Salomon 101 was filled to the brim during Saturday's Ivy Film Festival "Masterclass," when it welcomed acclaimed film director Martin Scorsese. The capacity audience sat rapt for two hours as Scorsese spoke about his relationships with individual actors and music while addressing the centrality of improvisation and personality in his movies.
Scorsese, who has repeatedly directed actors Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio and Harvey Keitel in his films, emphasized the value of an actor's ability to improvise during filming. The director said, for example, that De Niro and Keitel fully improvised a scene of "Mean Streets," which, along with several other clips from films he directed, were screened for the audience.
Scorsese, who forgot to bring his notes to the set that day, said the two actors "just go off on jazz solos, the both of them," comparing Keitel's straight man and DeNiro's libertine to the comedy duo Abbott and Costello.
The Academy Award-winning director said his first documentary, "Italianamerican," was a chance to let a film "relinquish to the power of personalities." The picture featured his parents interacting in their own home as "directors" of their own lives, Scorsese said.
Documentaries "give me a sense of freedom, in terms of breaking away from narrative structure," Scorsese said, referring to the "conventional dramaturgy that seems to be the beginning, middle, end." Scorsese called his parents' interaction in the work a "constant duet, overlapping each other."
Scorsese said that music chosen for a film must closely resonate with it in order to be effective.
"Music I heard around me was the soundtrack for the film, and (the characters) had to tune into that music," he said.
A scene from "Goodfellas" set to Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love" was cued: Robert De Niro's character, in a bar, glares in the direction of the camera, not long after pulling off what Scorsese called "the greatest heist in history."
"That look in his eye - I heard that guitar in my head. ... We synced it to that look in his eye and we just left it in completely."
Scorsese, who said his method was to "film what you feel," credited his actors for their commitments to connecting with the psyches of their characters.
"To deal with darker characters and deal with darker aspects of being a human being - it's a big risk," Scorsese said. "With (De Niro, Keitel and DiCaprio) - they were willing to take the risk."
Scorsese said the strength of some of his actors lay in their abilities to give the viewer "empathy to understand - or at least to identify (with) the dispossessed, the disaffected, the ones who are outcasts."
Scorsese praised De Niro, whose Travis Bickle in "Taxi Driver" aims to assassinate a presidential candidate, and DiCaprio, for his portrayal of obsessive-compulsive billionaire Howard Hughes in "The Aviator."
Both characters' obsessions with cleanliness resonated with Scorsese.
"It goes back to me being very Catholic - the Mass itself, the step-by-step ritual of the Mass itself - that invoke an open call to God," Scorsese said. "It's a way of controlling, making sure you do the ritual right so you are heard."
Scorsese, who praised the revolutionary technique of French and Italian New Wave directors, said he was unsure he would ever realize his ultimate cinematic vision.
"There's got to be ... an urge to make the picture to satisfy a kind of obsessive desire that is never realized," Scorsese said. "That comes out of a sense of possession of old cinema and the love of old cinema."
As to what cinema is, old or new, even the director himself seemed unsure.
"You're trying to express yourself with film, but on the other hand, what is film? It's a box with celluloid on a reel," Scorsese said, explaining that a film becomes art only when it's experienced by an audience.
Scorsese seemed relaxed in front of the audience, using humor in his back-and-forth dialogue with John Lesher, president of Paramount Film Group and the event's moderator.
Amanda Marquit '09 said after the event that despite not being a "film connoisseur," she "learned about how much detail goes into reading certain scenes and the integration of soundtrack." Marquit said Scorsese was "humorous" and "eloquent."
Scorsese, who said he didn't know if he had the ability to communicate with an audience like DeNiro or Keitel, seemed to make an impression on the several hundred students and community members, who gave him two standing ovations.
