with the art of cinema. We don't know what's coming though. Sure. Okay. The James Gunn heads, the top five James Gunn films pod that we'll be doing 30 years from now, the three of us, you know, that will say something different. Get ready. You got your takes ready about super and slither?

No, because they're just going to be twos and threes. That's true. Let's go to our top fives. You guys know the rules. We go five to one. We each go around the ring. You have any runners up you want to note before you get into your lists? Adam, what about you? I mean, I could mention runners up, but I suspect some of them might be on your list. One that I'm not sure will be on either one of your lists that I just barely left out. Like I crossed it out in the streetcar on the way over here. I was going to put it at number five, but I was going to do After Hours, which I don know is if that's going to be on either one of

your list this is this sort of like very picaresque new york at night comedy that he made in the in the mid 80s with griffin dunn as this guy sort of beset by all of these alluring and and and and dangerous women during one night in new york it's the kind of movie i really love which is it's not in real time but it's kind of like a very consistent contained narrative. And it's all about male anxiety and kind of a satire of those things by no means, uh, uh, kind of puffed up macho movie, very much the opposite. I just find it funny and, and, and, and, uh, and, and hilarious. It's been a favorite of mine for a long time. Likewise, you may hear it on my list a bit later in the show.

Funny how a bunch of guys approaching middle age are interested in after hours and male anxiety. What a town. Chris, what about you? Runners up? I would say that my runners up are largely his masterpieces.

Oh. That they don't really figure in my top five because my top five, I tried to be a little bit more true to myself than just like, you got to have this here

because of what it means. I'm not playing Apex Mountain with this list. I'm playing just like personal favorites. Okay. I want to give a quick shout out to Life Lessons, which is his segment from New York Stories starring Nick Nolte, which I think is one of the best things he's ever done. It's obviously not a proper film, but it's something that I love to revisit. And it's also very fun to skip the other two films in New York Stories, which I don't think work terribly well. Let's just dive right in right now. Adam, number five. Number five, I've got The Last Waltz.

Yes, so do I. So do I. Hell yeah. Three number fives. Don't do it. Don't you break my heart. Please don't do it. Don't you break my heart.

Adam, what do you like about it? Well, when I was doing my list, I wasn't being this schematic about it, but I'm like, there's all these different aspects that he has to get at that idea of versatility and not reduce him to, you know, De Niro and gangster stuff. And rock is such a part of what he does. I mean, Sean kind of said that off the top. And I kind of, I don't just prefer The Last Waltz to the later rock documentaries because it's more in the moment, you know, like things like his Rolling Stones doc, I find like really

gentrified and dull at this point. Like the amount of resource that he has in the stones are so old and irrelevant at this point. Like when he's doing the band in 76, it's capturing the end of something in real time and a moment in rock music that he was part of because of his work on Woodstock. But it's also just so thrillingly choreographed as a piece of filmmaking. I think about the scene and it's in a studio where they're doing the weight and the way that he cuts on the chorus from Helm to Robertson to Danko doing the and right before they sing Put the Load Right on Me. Like it's so kinetic.

It's as kinetic as any action scene, as any suspense scene. It's just such a beautifully judged piece of filmmaking in terms of putting rock to images. And then, you know, just the narrative of the band themselves and the different characters. And it's also kind of the starting point for some of the later rock docs that he makes, like, you know, Robertson and Dylan. I just think it's really at the center of his filmmaking universe and, you know, as good as anything else he made in the 70s.

Chris, what do you dig about The Last Waltz? Yeah, I mean, a lot of what Adam said, it's one of the two best concert films ever made along with Stop Making Sense. And I think that my favorite Scorsese obsession, for lack of a better term, is the juice. It's the like moments in life when your blood quickens,

when it's all kind of connecting and clicking and something's going on. And he captures that feeling better than any filmmaker, whether it's Jimmy Conway smoking or whether it's a guy walking into a room. And that sequence of the wait that Adam's describing, the people on camera know it's happening. You know, like the people on camera can tell they're participating in something

incredibly special. I don't know how he shot that. I don't know how many takes they did of that. I don't want to know, but there's a moment right at the end when they finished the last harmony and Mavis Staples mouths, beautiful. And she's talking about the performance, but she could just as easily be talking about the actual, the filming of it. Yeah. I think one of the themes that runs through a lot of his movies, and you wouldn't think it would apply to this movie, but it very much does, is the idea of conspiracy, of people conspiring together to do something, to pull something off. And in some cases, it's as obvious as the Lufthansa heist. And in other cases, it's a movie like Hugo,

and it's how making film and milieu and all that and in this movie it's a rock band self-consciously marking time and saying we have to commemorate the end of this thing on thanksgiving together and we need to get our friend marty involved and we need to film it operatically and it's every almost everyone yeah who performs with the band rising to the occasion i I would be remiss if I did not mention Van Morrison just fucking going for it in this movie. The caravan performance and the leg kick. And part of that is, it's just the residue of design. You know, it's like Scorsese can be the greatest filmmaker in the world and you wouldn't necessarily get the chance

to see Van Morrison in that mode or Muddy Waters in that mode or Joni Mitchell in that mode or any of those people in this film. There's a really great quote at the beginning of The Color of Money, which, I mean, obviously was written by Richard Price, but Martin Scorsese does the voiceover at the beginning over the title sequence. And he basically is talking about how to play nine ball

and how it's, you know, this mix of skill and luck. And he's like, but for some players, luck itself is an art. And he's like, but for some players, luck itself is an art and he's fucking lucky. He got De Niro. You know what I mean? He got the band. He got Leo. So, you know, Marty knows how to capture luck. And that in some ways is his own art. This is why I've aligned myself with Chris Ryan, Adam. You know, I'm just trying to get it close, close to the juice as I can. Yeah, of course. I like that we all have the last waltz at number five. I would guess that we're going to diverge from here. Adam, what's your number four? My number four is Taxi Driver. Oh, that is also my number four.

You're talking to me? Then who the hell else are you talking to? You're talking to me? Well, I'm the only one here. Chris, not your number four nope did not make my list Adam speak on it

as if no one has ever spoken on Taxi Driver before yeah a really underrepresented movie that could really it could really stand for some it could stand for some analysis I would just

I mean somebody's got to take this and just see what you could do with it in the comic book shop that's what I've been this has been screaming out for this yeah this is one of the challenges of this podcast is

what what is there to say about taxi driver and and is it still useful i think is an interesting conversation because obviously through the lens of whatever joker's trying to do you can make a case for it but unto itself what do you what does it give you right now adam what it gives me is what i think it it's always given the people who've watched it, which is without overstating the case and getting into this realm of hyperbole that's a very kind of op-ed kind of hot take way of describing a movie. It doesn't feel safe when you watch it. I think that if you read what Manny Farber wrote about it in the 70s and Kale. I mean, Farber didn't love it, but he saw it six times to write his piece, The Power and the Gory, and Kale was a fan of it from the beginning. They talked about how your position as a viewer is very vulnerable and very destabilized.

It's really hard to know how to react to Travis Bickle. It's really hard to predict how he's going to react to what's around him. He's not surrounded by characters who bounce off him in a way that clarifies the film's morality or clarifies the film's point of view. Even the way that certain scenes are shot and edited, it's not a horror movie, but it's very much this language of suspense and surprise beyond the plot, just the way certain things are revealed by the camera. I think that it's a phenomenally accomplished technical exercise in nervous tension and in alienation and in a kind of horror that no matter how many times it's copied, ripped off, repurposed, I would say travestied in some ways by what Todd Phillips thought he was doing in Joker. It's not just the cliche that it holds up.

Like, it's invincible when you're watching it. It's dated in the sense that it has so much history associated with it, like real history, the history of Hinckley and him shooting at Reagan, and so many films have copied it. But it's invincible. It doesn't date. It doesn't fall out of fashion. It hasn't lost any of its potency. As much as any of those 70s movies, and maybe more than almost all of them, you can still watch it now even for a first time and be like, that is fucking intense. But the thing that jumps out to me as I put it in the context of his career is the film that comes before it is Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. And the film that comes after it is New York, New York.

And we imagine Scorsese as this shaman of isolation and violence and a kind of psychological terror that happens to the male psyche when they have guilt and unrepresented loneliness. And the truth is he made a musical and a film about a single mother before that and it's that that isn't the definitive nature of all of his films but in taxi driver i think we think of it as this mad rampaging story of a person losing their mind full stop and that's not what the movie is the movie is very patient and methodical and quiet and like a little bit funny at times. I think it's a little atypical for him in some ways. Yeah, it is. It doesn't have the same energy.

It does not have that whiz bang, goodfellas, you feel like you're inside the jet engine feeling. It is menacing and it is kind of, there isn't that feeling of dread that Adam is describing, but it is taking its time to get to its conclusion. And of course, this conclusion is very violent and very noisy and operatic. But it's funny, we always talk about the rewatch.

And the rewatch is much different than what you would expect. I would encourage people to rewatch it in the aftermath of all this conversation we've been having about it recently because it is very rewarding in maybe the ways you wouldn't expect. Chris, what's your number four?

Wolf of Wall Street. When you sail on a boat fit for a Bond villain, sometimes you need to play the part, right? I think it's time you both get the fuck off my boat. What do you say? You know, Jordan, I'll tell you something. Most of the Wall Street jackasses that I bust, they're to the manner of war.

Is that right? Yeah. Their fathers are douchebags, just like their fathers before them. But you, you, Jordan, you got this way all on your own, did I? Good for you, little man. Little man. I almost put this on my list, and there's some criticism about this movie that it's a little bit of a karaoke stockbroker version of Scorsese. What is it that resonates for you?

It's the funniest movie I think he ever made, And I don't think that that can be overrated. And I think it's fairly misunderstood, although I appreciate how it's misunderstood because some people think it's this love letter to excess and to world-beating domination. I think he abhors everybody in this movie. I think he abhors, like, everybody in this movie. I think he absolutely loathes them, but that's not necessarily how it's made. It's made in a way that's sort of supposed to be, I think, from the perspective of Jordan,

is how it's made. It's made through his, like, sort of how he was seeing it in sort of Scorsese's idea. But probably the, you know, while exhausting in terms of its length, the funniest and most fun I've ever had watching a Scorsese movie. Have you rewatched it recently? In bits and pieces. Speaking of rewatch, I think it's a very easy like,

oh, this 20 minutes is on. I'm going to check this out. Yeah, there are a lot of scenes. Yeah. A lot of great scenes. Whether it hangs together is kind of an interesting question. Maybe we'll investigate that on the rewatchables at some point down the road. Adam, what do you make of Wolf?

When I saw it, I wasn't crazy about it. It's benefited from exactly what you guys described almost to the letter of, that's a collection of scenes. Certain of those scenes are quite funny and I do have cable. So when it's on, I find myself watching it and enjoying it. I think that one of the ways that it was criticized was really this idea of retweet equals endorsement. You know, that if you spend three hours with these characters and the filmmaking is so exultant and their performances are so exultant that the lack of anyone coming out and saying this is bad, you know, means, you know, that he's in favor of it, which I do think is dumb criticism. On the other hand, there is something to be said that if you get inside this movie, you spend that much time with it inside what it is that exhilarates people.

It might not mean that your film isn't a critique, but like the efficacy of that critique or the success of it is something that I think at least can be debated. And so my experience of the movie wasn't so much whether I liked it or not, as that when it came out, it seemed like maybe for the first time or more recently in general, if you don't love a Scorsese movie, then his supporters as critics or on social media will basically say that you're the dumbest person in the world. And, you know, I think that that's a reputation that he's earned but in some ways when i see people rushing to his defense like he's tied to the train tracks in a movie from 1910 i'm like the movies stand up to it you don't need to defend every second of everything that he makes but that's the status that he has yeah i also think fascination with the grotesque is not an

endorsement either. It's fun to see terrible people on screen sometimes. And just because it's fun doesn't mean you think it's the right way to live your life. And there is a bit of nuance in that conversation. I would say that in some ways they make Jordan Belfort seem extremely fun in various moments. At points, yeah. Not always, but they sort of... I think they make him seem like a good salesman yes and and inherent like movie stars have an inherent charisma and leo has an inherent

charisma this is probably like top two or three dicabrio for me he's he's really going for it adam number three uh number three for me is age of innocence nothing's nothing's done that can't be undone. I'm still free. Yeah, so this isn't on my list, but I'd love to hear you talk about it. I think that, again, this idea of trying to see that which is superficially atypical in Scorsese as being things that he's actually deeply interested in. I think this idea of a movie that is a snapshot of a society, a snapshot of class and of aspiration within that, aspiration that on some level succeeds and on another level is thwarted, and also a film about people who have to kind of keep things inside because people often find Scorsese quite volcanic.

So the way that Travis Bickle explodes or Pesci and Goodfellas, I mean, again, this is this cliche about him, even though those are super memorable moments. And in The Age of Innocence, I'm just amazed by the focus and the restraint and the concentration and the suggestion of things inside with the actors who he happens to work with, particularly the scenes between Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer, which I think are the sexiest and some of the most tragic stuff that he's ever filmed. But I just very much, I mean, I almost thought about putting Kundan in my top five too. And it's not just to be contrary or to be difficult with him. It's just to push back against this idea that he's one kind of filmmaker. So I think for him to do Edith Wharton in and of itself is interesting. I think for him

to do a period piece outside his lived experiences is interesting. And I just think the execution of it is exquisite. I find it to be one of his most moving films and weirdly one that I like to rewatch. Yeah. Again, he has this amazing ability to sandwich his classics in between these sort of, they're not genre exercises per se, but they're extensions outside of his traditional comfort zone. So The Age of Innocence is followed closely by Casino, which is followed closely by Kundun, which is followed closely by Bringing Out the Dead, which is followed closely by Gangs of New York. All of those films are set in completely different times with completely different costume design and photography style

and different actors and different actors and different approaches to filmmaking, but they all have this ineffable touch. They are very clearly his movie. Chris, what about you? What's number three? After Hours. I've got 97 cents.

No. It's raining like mad out there. No. Would you just give me a break? I really just want to go home. I'm sorry. I can't do that. I could lose my job.

Well, who would know exactly? I could go to a party, get drunk, talk to someone. Who knows? This is also my number three. Really, one of the movies of his that has come to me later in my life, I don't think that I really understood it when I was younger, maybe because I just hadn't had that many nights out under my belt, but captures a certain quintessential New York experience,

which is, first of all, it's orientation toward late night, which is something that you lose as you get older and also move farther away from New York. What's your normal bedtime? When he goes out. When Paul Hackett goes out at 1130 to go meet Marcy Franklin is when usually I am tucking into bed with an episode of something on Netflix. But I just wanted to point out a quartet of performances from Catherine O'Hara, Rosanna Arquette, Linda Fiorentino, and Terry Garr, which is kind of an 80s actress Mount Rushmore for me.

I thought it was, on rewatch, they're just so delightful and interesting and obviously represent a lot of different things that Martin Scorsese may or may not feel about women. 1980s vintage paperbacks and Jay McInerney and New York yuppie anxiety that goes into Kafka-esque sort of transmutation and is a really interesting case where it's not De Niro. It is a different kind of energy to have Griffin Dunn as a protagonist and he has like a kind of electrified, quasi-intellectual, but very kooky energy where he's talking, you know, that we meet, when he meets Rosanna Arquette in this movie,

he's reading Henry Miller and he just starts riffing on Henry Miller and rereads and it has a just kind of like anything can happen feeling that I think perfectly matches

his style of filmmaking. I think the energy of the film is best explained by the soundtrack. So this soundtrack to me is everything about Scorsese

so you've got Bach and Mozart this this sort of historical classical familiar and yet elusive grand and operatic music you've got Cole Porter and you've got Ira Gershwin he's sort of early 20th century standard bearers who, you know, that's very similar to the kind of way that he looks at film too. He's got an innate understanding of those classical American tropes. And then you've got Joni Mitchell and you've got the monkeys

and you've got Robert and Johnny throughout the film. And then all the way at the end of the film, you've got Bad Brains. Yeah. And you've got punk rock and you've got rebellion and defiance. And also that scene where Bad Brins plays is my favorite Martin Scorsese cameo

as the Club Berlin searchlight operator up there with taxi driver, taxi guy. Yes. This is also notably the first movie in 11 years that De Niro does not appear in. And it's obviously comes on the heels of his inability to get The Last Temptation of Christ

off the ground at Paramount. And so he pivots to this kind of grungy, dingy, smaller, quote unquote, film. And, you know, Adam, for years, Scorsese, it was thought that the mid 80s was kind of his down period, I think, until he gets to The Last Temptation

because he doesn't make a film for a couple of years. Then he makes After Hours, which is sort of overlooked. But I think, and maybe it's because of guys like us, but I think in the last 10 years or so, this movie has become a bit of an object of obsession for people who love him. What do you think the reason for that is? Well, I think that, I mean, again, it's that idea of there's a little bit of maybe critical currency in reclaiming kind of unloved

or underrated movies so there's that but it's also a movie that again i think to some extent within the culture its time has come right there's a lot of things that this movie about this kind of you know ostensibly kind of cool and adventurous but fundamentally uptight and paranoid man surrounded by all these projections of his desire and his anxiety like Like, I'm not saying that that's specific necessarily to 2019, but it signifies interestingly now. I think it signifies interestingly now in terms of the cult around Scorsese, whether it's the more mainstream one that really does hold him up for sort of, you know, tough guy, macho stuff, or the critical

one that's interested in how he strips back and kind of dances around that stuff. But I loved you mentioning life lessons earlier, which is very much close to that stuff. But I loved you mentioning Life Lessons earlier, which is very much close to After Hours. I think you'd agree, like, those two movies go together in terms of their proximity, but also just this kind of funky, bohemian New York of artists and whatever else. Absolutely.

And it's a mode of his that he hasn't necessarily continued, but I find him so comfortable and agile and virtuoso within it and when you mention the mid-80s even though it didn't make any of our lists i would kill for a studio entertainment as enjoyable as the color of money now to be honest that's actually on my list wouldn't be so sure it's not on someone's list knowing chris's idea well then i'm then i'm wrong but i would kill for something like that now. Okay. Number two? Number two. Adam.

Silence. Do you have the right to make them suffer? I heard the cries of suffering in this same cell, and I acted. You excuse yourself! You excuse yourself! That is the spirit of darkness! And what would you do for them? Pray?

And get water in return. Wow. This fucking guy. Yeah, Adam. I mean. And when I say this fucking guy, I'm imitating Jesus speaking as a stone in silence. Yeah. That would be a spoiler.

The scene in silence where I almost came out of my seat was when he's speaking to himself in the reflection. And I mean, beyond just the question of whether this is a conversation he's having with himself or the delusion or the narcissism or the humility of seeing himself as Christ. It's like, it's just a version of, are you talking to me? Right? It's De Niro in front of the mirror, restaged. And I'm like, you know, not that I need to be reminded that this is the same filmmaker, but so palpably driven by these same questions and these same uncertainties and just continually finding new ways to express them in a,

in a world that made sense. That's the sort of film that would have made a lot of money and, and maybe gotten some, some Oscar nominations and been seen for what it is, which is, I think, by far the best of his late movies, the most serious one, the one that his heart is the deepest in. And as it is, it just kind of weirdly came and went like it was respected and no one really like crapped all over it. But I don't think it has the cachet and the legacy that it should have. It's a perfectly made movie. It transcends the kind of unfortunate casting of such super American actors because Garfield and Driver do feel a bit out of place.

I would say that the performance by Issei Ogata in that film as the Japanese character having these long disquisitions with Andrew Garfield, I will go so far as to say it's my favorite performance in any Scorsese movie. He's just amazing. I do take a lot of the Marvel comments in the last couple of years as a direct reaction to the sort of non-reaction to Silence. The fact that it was so little seen and not treated as an event. And I think any other film like this, even if it was not a box office hit from Scorsese, was treated as an event.

The Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun, both his sort of classical spiritual epics. Well, and it's a statement about where we are as a culture where like the comments about Marvel are more controversial than making a movie about Christ. You know, like the way that Last Temptation of Christ was an actual scandal and that Scorsese actually like feared for his safety over that movie and was sent into depression over it and

now it's more like you made fun of Groot that's the controversy yeah and I think Silence has a chance to be the after hours of the 2030s you know it's the movie that people will go back to and say, we were wrong or we didn't appreciate this. Who will be the Horst of silence? Yeah, it's very hard to say. Chris, number two for you. Color of Money. Straight forward, you had to be a real surgeon to get along. It was all finesse.

Now everything is nine ball because it's fast. Good for TV. Good for a loud break shot. Oh, well, what the hell? Check yourself, Warden Chess. Yeah, so? So this is Scorsese's one for them. It was the real, like, his studio picture

that he was doing to show that he could make big Hollywood movies. It is a real sliding doors moment because Scorsese has so much repeat business with actors. He works with De Niro, obviously a bunch, and DiCaprio a lot in the last 10 years, 15 years. But a real moment where you're like, this guy understands how to make movie star movies in a way that few people do. And the performances of Cruise and Newman especially are two of my favorite in Martin Scorsese movies. It is an anti-sports sports movie that ends right where most sports movies would begin their climax. It has the best sequence he ever filmed, which is the Werewolves of London scene,

and also has my favorite opening scene of any Martin Scorsese movie, which is Paul Newman simultaneously having a conversation about bootleg bourbon that he's trying to sell to a bartender and making fun of John Turturro's character, Julian, who is a cokehead pool player, who is getting his ass whipped by Tom Cruise's Vincent. So there's this like incredible moment where he's having these two conversations. And what that really was about for me was Richard Price, who is sort of like the great, like, I wish they had made three more movies together guy. Price never really like, I think he, Scorsese was even the mix to make Clockers, but there's a couple of other Price

books and scripts out there that I wish Martin Scorsese had made. I wish he had made Lush Life. There's a screenplay for Lush Life. It would have just been, God damn it, why didn't just like Leonardo DiCaprio could have just made Lush Life? I've always thought that that should have been a thing. And so their partnership is really wonderful because the dialogue in this movie is just poetry. It's such an incredible film and i think it's really overlooked it captures winter in the east coast and midwest in a really beautiful way atlantic city in a beautiful way and newman is an absolute absolute monster in this movie he's so good it is also maybe you guys know this as far as quasi revisionist sequels, where does it rank? It's also, it's fucking franchise IP.

It's IP. That's the thing, is that he's obviously able to do that. And it has, frankly, very little in common with The Hustler in terms of its style. Obviously, it's about pool in many ways. But the filmmaking is so different and the energy is so different. And even Paul Newman's character in many ways is so different. It's a great pick. My number two is The King of Comedy.

You know, there's no reason to get mad about it. I'm just trying to ease the tension. Even though this is a kind of strange situation, there are moments of friendship and moments of, I don't know, you call it sharing or whatever. Okay, let's go. I think as I get older, I think I'm most interested in the funny movies that he's made.

Sure. I think a lot of people, you know, Adam, you've mentioned The Age of Innocence and Silence, and these are two of the more serious films that he's made. And they have funny elements. I think, you know, that Andrew Garfield's performance might be considered funny in some ways. Comedy is in league with a movie that you referenced earlier, Chris, which is Network. Just in terms of its ability to predict and perceive our bizarre relationship to fame. Yeah. And the idea that anyone can be famous if they just go to the deepest lengths that they need to. And Rupert Pupkin, I think the many times I watched the movie, I never really understood him to be mentally unstable.

I just perceived him to be way too into the thing that he was into. Now, as I get older, I realize there's a lot wrong with him. There's a lot wrong with Sandra Bernhardt's character. But it's not, it doesn't really make fun of him. We're often in his perspective and people are reacting furiously around him. And Jerry Lewis's character is just absolutely baffled by him and it's an incredible performance by Jerry Lewis.

But Rupert Pupkin never breaks. He never shows us the other side. There's no, like maybe I've gone too far aspect to his performance. And it's just, it's a very, very strange movie and it's a very strange movie

that follows Raging Bull immediately afterwards. And I still find myself discovering new feelings about it as much as it makes me laugh, as much as it makes me think about our obsession with fame and where we want to be versus where we are bound to be. So that's my number two. Time for number ones. I wonder if we have a unanimous decision here. I don't think so. Adam? I would guess Adam is going to subvert that. Adam, what's your number one? In prison, dinner was always a big thing.

We had a pasta course, and then we had a meat or a fish. Paulie did the prep work. He was doing a year for contempt, and he had this wonderful system for doing the garlic. He used a razor, and he used to slice it so thin that it used to liquefy in the pan with just a little oil.

It's a very good system. As if it's going to be anything else it's good fellas yeah it's got to be good fellas that's good so we have this doesn't happen very often we have 20 minutes to talk about good fellas which is very exciting um adam when you think of good fellas now at the age that you're at at this stage of your life does it hold the same power over you that it did the first or tenth time you saw it oh. And it's rare in that regard, because for me, anyway, I wrote a thing for you guys earlier this year about trying to revisit something like Pulp Fiction and what that meant to me as a teenager versus being in my late 30s now. And it's not about disavowing

Pulp Fiction or pretending that you grow out of it, but I very much have had my relationship to that film and that filmmaker change, which is not a put down of either one of them. When I watch Goodfellas, I am the same as I was when I saw it for the first time on home video because with how old I am, that's how I had to experience it. I couldn't see it in the theater because it came out when I was nine years old. I am consistently in awe of it and beyond entertained. It's unturnoffable as a movie. And obviously, as I've gotten older, some of the questions of, you know, it's moral ambivalence and is Henry Hill an interesting protagonist? And is this a movie with really a strong narrative drive?

Like, I've sort of tried to think about it as critically as I can because I'm a critic. But just in terms of being a window onto a world and drawing you into that world and not really hitting you with the gut punch about what that world really is and means and how much you'd want to be out of it once you're in it, I've never seen anything like it. And I think that one of the things that it deserves to be praised for and that good critics talk about with it is its documentary quality. Not that it's shot in a documentary aesthetic, but it's essentially a film of just real world details right down to how you slice garlic with a razor blade. And that's why it holds people like that. Nothing in it feels invented. It all feels observed. It feels observed by someone who knows where to look at every second. It makes it, I think, maybe the most rewatchable movie I've ever seen.

So there's this canard about The Godfather where the character throughout the film is called Don Corleone. But in the Cosa Nostra, he would be known as Don Vito. And that's an inaccuracy that is integrated into the movie. And it has become the way that the real world acts now where they'll use the Don for the last name and not for the first name. Goodfellas feels different from that. And Adam kind of put his finger on the idea of authenticity in the movie, this documentary quality. Does that matter to you in a movie like this? Does that make this movie more effective for you? That's a great question. I'd never really considered whether or not Goodfellas was factually accurate. I, like Adam, think it's the most rewatchable movie i've ever seen

it's the first movie where i think i actually understood how you portray the arc of a character on a film in a film i mean i'd obviously seen movies before goodfellas and great movies but i didn't understand why i was feeling the way I was feeling in the second half of that movie, in the last third of that movie, and watching Henry dissolve. And that's always been the thing that I love so much about it, is the way you go up with him, and you go up to the Copacabana, and you get the Lufthansa heist, and then you come down, and it's Harry Nilsson and the helicopters, and where he ends up just being a schmuck, you know, eating spaghetti with ketchup or whatever.

And yeah, the accuracy of it, I think, I'm sure Henry Hill was a different kind of guy than even the Nick Pelleggi book made him out to be. You know what I mean? Like, I don't know. But what do you think? I should say, by accuracy, I don't mean that this is exactly what happened. What I mean is it's shot and observed and explained to us in such a way where it's like, yeah, that checks out.

Yeah, it feels lived in. It feels real, yeah. That's how a restaurant gets firebombed. That's what happens if you put a corpse in the back of a freezer. That's what a cartoon for like a wig shop would look like. That's how you bury a body. That's how you bury a body.

It's got, I mean, it's an expressionist film. And even how you bury a body. That's how you bury a body. It's got, I mean, it's an expressionist film. And even when you mentioned the body buried thing, using the Shangri-La's walking in the sand and the deep red lighting of the car, I mean, there's an artificiality to that. There's an artificiality to the freeze frames in the beginning and even the competing voiceovers where suddenly Karen gets her own voiceover. I mean, Ebert observed this, you are constantly being reminded that you are watching a movie, but within the world of that movie, you never once sort of go, I don't know if that would happen. It's more like you're watching and going, I can't believe this is happening. And the scenes that he was told maybe to cut, like he famously talked about the scene with his own mother playing

Tommy's mother with the hoof and stopping and having the spaghetti with poor Frank Vincent in the truck. Those are things that maybe another filmmaker with less power or less control at that point in his career might've been forced to lose, but they're what makes the movie. Growing up in New York on Long Island as I did, I think that I understood Goodfellas to be the first important piece of art. Chris, you explained it as understanding a character's arc. I was 10 years old when this movie, no, excuse me, I was eight years old when this movie came out. And around my neighborhood, and I grew up across the street from Nick Pelleggi's nephew. So I had some deep awareness of what was going on with Goodfellas.

I had a kind of play-by-play as a young person. I remember him sitting in my living room and talking to my dad about this movie. My dad's a police officer, so he was also inherently interested in Martin Scorsese and the way he portrays a certain kind of lifestyle. And it created a kind of cult around the movie at a very young age. And I wonder if I sit here today in part because I was kind of jet-streamed into Goodfellas at too young an age. But by the same token, because I got to it so early and because it's probably the movie I've seen the most out of everything, it's probably that and Pulp Fiction, which Adam just mentioned is the sort of one and two of the movies I've seen the most times. I also feel unable to understand it in a lot of ways. It's a bit like trying to understand what you love about your brother,

or you're just, you're so close to a person and you see so much of yourself in the person and you see so much of the good and the bad, and you see so much of what you accept as a natural part of your own life that I don't, I actually feel like I have no insights on the movie. I just, I like to think of it as a great library that you can get lost in different stacks in. And sometimes I'll watch it and really just watch for Karen and Henry because I think it's an amazing relationship movie. It's probably one of the more realistic fights, romantic fights I've ever seen is when she flushes the cocaine down the toilet, which I know sounds weird, but the desperation and like, we're so mad at each other,

but we're also still connected to one another. I was dependent on that. Why did you do that? I had to do it. They were going to find it. Fuck, Karen, they would have never found it. They would have found it. I swear to you, Henry.

I swear to you, Henry, they would have found it. No! Why did you do that? Why? They would have found it. Why did you do that? Why? Why did you do that, Karen? How many times have you woken up to a gun in your face from your wife? Frequently or semi-frequently? Yeah, she gets pretty mad about my driving.

There's that. I think pretty easily the greatest use of music in a movie, the way he uses pop music. There's too many moments to even comprehend from Layla to, and then he kissed me to Sunshine of My Life when the slow motion shot of Jimmy Conway and smoking. I mean, you can't even, to Harry Nilsson. There's so many things in this movie

that you can just kind of like wander off, go down that aisle for a while and then you know you realize oh i've been here this whole day just flipping through this scene yeah it also helped me understand you mentioned that you you never really feel like you're not watching a movie it's constantly reminding you and it starts in the very beginning which is that opening voiceover as far back as i can remember i always wanted to be a gangster just brief and just two sentences. And then we cut immediately into Tony Bennett's Rags to Riches. And it feels like

there's something being constructed around you. It's like something is being built up around you, a whole world, which Adam is identifying. Adam, what else about Goodfellas should we be saying? I mean, it's interesting to look at it as a collection of performances because, I mean, Henry's the lead, but in some ways, Leota's quite self-effacing. I mean, the point of this character is that he's very much a passive observer, right? Until he realizes far too late that he's not just an observer. He's bound up in it and he's culpable morally and legally. But just the balance between those three main characters, people don't, for some reason, people don't clock it as a major De Niro performance

because he's not the whole movie. He's not Jake LaMotta. He's not Travis Bickle. He's not Rupert Pupkin. But he's amazing in Goodfellas. It might be one of his most underrated performances for Scorsese, just the sense of menace and self-preservation that he has. Pesci's obviously just electric,

and he's one of the best illustrations of that principle of comedy in movies of the comedy of excess right like it's funny and then it's not funny and then it's funny again and then it's terrifying and then it's not funny i mean his whole you know are you laughing at me or am i funny to you you could use that in any course on how i don't know the comedy of machismo works on screen. But I also just think, again, that as a piece of construction, you girl standing behind the fence watching him there's like a coming of age novel in that eight seconds of of of footage it's an amazing act of compression everything about it feels epic but everything about it feels fast it's the speed of it that i never get over can you think of a movie that is that packed with detail with less drag? Is there any part of the movie

that drags? Is there any part of the movie that's boring? It just isn't. If you start listing your favorite scenes in Goodfellas, you very quickly wind up just filling out the screenplay. Narrating the film. Yeah, exactly. I was just thinking, Tommy's death, Jimmy's reaction, Karen going to get the furs, the helicopters.

You start and you keep going. The cleaning up after the Lufthansa heist, the Lufthansa heist reaction in the shower. It's like, how many different things are you like, oh, in any other movie, this would just so easily be the best scene in the film. So let me put it to you guys then. What is your favorite scene in the film? Chris, you first. Oh, fuck you. Step it up, Chris. We're live on a podcast. I guess it's when he beats the shit out of that guy across the street from Karen's house. Hey, fucko. The feeling that he's able to turn on that level of violence because he's familiar with it.

And the reaction that she has to it. The reaction that she has to it. And the slow-mo shot of Lorraine Bracco opening the screen door with her pink cardigan. And he hands her the gun. He's like, hide this. Adam, what about you? I think it's the moment when the young Henry is greeted outside the courtroom by all those guys telling him that he took his first pinch like a man. And you're so caught up in

his it's like the exact right and wrong lesson has been learned simultaneously where you know he gets caught and then he does the right thing he doesn't rat on anybody and that's exactly what jimmy tells him but you're like this is a moment of moral deformity you know within the world of the movie maybe if there'd been punishment or consequences, this character would have turned out differently. But instead, he's celebrated for the thing he did that got him arrested, celebrated for the arrest, celebrated for not cooperating with the cops. And there's just something where you sort of see a version of Henry being born. It's not a coincidence that right after that, you cut to the young Leota because it's like now this character is formed. It's just such a great moment. Serious. I'm going to go with Jimmy and Henry meeting at the diner

and the realization that things are going to break bad. Yeah. That Jimmy is going to turn on Henry and that Henry is in a lot of trouble and that he needs to find his way out. And there's that moment when he arrives at the diner and he says, I showed up 15 minutes early and Jimmy was already there waiting for me.

And you immediately understand that this rise to power has consequences. And I'm not sure that when I watched the movie the first few times that I necessarily understood that there was a morality to the movie. And there is a really a morality to all of his movies. The whole Tommy thing, him saying like,

there was nothing we could do. It was real Italian shit or whatever. You know, it was like that whole idea that everywhere he goes, he's always going to be an outsider is really an effective storytelling device because it makes you feel closer to him. But it makes all of his experiences that much more electric because he's like, I'm just not always, I'm never really part of anything. I've also always been charmed by the fact that Scorsese continues to cast

Robert De Niro as an Irish guy. The Irishman is the charmed by the fact that Scorsese continues to cast Robert De Niro as an Irish guy. The Irishman is the second time he has done that. Jimmy Conway is half Irish, which is why he can never be a made man. And Robert De Niro is the least Irish person I've ever seen. And yet there is this bond between the Irish and the Italians, you know, growing up in the urban centers of America that is in inextricable and so we see the way that they they're interwoven throughout all of scorsese's movies and i think that's part of the reason why i grew up with him in my household i think my dad probably realized that too that there was something connected between these kinds of people can i say something really just can i

just point something out about our lists sure nobody had raging bull which is arguably his technically his best made film in some ways. You know, it's in a lot of ways the peak of his. No, I mean, my guilty opinion is that it's it's it's the masterpiece that has never really worked for me. Yeah, I mean, I just I I honestly have a hard time watching it, which is weird with Scorsese movies because it's not like they're all musical comedies until you get to Raging Bull. But I do actually have a hard time watching Raging Bull. Adam, what do you make of Raging Bull in the aftermath of all this? I think Raging Bull. But I do actually have a hard time watching Raging Bull. Adam, what do you make of Raging Bull

in the aftermath of all this? I think Raging Bull is quite amazing. I mean, we all did our kind of things with our list where to some extent you're trying to advocate for stuff beyond the, as Chris put it, beyond the acknowledged masterpieces. Like Raging Bull is the primal scene of a lot of the stuff that people associate with Scorsese and the performance is amazing.

But I would sort of say I've never found it super pleasurable to watch. Like the really hardcore auteur late Scorsese case, like no one's saying Shutter Island or even his Oscar ratified movie The Departed, which I'm on the record actually on Ringer as saying I don't like, which made people very angry at me. I love The Departed. I think that The Departed is something I spend a ton of time with around the time it came out. And when we did rewatchables, I was talking a lot about it. It's a really important movie to me, but I understand its flaws. Guys, we're just about out of time here. I'm really looking forward to talking about The Irishman with both of you because I think it sort of circles the square on a lot of these things.

It is simultaneously thrilling and exciting and funny and also deeply grave and truly about not just morality, but mortality. So stay tuned to The Big Picture, where I'm sure the three of us will circle back soon. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Later, Adam. Now let's go to my conversation with Edward Norton.

Delighted to be joined by Edward Norton. Edward, thank you for doing this. Pleasure. Edward, you've got a movie here. It's your first directorial effort in 19 years. Why 19 years? I didn't intend it to be 19 years, but like John Lennon said,

life is what happens when you're busy making other plans. I meant to do this sooner, but when I was writing it, I got a little blocked. And then when I got blocked on it, I kind of did that classic thing of put it in the drawer. And when something's sitting there, it becomes this albatross. It's like you're scared to crack the drawer because of the, it's like taking the rust off an engine. You have to start the whole thing up all over again. And, um, after some significant, um, uh, friendly goading by, by, by certain friends. And I finally got it back out and got it going, but I, when did you first start writing it? Uh, I really,

I, the book came out in 99 and I had conversations with Jonathan about wanting to do it, but I told him at the time I was just going into making Fight Club and then directing Keeping the Faith. And I knew it was going to be a number of years before I could get to it. So I started working on it in like 2003 or 2004. the research and the writing, the whole idea to transpose the novel from a contemporary novel back to the fifties and enmesh it with this sort of social history of, of New York from that era, all was that exciting, this initial inspiration and wave.

Um, and then I got hung up on it and then I, I really didn't work on it again for years. And then I finally finished up on it. And then I really didn't work on it again for years. And then I finally finished it in like 2012. But then, you know, it's hard to get these movies made. It's very tough to get like original adult dramas done. Someone just described this as a movie movie to me. Yeah, it's like a lot of people have been movie to me. Yeah. It's like,

it's a lot of people have been saying to me, man, they just, they don't make these movies anymore. How did you get it, get it done? And, and,

um, how'd you do it? Uh, it was, it was complex. It, it, I had a great champion and this guy named Toby Emmerich who now runs Warner

brothers, but we, we had actually, he was a screenwriter. He worked at new line when I was making American history X and he wrote a movie in the late nineties that, that, um, we were making around the same time as keeping the faith. And, um, we became friends and, and as he, um, he, he was part of getting the book for me all those years ago. And it's, you know, people talk about like studio

executives it all sounds very hollywoody but but this really was a um i had a real we have we're friends and he's a huge springsteen fan and we we have a lot of commiseration and he really was my champion on this you know sometimes you need someone who's saying finish this it's great and i want to make this movie we've got to get this done and and then he was the person who said you should direct this so he really he he was a rare champion um and he really stuck with it and finally we figured out how to get it done i think this is sort of the black diamond of movie ventures for one man so you wrote it and you directed it and you star in it and the performance requires

a keen level of focus because of the disability of the lead character. Um, how do you do all of that? That seems like the hardest possible thing to take on after not making directing a film for so long. Um, yeah, the, the, it's always tricky. The, the, the wearing two hats is always tricky. My anxiety was less, uh, about doing it myself and more about the impact that, that directing and playing this role was going to have on the experience of the other actors because the, because the character has an affect on other people and you want other

actors to have that kind of ideal experience of getting to interact organically and in the suspension of disbelief that goes on when someone's sort of staying in character and all of it but that just wasn't possible and i was worried about i was worried about i was worried about the deterioration of the quality of the of the acting partnership i would be able to bring by constantly breaking out of it and then also being their director my my my my whole card if you will to play into that was just get the best actors in the world like and i everyone says that but i really went for very specifically tradecraft prose people I have long relationships with, a shorthand with, who are New York stage actors for the most part, and who I knew weren't going to be kind of overly methody or needy and could be facile and nimble and work with me in that capacity. And that really paid off.

Was there ever a time when you were not the director or not the star of the movie when you still wanted to get it made? Or was it always going to be that way? You always have moments when it's a struggle to get something put together. Your brain spins the Rubik's cube and goes, well, what if I didn't direct it and I got so-and-so who's having a hot moment to do it? Or, um, but ultimately, ultimately I think that, you know, um, I was very inspired by there, there are films made by actors that to me are real pole stars of people who have done that thing. Obviously, you know, the great example is Orson Welles making Citizen Kane, right? This audacious thing that

was underappreciated at the time, but was an incredible achievement. But, you know, growing up, Warren Beatty, Reds, was one of the great films of the era. And I knew, you know, that Warren really struggled with that. I asked him lots about that. Everybody told him he was crazy. Everybody told him it was too long. Everybody told him it was too sophisticated and too wordy and all of it. And it's one of the great films of that decade, if not like the last 50 years. And, and, you know, Clint Eastwood making Unforgiven or Kevin Costner making Dances with Wolves.

There are these examples of times I think when actors, they have a, they have a sense of how a piece of material sits within their core understanding in a very special way and they do something special with it. You know what I mean? And I, they bring their understanding of themselves as a performer. The, their,

the story is something they hold deep and, and lots of those are, are tilting at windmills stories when you dig into them. And I, I, I kind of felt you just, you just gotta, you just gotta keep at it.

You know, this just you just gotta you just gotta keep at it you know this you just gotta you just gotta keep beating against that wall until it cracks and um it's frustrating at times but then then it's rewarding when you get it done you mentioned yesterday when you introduced the movie that there was something very appealing about this character and wanting to play this character and see what you could do with it. What was it specifically about Lionel that you connected to? I would say many times I'm drawn to characters because of their exoticness to me. I feel very distant from what they are. And that interests me, seeing if i can stretch across into an understanding and the creation of something is very very distant for me lionel more than most characters i felt a really

strong sense of understanding and affinity in the sense that um i think that the trumpet player that michael k williams plays sort of says what i feel which is you've got a head like mine. It's always boiling over and turning things around. And some people call it a gift, but it's a brain affliction. He's speaking about his life as a musician. I feel that way as an actor. I think that acting is, it's a compulsion. At times it's a compulsion to mimic and to play with words and to hear the sound of words and to hear the tonality of voices. And in a way, acting's a lucky way to sublimate that or to put it into something creative, but Lionel's, Lionel's, um, Lionel's brain, um, and the way that words and sounds can be, um, an addiction and an affliction was something I, I, I really related to. So I, and I also think, um, he's such a paradoxical character in the book. He's very poignant, very lonely, but really funny too.

He's really smart, but then he can't navigate the world without enormous effort because of his affliction. And those kind of, those dualities, those paradoxes always make for kind of rich, rich, you know, soil as an actor. Yeah, he gets to be funny, but not really at his expense in a way. Like the humor is very precise for when his, the moments of humor around whatever is troubling him, you know? Well, there's, I think there's the, there's the unintended humor in a way.

There's the humor of, of there's the humor of the moments where in the exact moment that the classic noir detective would would be smooth he's a disaster yeah and that's you know like trying to trying to hit on a blonde at a bar that's just not going to go well for him um and but but there's also i think it's one of the qualities of jonathan's book i like lionel himself knows that that there's a certain nutty hilarity to some of the things that come out of him and I like that I like the idea you know I think that the the awareness the awareness of himself is a part of what the story is about because he, as he ends up observing to Laura, he he's kind of trapped in his own affliction.

Doesn't really pay attention to much beyond the narrow confines of his problems until what happens in the story opens him up into sort of looking beyond his own troubles and at things that are going on in the wider world and deciding to sort of start to um act you know as opposed to just be a uh you know a passive um have his life be defined by his affliction yeah and i think a switch flips at some point for him you can kind of see it yeah there's and this is it's i always think um the the second level of a story is great if it's there and in our story there's a lot about what's going on in america what's

always been present in america in terms of underneath our rosy narrative about the democratic ideal and all of it we like anywhere else in the world we've got the threat of the allure of autocratic power um the abuse of power on many levels and um and and this and the way that that and racism affected the the way that one of the great cities on earth was built, New York city is, it's a big murky story. And to me like Chinatown and, and the fact that LA was built on stolen water, if you come away with an essential sense of, of something that's good, but you need, you need to be pulled through a story like that primarily by the journey of a

character. And I think that what always made me feel like Lionel could be the vehicle for working through these worlds and these bigger themes is simply that, that in Jonathan's book, what's wonderful is he's this sort of recessive, odd, unique personality who has this mentor, but in some sense, it remains limited, um, in this safe little niche with his mentor. When he loses his mentor, he sets off on that kind of classic hero's journey to grow up and become, become his mentor, you know, become an adult in a way. And I, and I think Lionel is not heroic in the beginning of the movie at all. Um,

but he has to become, he has to become heroic. Uh, and, and that hopefully is, is the, is the emotional journey that, that makes the degree to which you follow the,

the plotting or the bigger themes, um, sort of a bonus, you know, the, the film really kind of clicked for me in a meaningful way when it became clear that it was going to be a pocket history of new york and i like how much you changed about the book and the story and made it much more about these

somewhat hidden figures in history um and didn't necessarily beat us over the head with trying to explain and explore the themes that you're talking about, but made it feel seamless to the Lionel story. I guess I'm interested in two things about that, specifically changing something radical when you have something that you love, and not just the change to the 50s, but even some of the key elements of the story. And then also making a movie about the history of new york in power and how they fit together the short answer is i wouldn't have done it if jonathan lethem wasn't okay with it i was pretty upfront with him fairly early on that i felt that there was an issue with the book being

sent set in contemporary new york because the characters he wrote are, are described in a way that feels very much like people in the fifties. They, they act and speak and have backstories and, and, and it was conscious Jonathan sort of wrote like these, these old world characters. Yeah. And in the book, it's kind of a meta, uh, um, it riffs yeah and in the book it's kind of a meta um it overlay and but film is very literal and you can quickly it could feel ironic you could feel like um almost like is this the blues brothers like you know is this is this a joke are these guys being funny are they

are they you know and and there were lionel was too interesting a character in his own right to get ironic with him i think and jonathan 100 agreed with that so my first instinct was simply to set the story in the 50s um because it would allow lionel to be this afflicted character in an era that's less sensitive no you don't have to explain like well wait everybody knows what tourette's is now why is everybody being so mean to him you know what i mean yeah it let his isolation um and the fact that people call him freak show kind of feel more credible and grounded and then once you did that we sort of had to jettison the modern conventions of the plot. And I had always been interested in what happened to New York in the mid-50s. I think it's the moment at which, if you want to call it,

the crimes on the dark story of how modern New York really got built and made what it is with all of its kind of nefarious, racist infrastructural design. It really happened there and it happened very conscientiously and it really did happen under this sort of Darth Vader like figure who was incredibly antagonistic to the ideal of American democratic, um, values,

you know, and, uh, and I, and I felt that there was resonance, obviously not just to even what we're going on sort of post 2016, but there was just, it's,

I think that the United States, the reason noir cinema rose in the United States is because the United States has always had a narrative that's highly idealistic. But there's always been a shadow underneath that narrative. And it doesn't mean the narrative isn't beautiful. It doesn't mean the ideal isn't beautiful. As Langston Hughes kind of said, we're trying to make that America come true, you know, and in many ways we are. But there's always a shadow and American noir movies from The Big Sleep to Chinatown, whatever, what I think actually makes them more than entertainment, have an actual social relevance, is they tend to be these narratives where people peel back that superficial layer and say, now, wait a minute.

The way the sausage is really getting made or the way people are really behaving is very antagonistic to this other story. And it's worth looking at, you know, and in a funny way, I think noir is patriotic because in America you can challenge the narrative. In other places you can. In America you can say, hey, wait a second. That's not the way things are supposed to go here. And the detective in American cinema is the guy who takes us into that shadow realm, you know? And, um, and I think, uh, I think Jonathan and I shared like a love of that almost like literary tradition.

And, and I think that's why he was pretty lit up by the idea, which was a real gift to me because having the author say, Hey man, take him and make him like a Ray Chandler detective going off into another story. That's, that's a, that he, he has a big mind and a big heart and he kind of wasn't protective of his book. Um, and, and that was, that was a gift to me. Gentrification and autocracy and hoarding power. None of that stuff is new in America, but it's very, it's top of mind, I would say last few years. political or corporate or whatever power tends to also refract through the same people into, you know, this whole me too moment that we're going through, which is a, an incredible kind of a karmic comeuppance in a way or a confrontation with something that's been around for a long,

long time. did you find yourself revising the script and the film to more cleanly reflect those things? Um, there were, there were, there were, there were things that, you know, there were things that it, it, I certainly felt, well, let's underline that a little more, but in, but in truth, um, I had written most of this by 2012, You know, Obama was like, people have asked me, is some of this directly responsive to, you know, Trump's election or anything? And the truth is, it's not.

I really was like, I started trying, I was finished writing it, and I started trying to make it in 2012. I think that a lot of what it is about, the resonance of it, has definitely intensified. There's a couple of moments, though, that are striking. One, obviously, Alec Baldwin appearing in the film. But even some of the speeches. And Alec's character is an amalgam of lots of things. Contemporary from that era, obviously like a figure like Robert Moses, um, who was the, the,

the Imperial dark overlord of New York in that era and actually did many of the things, but, but without running a list, there are, you know, um, there are aspects of, of the sexual power dynamics to get revealed. The, the, the revealed the the the closet racism um all of it that that are pulled from you know there there were four different like people that that provided in a way source inspiration for me for kind of the this figure and i i think that you know there's a reason there's a reason uh that citizen k reason, uh, that Citizen Kane isn't called William Randolph Hearst. It's, it's, it may have been about Hearst in some sense, but it's not either. It's a, it's a distillation of things that, that certain recognizable people represent.

And, and, um, and I, I, I think that when you, you know, when you, when you say you're making the real history of something, you put a burden on yourself, in my opinion, of accuracy. I don't like when people make a biography of someone or a true history of something, and then they take violent liberties that whitewash or skim over or smooth out a complexity. I think if you go ahead and say, Hey, you know, like, um, there was someone named William Mulholland, but in, in Chinatown is gonna be Hollis Mulray. And there's going to be sort of a distillation of things that happen.

We can get at the essential truth of what the crime that LA was built on was all about without getting hung up in history. That's what literature can do. That's what films can do. And I think, um, that's what I i wanted to to do here because you could you know there's less responsibility to to this to specific histories and more you're going at more like essential truths about the culture that we live in you know you mentioned already this movie is in conversation with a lot of movies and i someone pointed out to me that this is takes place in the year of sweet smell success, which I liked a lot too.

There's a lot of vibe that you get your movie shares. Did you guys watch a lot of movies before you did this? Or were you just bringing in like, I know what the classics are and I know how to invoke. funny thing is is for me i was thinking about films that i love from from rain man and uh goodwill hunting and forrest gump yeah for performance no because as much as political noir history films because because to me um you know eric roth who wrote forrest gump said something really wise to me one time when i gave him the script he said you know the narrative device of an afflicted underdog who triumphs and who the audience can root for not despite his affliction but because of his affliction, it gives, it gives the audience the

opportunity to feel enlightened or ennobled because they have chosen, they've chosen to root for the underdog they've commiserated with. They've, they've, they've aligned with and felt empathy for the person who's misunderstood and mistreated and not pity yeah exactly and there's a great there's a real wisdom in that i think that there are many you don't tend to look at um that emotional experience is formulaic but if you look at there's a lot of films i really love that that achieve that um like rain man and forrest gump and you know um a beautiful mind. I think sometimes the struggle of people, of someone to overcome an intense affliction, a really unique affliction,

that's the heightened quality that makes it visceral and exciting because it's extreme. But what it does is we still see ourselves within it, even though we don't have Tourette's. What we do is our heart reaches out because something in us responds to the sense of injustice or isolation or being misunderstood, because everybody has a little bit of that experience. And they don't want to be the person who would mistreat that person. They want to be the person who would give them a place in the world and see their gifts within their affliction.

And so I think Jonathan's book, though we departed from the story of it, the core emotional device of the book we stuck with very closely, which is that from square one, from the first second of the book we stuck with very closely which is that from square one from the first second of the film just like in the book you're inside his head with him as he explains to you i'm gonna set up for you that i have a serious problem you know what i mean and then you're gonna see it so that you're you're you're on his side um but that's also authentic to a bogart movie where you start a movie and you're inside of his head you know that's right and and that's that's why i like i love what jonathan did because it's a convention of the detective story but it flips it on its head in a way and and says right from the get-go like this is not going to be

a gumshoe story like you're used to but when i watch people watch the film, one thing I'm happy about is I think within about the first two minutes, people are on his side. They are interested in how he's going to get through it and sympathetic and i think when once once um uh when you you know if you think about uh forrest gump let's say as a film it's funny because forrest gump gets a bad knock sometimes people sometimes relegate a they say they think it's like more sweet and syrupy than it is when you watch that film it's a very it's a it's got real sardonic darkness. Life is hard on him, yeah. People are very, very mean to him. And there's dark things going on. Jenny has been molested by her father.

And the social history that he moves through is very turbulent. It's not, it's very mature, actually. And what you realize is quite effective about that movie is that you don't, you don't, when you look back on it, you don't remember the plot of it. You, you, you couldn't, you couldn't point to point to point,

narrate all the things that you're taken through. But what you remember is the way that what you, it's kind of like your emotional alignment with him as he, as he moves through these, the, the surging forces around him and and it kind of you you you end up with something deeper just about life in general more than than the plot per se and i always think that's those are the best stories like um if you if you identify if you identify with the character fundamentally,

it's more important than whether you process plot in a way. But I think part of that is the same way that we empathize with Tom Hanks, we also empathize with you. So if we see you in that role and we have a relationship with you too, it's a little easier for us in a way because you can disappear, but you're still you at the same time. Yeah. I mean, you know,

I think that that gets back to like what I was saying about people I think have done very inspiring work. And in some ways they understood what Lionel is, is a kind of character that I, I understand. And I, I hope it, it has a kind of a, that there's a core solidity to him and credibility to his unique strangeness that draws people through.

In the same way that, like, you know, not a lot of people can be the cowboy that Clint Eastwood is in Unforgiven. It's just, that's just like, that's like where we love him. Like an argument. Yeah. And, and, or Warren Beatty and Reds, you know, like that's, that's, you know,

as much as everybody wants to be versatile. And I think sometimes there's those things where everyone is an artist, hopefully finds their own, you know, if you're lucky, you get to find a voicing or find a, a sort of a set of themes and a, and a kind of a,

that you understand that you, and you, you want to express and you, you gotta in a way embrace it and go for it, I guess. Two quick questions. One, 19 years since your last directorial film,

will you continue to direct movies? Um, yeah, I mean, yeah, I've got a few rattling around in my head that if I want to get them done I probably shouldn't wait that long but nothing in the immediate

no I no immediate plan but I literally just turned this in the spring I caught a couple months to decompress and now we're putting it out I'll find my way around to feeling inspired again edward we end every episode of the show by asking filmmakers what's the last great thing

they have seen i don't know if you've been watching much lately um i really dug what uh paul thomas anderson and tom york did with that dance piece yeah anima yeah i mean it's on netflix i don't know if people caught it it's not like anything else you've seen you know it's like it's like i love tom's music obviously he wrote music for this film um and paul is like one of the great directors of our time and somehow they put together this thing that's almost like half buster keaton half like franz kafka i don't even know it's it's really worth checking out i loved it that's really good that's not such a far cry from motherless brooklyn either if you think about it yeah um i've been really digging um the films of this french director

jacques odiard i don't know if you know his heart skips a beat yeah the beat my heart skipped and um un profet like i i think it's a French film, Un Profet, but I really think that's one of the greatest gangster films ever made. I think it's up there with The Godfather and Goodfellas. I mean, it's really that great, and I think a lot of people haven't seen it. And I thought Rust and Bone, his one with Marion Cotillard, was just off the hook great as well.

Those are great recommendations. Edward, thank you for doing this. Absolutely. you