Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert by Roger Ebert Page A

speed, it comes out half as fast ...
    EBERT: Which is what everyone gets backwards about slow motion.
    SCORSESE: Right. And in the scenes of the killing, the slow motion and De Niro's arms ... we wanted him to look almost like a monster, a robot, King Kong coming to save Fay Wray. Another thing: All of the closeups of De Niro where he isn't talking were shot forty-eight frames to the second-to draw out and exaggerate his reactions. What an actor, to look so great up against a technique like that! I shot all those shots myself, to see for myself what kind of reaction we were getting.
    EBERT: The whole movie's very stylized, expressionistic ... you fragment scenes into very striking details, you control your colors to get a certain feel, there's the garish lighting ...
    ScoRSESE: And then I read that I'm a realist, a naturalist! Somebody compared the picture to Shoeshine! Really! I'm not interested in a realistic look-not at all, not ever. Every film should look the way I feel.
    EBERT: I read that De Niro really drove a cab to prepare for this role.
    ScoRSESE: Yeah. I drove with him several nights. He got a strange feeling when he was hacking. He was totally anonymous. People would say anything, do anything in the backseat-it was like he didn't exist. Finally a guy gets in, a former actor, who recognizes his name on the license. "Jesus," he says, "last year you won the Oscar and now you're driving a cab again." De Niro said he was only doing research. "Yeah, Bobby," says the actor. "I know. I been there, too."
    After Mean Streets was released, I wrote a review saying that Scorsese had a chance to become the American Fellini in ten years or so. The next time we met after the review appeared, Marty looked serious and concerned: "Do you really think it's going to take ten years?"

     

INTRODUCTION
    think I've interviewed Robert Altman more often than anybody else in the movie business. That has something to do with his method of making a movie, which is to assemble large groups of people and set them all in motion at once. There are always visitors on the set. Altman presides as an impresario or host. He likes to introduce people. I wonder if he dislikes being alone. Kathryn, his wife of forty years, is always somewhere nearby, a coconspirator.
    Once we both found ourselves at a film festival in Iowa City that was held only once. We both thought Pauline Kael was going to be there, which was why we'd agreed to come. Pauline later said she'd never been invited. Bob and I sat on a desk in a classroom and discussed the delicately moody Thieves Like Us, one of his most neglected films. Other times, I visited the sets of Health, A Wedding, and Gosford Park, and watched him rehearse the Lyric Opera adaptation of A Wedding years later.
    He marched to his own drummer. After the Sundance premiere of his Gingerbread Man, he sat at a reception for a thousand people in Salt Lake City, contentedly smoking a joint. In his screening room at his original Lions Gate in Westwood, he screened rough cuts for just about anyone who wanted to come. Twice Chaz and I joined the Altmans for dinner in Chicago with mayor Richard M. and Maggie Daley; the mayor likes movies and can talk about them, and the two men had an easy rapport. Entering the restaurant on a winter night after he'd wrapped The Company, Robert swept in with him the snowy air and the aroma of marijuana. Daley looked at me and lifted an eyebrow not more than an eighth of an inch, and smiled so slyly you had to be looking for it.
    Altman told me once he didn't mind a bad review, "because without them, what does a good review mean?" He added that in my case all of my negative reviews of his work had been mistaken.

    JUNE 12, 1977
    (CANNES, IFIRAN(CIE-Yes, it was very pleasant. We sat on the stern of Robert Altman's rented yacht in the Cannes harbor, and looked across at the city and the flags and the hills. There was a scotch and soda with lots of ice, and an efficient young man dressed all in