Wesley Strick on working with Scorsese

 

Wesley Strick: I’ve been on movies where I was the only writer right from the beginning to the end. I mean, Cape Fear for instance. I wrote the first script before Scorsese was involved and then we reworked it together. And then, to my amazement, he wanted me in the cutting room to help trim scenes down when he and Thelma Schoonmaker, his editor, were looking for ways to kind of tighten up sequences in the movie. He would fly me to New York to sit in the editing room with him and to say, do we need that exchange, can we get rid of that, can we lose that, which I thought was astounding, this being perhaps the greatest director alive, and he wanted little old me sitting there. But his point of view is that I’m the writer. I actually know, point by point, this movie probably better than he does in the sense that I, sort of, concocted the whole contraption that is this movie. And he was afraid that he might lose a bit of exposition or something important. He just wanted me there to bounce all of this off of. I think thats terrific. 

 

MakingOf: I’m glad you brought that up. I was going to touch on, what was it like working with him? And do you find now that you have directed that you are more sensitive to writers needs when you are on certain projects?

 

(WS): Yeah, absolutely. My experience with Marty was so illuminating because, as I said, he is a director who has final cut. He could do whatever he wants basically. And he can ignore writers at will. He doesn’t need, certainly, to please a writer, or pamper a writer. And I was actually warned before I started working with him on Cape Fear that he never had writers on set, which was true. And people said to me, once he starts shooting, you are gone. So I was sort of resigned to that. But then we had a great experience working together on the script and we got very friendly and I thought, you know, maybe I’ll ask him if I can just hang around for the first week or so. And I kind of worked up the nerve one day when we were sitting around and I said, Marty can I come down to Florida, where we shot the film, and just watch the first week or two. And he kid of got up tight about it. It was the only time I saw him stiffen up. And he said, well I don’t, it’s kind of a closed set when I’m working with De Niro, and I said never mind, forget it, it’s okay. And then he like kept coming back to that subject every few days going, well I don’t know, I’m thinking about it, maybe. And I kept saying, Marty don’t worry about it, it’s no big deal. And literally the night before we started shooting the movie, he came over to me, it was actually his birthday, and it was at a party for him, and he came over and he said, you know, maybe if you come and if I don’t see you, like if you are off to the side, like with the sound mixer and you are wearing head phones you can come. And I said, cool, I’ll do that. And I did. You know, I snuck into the back of the location and I was crouching down, making sure he didn’t see me, that I didn’t distract him. And then later that day he said, is Wesley here? I want to talk to him. And everyone was like kind of surprised he asked me something. And I ended up staying on through the whole shoot. And I have since been told that he now has changed his whole policy and keeps writers on throughout. So I am pleased to say that I kind of changed his whole attitude about having the writer around. But, yeah, you know, it’s interesting because I have worked with new directors, young directors, who are much more up tight about it. They don’t want me there. They would not ever think about inviting me to the editing room. And I think that comes out of insecurity more than anything. But when you are the greatest director in the world, you are not, you know, up tight about saying, here, come sit down and tell me what you think. In fact, Marty, in the middle of shooting Cape Fear I remember one day at lunch he said, would you go over to the cutting room, because Thelma was editing while we were shooting, while Marty was shooting, and he said, will you look at this assembly she has done of this sequence and tell me if you think I’m missing any shots. And I was like, are you serious? I said, sure, I’ll go and look. And I went over and Thelma ran the sequence for me, and it looked perfect to me. And I said, no. He said, do I have to go back, do you think I need a close up of this? I said, absolutely not. And I said, by the way, why are you asking me this? And he said, you’ve written a couple thrillers, I’ve never done a thriller before, and I just want your opinion. 

 

MO: You’ve touched on collaboration and the importance of it in the process. Who do you think in general, I’m sure it differs by project, that writers collaborate the most with. 

 

(WS): Ideally, I think on the best movies, we collaborate with the director. When movies get in trouble, it’s because the writer has to answer to the executive and sometimes the producer. Now, there are a lot of smart executives and producers, but often the notes that they give you are coming from the highest reaches of the studio where they are not really thinking about the script, the story, the movie. They are thinking about, lets say, how the market the movie. How to sell it, in short. And so, often you are getting insane notes that you don’t understand what the hell you are being asked to do. And then you take a breath and you go, oh, I get it. I’ll give you an example. I worked on the Superman movie that never actually got made. It’s was called Superman Lives. Tim Burton was the director. And I had come in and rewritten Batman Returns. I was the on set guy on that movie. So he brought me back for Superman. But Superman was a big budget, huge mega budget movie for its time and it was partly being financed through all of these deals that were being made with like Hasbro and other toy companies. So, you know, I was hearing we need a scene with a big spider, or we need a scene with a robot that looks like a martian. I don’t know. Stuff that had nothing to do with the work Tim and I were doing. And I had realized that they had made all these licensing deals with McDonald’s or something. To help offset the cost of the movie, they had already sold off all of these toy franchises before the script was even done, much less the movie even started shooting. So, thats the worst kind of collaboration, when are being given these kinds of notes that kind of come from studio marketing people.