Martin Scorsese on ‘Schindler’s List’: ‘If I did it, it would not have been the hit that it became’
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In anticipation of the imminent Cannes debut of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” 80-year-old American treasure Martin Scorsese sat down with Deadline to talk about the development of the Apple Original Films prestige picture. Sounds like if you’ve read the book, you shouldn’t feel like you know what’s going to happen scene-by-scene on this one. At one point during the screenplay’s development, he asked himself “So, what is it? A police procedural? Who cares! We’ve got fantastic ones on television.”
During the conversation, the Oscar-winner (and 13-time nominee) peeled the curtain back on projects that only exist in another timeline. He and his longtime collaborator Robert De Niro apparently check in with one another, to see if they have a match.
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“He wanted me to do ‘Analyze This’,” Scorsese said, to which he responded, “We already did it. It was ‘Goodfellas’.”
“I talked to him about other projects,” he explained, “and at one point he said, ‘You know the kind of stuff I like to do with you.’ I said, ‘OK.’ That became ‘The Irishman’, and it took nine years.
Scorsese pitched the two-time Oscar-winner “The Departed” and “Gangs of New York,” both of which were met with a “nah.”
But the director had a few “nah”s up his sleeve, too. Francis Ford Coppola floated his name to Paramount back in the 1970s for “The Godfather Part II,” but, as Scorsese put it, “I don’t think I could have made a film on that level at that time in my life, and who I was at that time … Now, I would’ve made something interesting, but [Coppola]’s maturity was already there. I still had this kind of edgy thing, the wild kid running around.”
It has long been known that, in the early 1990s, Scorsese and Steven Spielberg essentially swapped projects with “Schindler’s List” and “Cape Fear.” In the new interview, Scorsese reflected a little bit about why he realized the World War II-set drama wasn’t right for him.
“I did ‘Last Temptation [of Christ]’, I did it a certain way, and ‘Schindler’s List’ was scuttled by its reception. I did the best I could. I went around the world. Any arguments, I took ’em on. I may have been wrong, but I’m not sure you can be wrong with dogma. But we could argue it.
“In the case of ‘Schindler’s List’, the trauma I had gone through was such that I felt to tackle that subject matter… I knew there were Jewish people upset that the writer of ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ was gentile. I heard that there were people who complained about Schindler, that he used the inmates to make money off them. I said, ‘Wait a minute.’ I could… well, not defend him, but argue who he was. I think he was an amazing man, but I didn’t know if I was equipped for it at that time. I didn’t have the knowledge.”
The rebound of “Last Temptation” [a controversial movie that led to boycotts and, in France, religious fundamentalists setting fire to a theater causing several severe injuries] adds some new shading. Originally (and he alludes to this in the new interview) the primary reason he gave was “I’m not Jewish.” And he certainly still recognizes that Spielberg “was the person who really should go through this.” But he added that Spielberg “told me there were only 200 Jews in Phoenix. I couldn’t believe it. Because I come from the Lower East Side, and grew up with the Jewish community.”
When asked how he feels about the finished film, and how it changed his colleague’s life, Scorsese said he “admired the film greatly,” but his version would not have had the same ending.
“I guarantee you, if I did it, it would not have been the hit that it became,” he said. “It may have been good, that I can tell you.”
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