Martin Scorsese shares details about shooting for the television series Vinyl and why present-day New York is alien to him
Mick Jagger came to you with the original kernel of the idea that became Vinyl two decades ago. How does it feel to have adapted it for televisionIJ
I’ll tell you — it’s been a long time since we first discussed the idea. We would get together every few years, and every time we talked it would get bigger. So it kept changing shape and form. It went from a movie, to an epic movie, to a series. To finally see it happening is fulfilling for both of us.
At what point, and why, did it become clear that it needed to be a television series instead of a filmIJ
I don’t remember at what point it happened, but at a certain point we realised that the scope of the story was so big that we needed to tell it in the series form. There were so many paths to follow and they were all finally inter-connected—they were all part of the greater story.
You and Terry Winter have worked together several times now – on Boardwalk Empire, The Wolf of Wall Street, and now Vinyl. What is it about his scripts and your direction that work so well togetherIJ
Good writers are in short supply. Really. There aren’t that many of them, and Terry is absolutely one of them. He’s extremely talented, of course, but he’s also tireless. He’s always generating ideas for new areas of interest, new projects, and he’s endlessly inventive. With a script in production, if there’s a problem, he starts right away in generating possible solutions and doesn’t stop until he gets it right. He’s always surprising and has that great gift of keeping the audience on the edge of their seats.
All three of those stories are also (if the pilot of Vinyl is anything to go by) about empires falling. What is it about that epic storyline that appeals to you, and also makes it such a good subject for dramaIJ
I’ve always been drawn to it, I suppose, because I saw it happening in real time. In other words, you would see guys like the ones in Goodfellas and Casino, driving the Cadillacs and wearing the thousand dollar suits and the shoes, with the manicures and the haircuts, and you could see the downfall already—the story was being written before your eyes.
Sometimes it would break your heart; sometimes it would send a chill down your spine. Maybe that’s why I love The leopard, both the lampedusa novel and the Visconti film, because it’s a story of someone who recognises that his entire way of life, the world as he knows it, is coming to an end. He understands that he has no choice but to make way for it. Because everything ends. Rome lasted for centuries, much longer than this country has existed, and that ended. It’s the drama of knowing the world around you, the world that’s part of you, which, therefore, seems like reality, like everything, and the astonishment and confusion you feel when you see it dissolving before your eyes.
Sometimes it happens on a very small scale, within your family, your house and at times it’s a whole way of life. And sometimes it’s a business, a way of doing things, as in Vinyl.
What are the major differences between directing a film for theatrical release and directing a pilot for televisionIJ
You have to spend a certain amount of time setting things up —the situation, the central characters — setting the tone, establishing certain recurrent motifs. Other than that, it’s just getting it done. It’s the same.
New York is your hometown, and one you’ve portrayed on screen many times. What are your personal memories of living in New York in the early 1970sIJ
I was out in lA for most of the 70s, but of course I was in New York a lot, too. And for me, that was, and actually still is, New York: a city in the process of falling apart. The garbage strikes, the subway trains that didn’t run on time, the crime—to me, that was New York. Along with the amazing creativity: the avant-garde and independent film scenes, the extraordinary things that were happening in painting and visual art, in music, in theatre, and obviously in rock ‘n’ roll—that’s what our series is about. Great things don’t happen in sedate environment filled with comfortable people. It was a great time to be making movies, music, operas, plays, you name it.
The process of writing and then casting and then shooting brought it all back. The New York of today is, to me, like an alien city.
The 1970s are often portrayed in the media as an era of squalid degradation in the city, and though it looks gritty in the pilot, it also looks glamorous; was that a difficult balance to strikeIJ
But that was New York. You had the elite going to Elaine’s and the Colony for lunch, and you had the punk crowd at CBGB’s, and the artists’ loft scene in Soho, and you had the old Times Square, and you had many parts of the city that you stayed away from. And somehow they all, from time to time, intersected. The contrasts between all those different worlds, their intersection, the creative ferment, the tensions, the violence — all of that is what makes New York such a great backdrop for drama.
The pilot is beautiful, and epic in scale, particularly the final scenes of the building’s collapse. What were the particular challenges of shooting this two-hour piece of filmIJ
Apart from the usual challenges of making anything, it’s a matter of striking a balance between setting up an entire series and making an individual movie. That’s the challenge. I’m very happy with it. I think we struck that balance.
Vinyl airs every Wednesday at 10 PM on Star World Premiere HD!