Scorsese The Fighter -- Despite Failed Films, The Lure Of Drugs, And The Disdain Of Hollywood, The Brilliant Director Is Battling Back

Martin Scorsese is killing time. Dressed in a crisp khaki shirt and pressed blue jeans, with a tiny white bichon frise named Zoe tucked under his arm, he is waiting for the sun to go behind a cloud so the next shot will match the last one. He is near the end of the "Cape Fear" shoot in front of a produce stand just outside Fort Lauderdale, Fla. With him are Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange and Juliette Lewis playing a married couple and their daughter fleeing from a psycho who is stalking them.

While he waits, Scorsese's hand rarely leaves the side pocket of his custom-made jeans, where he works his watch chain like worry beads. He used to have Armani make his jeans, but he felt guilty wearing them. He orders new ones every two years, and since he can't bear to throw away even the most threadbare, his collection goes back 15 years.

The sun finally goes in. Nolte is on his mark in an instant. Lange, immersed in The New York Times, finally arrives at her position, and they walk through the scene.

"Nah, nah, nah - too long!" snaps Scorsese with his trademark machine-gun delivery. "We've gone through four bars of the theme of `Psycho.' Start them closer to the car."

For most directors, this shot would be a throwaway. But for Scorsese, there's no such thing as a throwaway. "The hardest thing to do is to get people into a car - to make it interesting," he explains. "It's all about the philosophy of the shot. Those people were beaten into the ground. They didn't want to talk to each other." So he decided to start wide. "You have to see the family as a unit, broken up and terrified as it is, and then move into Nick's face, pan to Jessica and pan back over. Then actually zoom into Jessica looking out, pan across the kid onto Nick's face, so determined to get his family out of there. That's finally the move I used."

"Cape Fear" is Scorsese's 14th feature. With a budget of approximately $34 million, it is the most expensive picture to date from a director who has always pinched pennies. It is the first fruit of a comfortable six-year deal with Universal Pictures for a director who has never had better than a two-picture deal anywhere.

The film was initiated by Steven Spielberg and is being co-produced by his company, even though no one could be farther from Spielberg's sensibility than Scorsese. And it is a remake of a 1962 studio thriller, from a director who disdains remakes. The project, in other words, is very much a paradox, a bow in the direction of the mainstream from the ultimate outsider.

Shot in CinemaScope, "Cape Fear" is emblematic of Scorsese's love/hate relationship with Hollywood, an ambivalence the industry is more than happy to reciprocate. He is widely considered one of America's most brilliant directors, one of a select circle of contemporaries that includes Stanley Kubrick and Woody Allen, within shouting distance of masters like Akira Kurosawa. His greatest film, "Raging Bull," was selected as the best film of the '80s by an outstanding array of critics. Yet Scorsese has been mocked and reviled in Hollywood.

Last year, he came back from a 10-year drought with "GoodFellas," selected as best film of the year by the New York, Los Angeles and National societies of film critics. Since then, Scorsese has been showered with honorary degrees and has been the subject of books and documentaries too numerous to mention. He has virtually become a national institution. It's a heavy burden to shoulder, and no one is more aware of that than the director himself.

"You have more to lose," says Scorsese, gazing at the view from his apartment window, 75 stories over midtown Manhattan. "Would it be a different risk if every picture I made was about Italian Americans in New York? I don't think so. Because they'd say, `That's all he can do.' So I'm trying to stretch."

His next picture is a good example. "The Age of Innocence" is based on an Edith Wharton novel and set in the very unmean streets of upper-crust New York, circa 1870. It's not the movie of a man content to rest on his laurels.

"Taxi Driver" was nominated for Best Picture in 1976. "For me it was just the beginning of going into an abyss for about two years and coming out of it barely alive," says Scorsese. "It was a few weeks after `Taxi Driver' opened that I started playing with drugs."

"Taxi Driver" did surprisingly well at the box office and won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Perhaps it was the success, perhaps it was the drugs, but Scorsese was setting himself up for his first failure. "New York, New York" was a big-budget homage to the old Hollywood musicals, starring Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli, in which the music overwhelmed the story.

"I will always thank the French for giving me that grand prize to allow me to reveal to myself what a total failure I could be," he says Now. "You get a big head. You think, `Oh, I don't have to make up a script, I can work it out on the soundstage when I'm there.' Sure. A lot of guys work that way. Evidently, I couldn't."

Scorsese was in and out of the hospital with asthma attacks. "The doctor would say, `Take these pills. You're suffering from exhaustion,' " says Robbie Robertson, who was living in the director's home at the time. "But we had places to go, people to see."

It all came to a crashing halt on Labor Day 1978, when Scorsese ended up in the hospital with internal bleeding. A doctor finally conveyed the message that he either alter his life or die. "Our lives were way too rich," Robertson said. "The cholesterol level was unimaginable."

During the same period, De Niro and others tried to persuade Scorsese to do "Raging Bull." He couldn't bring himself to read the script. Eventually, De Niro, while visiting Scorsese in the hospital, urged him one last time. "I said yes," recalls Scorsese. "I finally understood that for me I had found the hook - the self-destructiveness, the destruction of people around you, just for the sake of it. I was Jake La Motta."

As luck would have it, United Artists released "Heaven's Gate" 10 days after "Raging Bull," and the roof fell in. Scorsese's movie bombed.

And Scorsese, already buckling under the commercial failure of "New York, New York," hit another low. "Marty wanted the kind of success that (George) Lucas and (Francis Ford) Coppola had," recalls producer Sandra Weintraub, who worked with Scorsese during his early career. "He was afraid he would always be the critics' darling but the American public would never love him."

He was terrified that he wouldn't be allowed to continue making movies if he didn't make money. "There was nothing in his life besides movies," Weintraub adds. "What would he do?"

Somehow Scorsese got the backing to make "The King of Comedy," which turned out to be another troubled production. Scorsese had always had difficulty controlling his temper on the set. He did not suffer fools kindly and was easily frustrated.

"I'm just an angry guy, anyway. I look out of the window," he gestures to the twinkling lights in the distance, "and I'm angry about the smog. I'm angry about - you name it, I'm angry. You get to a point where the anger in you can explode. You go into little pieces. And then what - you're dead. Finally you realize that it's probably not worth it."

During the editing, Scorsese hit a brick wall. From December 1981 to March 1982, he couldn't work. "I got myself into such a state of anxiety that I just completely crashed," he continues. "I'd come downstairs from the editing room, and I'd see a message from somebody about some problem, and I'd say, `I can't work today. It's impossible.' My friends said, `Marty, the negative is sitting there. The studio is going crazy. You've got to finish the film.' "

This episode taught Scorsese a lesson. "It was up to me. Nobody cared, ultimately, even your closest friends. You're gonna act crazy? You're gonna get in a situation where you can't work? Nobody gives a damn. And you wind up alone. You face yourself anyway. It's Jake La Motta looking in the mirror at the end of `Raging Bull.' "

Scorsese plunged ahead with "The Last Temptation of Christ," a pet project he had been gestating since Barbara Hershey gave him the Nikos Kazantzakis book in 1971. But it made him an object of ridicule in the Hollywood-New York party axis.

"Big people in the business were saying, `Yeah, I know the pictures you make,' " he recalls. "One guy introduced me to someone who was the head of a company. He says, `This guy's gonna make "Last Temptation." ' The guy looked at me and laughed in my face. `Yeah, right. Call me next week.' I mean, I'd come through all those years to get that? It was like a kick in the heart."

Finally, Scorsese set it up at Paramount only to have the studio pull the plug well into preproduction. "I had to make up my mind whether I really wanted to continue making films. There was such negativity. So what do you do? Stay down dead? No. I realized then, you can't let the system crush your spirit. I'm a director, I'm going to try to be a pro and start all over again. I'll make a low-budget picture, `After Hours.' And then went a couple of notches up the ladder with `The Color of Money,' working with major stars and that sort of thing."

Neither "After Hours" nor "Last Temptation," when it was finally made in 1988, was successful, critically or commercially. Scorsese, who had feared never being more than the darling of critics, was in danger of losing that slim solace. He had still to learn how to subject his vision to the requirements of the industry.

Searching for a new film, he turned down "Sea of Love" and "White Palace" from Universal. It wasn't until 1989, with his episode of "New York Stories," generally recognized as the best of the three (Woody Allen and Coppola supplied the others), that he regained a piece of critical ground.

Then in 1990, a decade after his masterpiece, "Raging Bull," and 13 years after his last critically acclaimed hit, "Taxi Driver," "GoodFellas" proved that he could make art and money at the same time. Martin Scorsese had returned from Gethsemane.

When all is said and done, Scorsese has been fortunate. Despite, or rather because of, his failures and struggles, his wanderings on the wild side, he is perhaps the only filmmaker from that enormously hopeful generation of the '70s to have truly fulfilled his promise. Some, like Coppola, have made great movies - "The Godfather," "The Conversation," "Apocalypse Now" - but Scorsese has done more than that. He's made a career. He's survived in a business notorious for burning out talent and has arrived at the '90s at the peak of his creative powers.

The thing that may save Scorsese, finally, from the vertigo of fame is his humility before the shrine of "cinema." As much as he serves as mentor for struggling young directors, as much as he has become a force on the film-preservation scene, as much as he has matured into a disciplined director, he is in many ways still a student. As Barbara Hershey puts it, "His love of film over himself is the great leveler."

"You've gotta be careful," says Scorsese, "because you hear talk: `Well, Marty, people say in Hollywood, your films are really good and you're one of the best around . . .' It's an odd thing. You can't believe it, first of all. I think a lot of the pictures I've made are good. But they're not `The Searchers.' They're not `8 1/2.' `The Red Shoes.' `The Leopard.'

"What I'm saying is I have my own criteria in my head that's private. There's constantly a test. Constantly a final exam every minute of my life. Literally, I have the image of myself always keeping my nose right above the water, the waves always getting to me and about to sink me . . .. I just hope that, you know, `Cape Fear' makes money."

Reprinted from Premiere magazine.