Caffeinated Clint
While being touted and promoted as a thriller, ”Shutter Island” goes far beyond the Hollywood cliches and tests both the actors and director, Martin Scorsese, in converting Dennis Lehane’s bestselling novel, into a Hollywood hit. Moviehole’s Tim Johnson sat down with legendary director Martin Scorsese and stars of the film, Leonardo DiCaprio and Sir Ben Kingsley in midtown Manhattan where Leo describes the shoot as “some of the most hardcore filming experiences I’ve ever had”.
Martin, what was your process going in to filming this movie and deciding on choices you would make?
Martin: Basically it was from reading Laeta Kalogridis’s script, based on Lehane (Dennis Lehane, author)’s novel and from the reaction I had from reading that script as to the world that I imagined as I was reading it and how it really turned out to be, how it was revealed to the many different realities and without giving away too much certainly the levels of the characters. The doctor appears one way, scene four it’s another way, scene ten it’s something else and it’s something that intrigued me a great deal so primarily a saga that Teddy goes through, Leo (Leonardo DiCaprio)’s character and the conflict that’s inherit. In any event, I think I just tried to approach it from my own reaction to reading the material. Then, in the casting of course working with Sir Ben (Kinsley) and I like to say, although it isn’t as simple as this, but I like to say I didn’t quite know, I sort of gave myself to the material along with the actors, I didn’t quite know where we would be at any given time. I think we discovered that as we went along, at least for myself. In other words, it was a process of discovery throughout, and that includes the editing of the picture. That doesn’t mean I knew it was going to be a process of discovery. I had an intonation of that. I didn’t know how much it would be, and it turned out to be a great deal.
Leonardo and Sir Ben, how was your preparation for this role different to others you’ve done?
Leonardo: I felt very much the same way. I was very intrigued by this screenplay, it was very much a throwback to great detective genres of the past… Vertigo (1958, d. Alfred Hitchcock), which he screened for us. So, at first glance it was very much a thriller genre piece with twists and turns that worked on lots of different layers, but like he (Scorsese) was just saying there was this discovery for us while making the movie and this process, once we started to unravel who this man was and his past and what he had been through and the nature of what was going on, on Shutter Island, it took us to places that, there’s no way we couldn’t foreseen. I mean it got darker and darker and more emotionally intense than I think we ever expected. And, that was the real surprise for I think both of us making this movie. At first glance you read something on a page and it can seem one way and you can have your decisions before you wind up on set about what that scene is supposed to mean, but until you’re actually there doing them, there’s really no way to understand it. And that nature it was the best type of movie to do. I think we were all surprised at the end of the day. We felt surprised at the depth of the material, because the film is very much being publicised, and is a thriller in a lot of ways with a surprise ending or terrifying elements to it, and very much a genre piece. But, at the end of the day it is what Martin Scorsese does best, and that is portraying something about humanity and human nature and who we are as people and that’s what makes it stand out and makes it different than just being a normal genre piece, to me anyway. And that’s what I discovered while making the movie.
Ben: I think stemming from Marty, there was, as Leo and I discovered, and I know it’s on the screen; another vital ingredient because the miracle of filmmaking is that actually you make something out of nothing. There’s nothing there at all, and then our collective imaginations create something that fills cinemas, which is, I think extraordinary. It is, in a sense, a love story. Marty directs like a lover, everything is held together by affection. Affection for his craft, affection for his actor, affection for his crew, affection for the material and affection for the great journey of cinema in our lives. And what you perhaps don’t see on the page, and even when we were reading it together in the hotel room, Leo and I and Mark (Ruffalo, Chuck), what did emerge, was an extraordinary level of tenderness between the characters, that actually, even though it’s as Leo pointed out, it looks, if you see the trailer, like a thriller, the glue that holds it together is varying levels of tenderness for your wife, for your child, for your patient, for your friend. And that is an ingredient that you can’t rehearse, you can’t anticipate, it’s always surprising and can only be brought to film by the director. So our great journey was making something out of nothing and along the way discovering tenderness.
Marty, the film fuses many genres, from detective, to thriller etc., do you make these decisions on set, or is it a post production/editing choice?
Martin: No, I think the trappings of the story and the nature of the situation, the doctor and his hospital, the patients, the island, the storm, two detectives, an escaped patient automatically brings to mind a certain genres in my mind, certain genres, certain images that go back several hundred years. And so, I had all this to draw upon, but the issue was ultimately to have them work for our story and our characters and at the same time, refer to other material, other films, other types of films, other genres, in the past. In other words, I think the more you see, the more you see of the past, the more you could draw upon that, and the more you can make the present, and the future. It’s how you process the past, and often times in the picture there are references to certain imagery from certain pictures and certain novels, but is that literal? In other words, on the one hand, it’s a reference to that type of storm, a shot of a mansion at night, in a storm creates certain reactions because we’ve seen, that’s part of our DNA to a certain extent, in film. But what does it mean for our story and how is it, what’s the angle to use, what’s the camera angle, what’s the use of music there that relates to our story that doesn’t at all refer to the cliche of a genre. And so what makes a cliche true? And this is part of the elements of the visuals. Ultimately the use of widescreen too, 2.035:1 aspect radio, if the characters are in a labyrinth or a trap, it’s interesting to film the frame more with those elements of a trap. Interestingly in this picture the trap is internal. We had room in the frame to play with that, along with close ups and the way they are in frame together, or literally the iron walkways, or any of this. And yet at the same time, we’re on an island, where it’s open sky and open ocean. So, where is the claustrophobia, you see? So, all of this, it draws a lot on a kind of very, very long memory of films that I’ve seen and books that I’ve read, and music that I’ve listened to over the years. The music is something else entirely and that was created by combining sections of different modern classical music, whether it’s John Adams, or Penderecki (Krzysztof Penderecki) and Ingrid Marshall and Robbie Robertson was the one who would send me this music, and I’d listen to it and start syncing it up to the picture in different places and then overlapping and combining and creating a tone and mood and atmosphere that I thought would be interesting.
Leonardo, this was a really emotionally complex character and you did a fantastic job of portraying Teddy, how did you go about finding the clarity in each scene?
Leonardo: The clarity and thank you if you thought it was a good performance! The clarity comes from research and specificity as far as creating a portrayal of somebody that is obviously, again it’s very difficult for me to publicise this film because…
Marty: You can’t say anything.
Leonardo: Yeah, the sheer nature of what goes on in the movie, it’s very difficult, but I’ll say in reference to shooting in a mental ward, on an island, obviously mental illness was thematic in this movie. We were surrounded my it every day and we weer around dilapidated walls of an old mental institution, we actually had somebody who was there sort of guiding us through the history of mental illness, the past ways of treating it, the different forms of treatment. So, in doing that there was a tremendous amount of research done on the entrapments of mental illness and the suffering that people had to go through. So, it lead me to watch a lot of different documentaries, a lot of research on mental illness. As far as the emotional depths of the character, like we both keep saying, and not to repeat, but it was like a giant jigsaw puzzle, and the more we started to unearth and peel the back the onion of who this guy was and what happened to him in the past and trying to truly understand the reason why he would be so obsessed with this specific case, and once we start to uncover these things about him, we realize to explain one set of circumstances we needed to go even further with another set of circumstances. And for one thing to be believable we needed to push another storyline even further. And it really wasn’t until we were on set that we discovered that. Because if you read in a screenplay a specific set piece, of a man doing something, of a man dealing with a traumatic incident, there’s only so much that can be written down on paper. When you actually have to go do it and you’re there, physically, we realized we had to push certain boundaries that we didn’t think we needed to and there was a few weeks there that were, I have to say some of the most hardcore filming experiences I’ve ever had and you know, I think he (Martin Scorsese) will say the same, it was like reliving trauma in a way. It was pretty intense. And I don’t say that stuff very often, because it always seems superficial when you’re talking about it in reference to moviemaking, because it is an art form. But, it really went to places, in unearthing who this man was, that I didn’t think it would get to.
What did you do to extract the best performance out of Leonardo?
Martin: Again, I think we had read the script and we worked in rehearsal in the hotel, but I think it all started, it hit me, the first day of rehearsal, in the office, and I think you said this Ben, when we all arrived in the office and the two marshals came to speak to you. And suddenly it all changed. I’m not quite sure why and how, but normally that does anyway, I mean you have your characters, your actors are all ready and they’re in the set, and they’re in the actual place, and they have this combination of location and set. But there was something about the behaviour. And it started to, I remember that scene for quite a long time, two or three days, I forget. There was certain levels we wanted to reach, certain light touches, or references with a glance, or the use of a pipe in a certain way, the amount of smoke coming out of a pipe even, I don’t know. Whether Ben moved around the desk as he said a certain line, or not. Their behaviour, that’s why I screened Laura (1944, d. Otto Preminger) for everyone. Just to get a reference to the nature of the detective, and the detectives body language let’s say, in Laura, 1944 I think it was as Dana Andrews’ character. And he’s world-weary having gone through the war, when he goes and he asks, and the characters are talking to him, he doesn’t look at anybody. And so that was an element for Leo and Mark, but for Ben it was something else entirely. From looking at the pictures on the wall, the way their faces are in the frame together, with Leo’s hat and Ben’s profile, this is something discovered on the set. And as we start to get through that scene, and also the set dressing, suddenly when you started dressing the set, there’s something else entirely here. And I began to realize we were getting in deeper. It just became something, where I was excited about getting deeper with the story, but at the same time, a slight, although it only really happened once the weather started to treat us badly, but a slight panic as to would we hit all the levels, would we have the time to do it. And for the first six weeks were pretty good, we were indoors and able to explore all these different things. By the time we got outdoors, add to the emotional levels that they had to get to, that Leo had to get to, add to that, well this happens in film. But, when you see rain and wind hitting the actors to the level that it’s almost impossible for them to move in the frame, and this was a brutalizing experience for them, for everybody. But, this is the way films are made.
Marty, you speak of how you were inspired by producer Val Lewton for this film, or perhaps Italian director Mario Bava in your use of color?
Martin: Well, there’s always that Mario Bava, the sort of singularity, the use of very powerful colors, and he was a wonderful cinematographer and I always love the thriller/horror films that he made in the late fifties, early sixties and keep referring to them, Black Sunday and trilogy Black Sabbath they call it, some remarkable stuff. And there’s no doubt about that. And Bava’s use of less being more, the use of a little bit of mist in a way, a twisted branch, that sort of thing. That’s something that I use for inspiration in a way. But, the Lewton films are really the key films, there’s no way, this is not on that level, it’s a different kind of picture, but there’s no doubt, particularly in certain scenes in the mansion, Val Lewton’s films that had terribly titles we all know, Cat People and ‘I Walked With The Zombie’, those two being directed by Jacques Tourneur are beautiful works of poetry and I always talk about these films, they never, ‘Out of the Past’ is the other one, that’s not a Val Lewton film, but is directed by Tourneur, and that I showed you (Leonardo and Ben), ‘Out of the Past’, by Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, all three films to me, they are very modest, but they have to do with memory and time and I don’t know, when I look at these films, I look at them repeatedly and I don’t know what’s the beginning, middle or the end. I can’t tell you what scene it is. It’s like a piece of music, I keep listening to, or looking at it, and it’s kind of new every time. And so this has a lot to do with, certainly the pictorialism Tourneur, and I mean ‘I Walked With The Zombies’ is really Jane Eyre and the Indies we all know is a terrible title, ‘Cat People’ is a beautiful film, you could take it on the supernatural level, or you could take it on the level of suggestion, it’s all about suggestion. And of course, ‘Out of the Past’ is the web, the net that’s cast for this poor guy who does say at one point, ‘build my gallows high, baby’. He knows he’s doomed from the beginning, and you watch Mitchum go through it. And I never know, is it Kirk Douglas’s character, is it really Jane Greer who is doing all this? I never quite know, he seems to be doing it to himself in a way. But it’s about memory. And so is this, to a certain extent, the memory. And these were inspirations you know. I can’t reach that level of Tourneur, he was remarkable.
Did any of you come across challenges presenting characters where the perception to the audience fluctuates during the film, while at the same time maintaining consistency?
Martin: One of the key elements here is that if you care about the person. And I think what Sir Ben said is really right, in the sense that one of the things that I was so surprised to discover, ultimately I knew it, but I couldn’t verbalize it, was the love, or the caring, the tenderness that he has for the patients. And they all do. And the relationship between the patient and the doctor. And at times, stern. At times, you don’t know what he’s thinking, where he’s going with it. Why he’s saying certain things, why he’s behaving a certain way, is he really telling the truth or not? We don’t know. But, ultimately underlying all of this, is this very strong relationship of believing in this therapy, believing in it. And we all know from James Gilligan, the doctor, he does believe in, for example a talk therapy, and he talked about different ways, he’s a doctor who has been working this way for the past forty years or so, or maybe forty five years. He was our technical advisor. He talked of one person, a convicted killer who was insane, who behaved like an animal ultimately, yet one day he saw something, and he said, when you could talk to him it was very interesting, it took twenty five years, but the person’s not out of jail of course, but there’s humanity there. There’s still a human being there, there’s a heart there, somewhere. Other people would say, ‘drug them!’, ‘do this’, ‘give them lobotomies’, he just kept working on it. That’s one. Not all are that successful, there’s no doubt. And so this was very interesting to me. He could be going through anything he wants, but here’s the person, he’s the one who cares about it, who guides it. And if you look at the film, if you look at it a few times, you’ll see there’s certain elements when Chuck and Teddy are out in the woods, and on the cliff, what are the doctors doing, in terms of the story? Why does Chuck leave? All of these elements come together in terms of everyone caring for him and trying to pull him through. And even understanding his decisions at the end. Even understanding it, sadly.
Leonardo: Very simply put, it was a very difficult character to take on in that respect. Obviously this film depends on you not knowing where you’re at any given situation. So, with that in mind, every day on set was a challenge for me, really. And how I interacted, how much I led on as far as what Teddy was really going through. But a lot it started to become a lot more natural when I got to work over a long period of time, with the other actors, and in that it became it’s own truth in a lot of ways. As much as I invested in going in to this process with a predetermined thought of exactly how this guy would be, and exactly how he would react to the people around him, once these scenarios started to take place, and once I got to be in a room with these other characters, there was a certain realism, and a certain understanding that we all had about one another, that I could never have foreseen.
Ben: When you have a great working environment, provided by Marty, one of the best things, working under his guidance was that whatever you offer the camera, he will see every single scrap that you offer. He doesn’t miss anything. The slightest movement of your eyebrow, an elbow, and inflection of a certain word, everything is noticed, everything is gathered. And a great deal of what you are striving to do will be in the picture, if not indeed all of it. Because that environment is so trusting, and because therefore you’re released, nothing needs to be demonstrated, nothing needs, ‘are you watching?’ none of that needs to be stated. It therefore forces an accuracy and an economy, you don’t sentimentalize your performance, you don’t embellish your performance. The environment forces you to be utterly dependent, between action and cut because the environment is perfect, on your fellow actor. For us I think, for our relationship, Leo and myself, life and art joined because my relationship with Leo as an actor became my relationship as a healer to that which needs healing. In other words, I had to watch him with my eyeballs peeled, for any single clue in terms of his journey, psychologically. In turn, Teddy had to watch the doctor with his eyes peeled, for any clue that I might be on to something. So as an acting exercise, it’s absolutely thrilling. The focus we had to bring to each other, echoed in life, echoed in art. When you get that parallels it’s really thrilling and it’s full of surprises, but it all has a logic.
Thanks so much gentlemen.
Martin: Thank you.
