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(SHIP HORN BLARING)

(RETCHING)

(PEOPLE CHATTERING)

Would you like some tea? Would you like some rum?

Madam prefers when you smile.

NARRATOR: (AS KAZAN) What kind of a person

must a film director train himself to be?

A white hunter,

leading a safari into dangerous and unknown territory.

It's not deserted. They're there.

They know you're here.

NARRATOR: (AS KAZAN) A psychoanalyst who keeps a patient functioning

despite intolerable tensions and stresses.

I was born here...

NARRATOR: (AS KAZAN) A hypnotist...

...brought me to America 25 years ago when we married.

NARRATOR: (AS KAZAN) ...who works with the unconscious

to achieve his ends.

He has to have the cunning of a traitor in a Baghdad bazaar.

He must have the kindness of an old-fashioned mother who forgives all,

the sternness of her husband, who forgives nothing.

Why did you push that ice down?

NARRATOR: (AS KAZAN) The elusiveness of a jewel thief.

The blarney of a PR man.

...respect, which people are...

Respect?

Did you ever hear of anyone buying any product,

beer, hair rinse, tissue, because they respect it?

You've got to be loved, man.

Loved!

NARRATOR: (AS KAZAN) Very thick skin, very sensitive soul,

simultaneously.

MARTIN SCORSESE: What kind of a person must a film director be?

I wonder.

Maybe it was Elia Kazan who started me asking this question myself.

Actually, it was his pictures,

the ones I saw for the first time back in the 1950s,

the ones I grew up with, and that grew up with me.

I remember going to the Loew's Commodore.

It's now gone, like most of the old theaters are.

The Commodore was where I saw On the Waterfront

when it opened in 1954.

It was the faces, the bodies, and the way they moved.

The voices and the way they sounded.

They were like the people I saw every day...

...and poorer now than when I started.

SCORSESE: ...at the butcher's,

or sitting out in the street at night to cool off,

and church.

I saw the same mixture of toughness and tenderness.

It was as if the world that I came from,

the world that I knew, mattered.

As if the people I knew mattered,

whatever their flaws were.

Hiya, kid.

I was just gonna feed them.

SCORSESE: The director's name was interesting to me,

and I remember I wasn't quite sure how to pronounce it.

The very simple essence of it is

it's not fake, it's not pretense.

If you can stir up the real emotion,

whether of anger, or love, or desire,

or any one of the other powerful emotions that make our drama,

if you can stir it up and use it,

you'll have something that's unique, or unusual.

And that's what drama is.

SCORSESE: Stir up emotions in the actors and in the audience.

There was another movie made not long after that by the same director.

In fact, about a year later.

Should have gone right on in there and talked to her.

SCORSESE: This time it was in color.

It was a story of a father and two sons, two brothers.

It was called East of Eden,

and it certainly stirred up real emotions in me,

emotions that I wasn't really aware

that I had or even what they were.

And I saw it many times.

In fact, I followed the picture, I stalked it,

all over the city, from one theater to another.

He's not watching us.

I feel as if he can still see us.

SCORSESE: And I always saw it alone.

I love you, Aron.

Really, I do. Really.

(LAUGHING)

SCORSESE: And in a way, what I'm telling you now

isn't really about film history,

I suppose it's about giving and receiving.

When I began to make my own pictures,

I would always ask myself when I was doing a scene,

"Does this have the honesty,

"the eye for detail,

"the loving power of what I experienced in Elia Kazan's pictures?"

I guess every person who starts to make movies

has the same experience.

The current will carry us across.

Slowly.

SCORSESE: There's a moment when you see work that sparks something in you,

that stays with you

and becomes the standard you set for yourself, almost unconsciously.

What's that song?

Oh, it's just some old hymn.

SCORSESE: And that's what Kazan's work meant to me.

And to a certain extent it still does.

(SINGING) And he tells me I am his own

And the joy we share as we tarry there

None other has ever known

SCORSESE: But work like that doesn't come out of thin air.

You have to have lived it.

NARRATOR: (AS KAZAN) "Why are you mad?"

My wife asks me that, seems like every morning.

"I'm not mad," I say.

"It's just my face."

I no longer hide it.

It's out in the open.

My perennial scowl.

Which is why my smile, when it does appear, is so dazzling.

The sheer surprise of it.

That's supposed to be a joke.

SCORSESE: I look at these pictures

and I can see that Elia Kazan's smile really was dazzling.

And he knew it.

Did he use it as a weapon? A defense?

And if a defense, defense against what?

Against disappointment and failure?

Against fame and success and all the distractions?

Against small talk, which he hated?

Against shame and public scourging?

Against rejection.

Against all kinds of adversity.

MAN: They are bringing him, my friend. They are bringing your boy.

See? A fine young man.

(SOLDIER SHOUTING ORDERS)

Now, smile.

Smile.

I am very grateful to you.

SCORSESE: He had a name for this defense.

The Anatolian Smile.

He learned it from the men in his family,

who endured humiliation on a daily basis in the old country.

I like all the Greek subject people.

We all know that.

KAZAN: Anatolian Greeks were Greeks who were afraid all the time

that they might step out of line, and that was my family.

MAN 1: He doesn't know his place.

Well, it's not our affair.

They're Armenians, we're Greeks.

Their necks are not our necks.

SCORSESE: In fact, The Anatolian Smile was the original title

for the film he would eventually make

about his uncle, called America, America.

That film was Kazan's favorite.

And the picture is very special to me because it's "the" story.

The passage from the old world to the new world.

The story of his family, and really, actually, of my family, too.

That film tells more about me than I care to say.

INTERVIEWER: Well, what does it tell about you?

"Go fuck yourself."

(LAUGHING)

Well, I'd say that I essentially have the soul of an immigrant.

I'm essentially an outsider.

SCORSESE: "The soul of an immigrant."

It's a certain way of looking at the world,

staying outside, being always on your guard,

and it was handed down from the old world to the next generation.

NARRATOR: (AS KAZAN) Father communicated to me by example.

Mind your own business.

Don't start up arguments.

Walk away from a fight.

Because out in the world, Father couldn't afford anger.

And, of course, it had to come out somewhere.

And it did, at home.

Cal, listen to me.

A man has a choice. That's where he's different from an animal.

You don't listen. You'll never remember.

SCORSESE: Fear, resentment, trusting nobody,

out in the world and back at home.

As if that's the way it's supposed to be.

Kazan understood the way that can feel when you're growing up.

There is nothing in this world

that I wouldn't do for you, boy.

There's nothing I wouldn't do if you do right.

If you do right, Bud.

SCORSESE: He knew the weight you can carry through your life.

The way it could feel like a birthright.

(SNIFFLING)

Sometimes, though, if things go a certain way for you,

you could find a new home.

Make a new home for yourself.

And eventually, Kazan found his new home in movies,

making movies.

KAZAN: The thing I wanted to be was a film director.

I used to study, I used to go to films all the time.

I saw all the great Russian films.

Dovzhenko, particularly, had a big influence on me.

And I watched them all and I said,

"God, that's it. That's life, doing that."

SCORSESE: For a young man with the soul of an immigrant in 1932,

Hollywood would have seemed almost impossible.

So Kazan took a roundabout way into movies.

KAZAN: How do you get a start as a film director in 1932?

There's no such way to do it.

Now you can get into TV

and one thing and another, but then, nothing.

So I got a chance to go with the Group Theater and become an actor.

SCORSESE: The Group Theater.

These were the people who changed American theater

and acting all over the world.

Kazan worked his way up the ladder from apprentice to actor.

And for a while he was a name on stage and briefly on screen.

Remember me? This is Googi under these duds.

NARRATOR: (AS KAZAN) Someone wrote that I was supercharged.

Thank you very much, but my opinion is less flattering.

I had the energy of the era...

Tell you the truth, Danny, I've been sightseeing.

NARRATOR: (AS KAZAN) ...and the intensity of my neuroses.

Then I took a little trip up the Hudson, too.

There's a beautiful view up there from a certain window,

and I ought to know because I looked at it for 36 months.

NARRATOR: (AS KAZAN) I was, for a few years, a cult favorite.

I was playing for peanuts.

NARRATOR: (AS KAZAN) I spoke for the times.

SCORSESE: He moved on from acting to directing,

and he directed the first productions of two great American plays.

On both Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire,

Kazan contributed so much to their unusual staging

and the way they blended reality and memory.

He went beyond what was expected of a theater director

and quickly became the most sought-after man on Broadway.

I imagine it must have been dizzying

to be Elia Kazan in those days.

He was on top of the world.

But the more successful he was, the more dissatisfied.

NARRATOR: (AS KAZAN) I put myself in the author's shoes.

I was many men, but none of them was myself.

SCORSESE: When 20th Century Fox brought him out to Hollywood,

he had everything laid out for him.

But he was frustrated by it all.

KAZAN: I was essentially a stage director.

What I did was that I staged the scenes, wherever they took place,

mostly in a room, the way I would on stage.

Neeley, sometimes I think you make these holes on purpose.

SCORSESE: But I think he was quietly developing his own voice,

whether he knew it or not.

You know what I read in a magazine once?

What was it, Francie?

Well, it said that walking was a good thing.

It said people would look and feel a lot better if they did more of it.

"Walking puts rose petals in your cheeks," it said.

SCORSESE: That first picture, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,

from the famous novel by Betty Smith,

is a beautifully made period piece

produced in Fox's best house style.

But it's what Kazan found with his actors that brings it alive.

It ain't right. If you got something to say, just say it right out.

SCORSESE: Peggy Ann Garner, for instance.

NARRATOR: (AS KAZAN) You can't get it out of them unless it's in them.

It's difficult, if not impossible,

to get away with anything false before the camera.

Because it reveals what's truly happening...

KATIE: I should have had time.

NARRATOR: (AS KAZAN) ...if anything,

if nothing.

I don't know how I could do any different.

What time is it?

SCORSESE: Many child actors from the period seem formally controlled.

But you don't feel that with Peggy Ann Garner.

She's a very good actress, but she also has the freedom of a child,

the awareness of a child, and the vulnerability.

These are things that can't be faked.

I'd like my father's shaving cup. That one, "Nolan."

Oh, you're the little girl.

Yes, I'll clean it up for you.

He was a fine man.

Tell your mama that I, his barber, said this.

SCORSESE: Kazan always made the point

that he would have done this picture differently

if he had been on his own.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn really does feel like a Kazan movie to me,

but I can understand why he saw it differently.

Hello, Father.

Hello, my dear.

(GUN FIRES)

SCORSESE: Boomerang!, made a couple of years later,

was a courtroom melodrama,

but it was shot in the docu-drama style

that came out of Italian neorealism popular in the late '40s.

And it allowed Kazan to get away

from the status and security of the studio system

and, literally, outside into the open air.

The important part was that I caught something in the background

in the life of a city like that

that made me feel, "I can go anywhere and make a film."

God bless you, Blackie. God bless you.

God bless you.

Hey! You get away...

SCORSESE: Kazan went even further with Panic in the Streets,

which was shot on the streets of New Orleans.

KAZAN: I tried to make, in effect, a silent picture,

and I said, "The pictures themselves should tell a story

"and not hang on the dialogue."

(HORN BLARING)

SCORSESE: There's such a sense of freedom and invention in this movie.

You'd better wait down here.

SCORSESE: Sometimes filmmakers are energized by their environment,

the spirit of the moment.

We got a sick man here!

I'm a doctor. I want to take a look at him.

SCORSESE: And you can feel that right here.

Isn't his name Poldi? Put him down. I want to see.

Get out of the way! (MAN SCREAMING)

I found out that it's a very important thing

not to pay too much attention to the script

once you've got it good.

Then you can work and you can say, "Wait a minute.

"Let me look back on this thing and see what it says here."

You brought them their food every day?

Yes, sir.

Did they ever say anything?

Sure. "Food stinks. Goodbye."

This boy just kills you, doesn't he?

Now, did they... Are you the cook?

Yes, sir. Go away.

SCORSESE: I think you could say that, around this time,

a director was slowly becoming a filmmaker.

And these pictures, each of them beautifully made,

were kind of stops along the way.

Professionally, he had reached a peak

in Hollywood, on Broadway, and as co-founder of the Actors Studio.

And then something happened.

NARRATOR: (AS KAZAN) I did what I did

because it was the more tolerable of two alternatives

that were, either way, painful, even disastrous,

and, either way, wrong for me.

That's what a difficult decision means.

Either way you go, you lose.

SCORSESE: During the height of the Red Scare,

when anyone with leftist connections in their past

was suspected of being a Communist and a traitor,

when no one felt safe and careers and even lives were on the line,

Kazan appeared twice before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

First time, he was uncooperative.

But the second time, he gave eight names

of former Communist Party members from the Group Theater days.

Of course, Kazan wasn't the only friendly witness.

But when he published a letter in The New York Times

attempting to justify and explain,

he almost guaranteed that he was the one people would always remember.

NARRATOR: (AS KAZAN) What happened during that time,

and how I dealt with it,

made my face what it is today.

SCORSESE: Was it destructive? Of course it was.

And the consequences were tragic for everyone.

To many people,

friends, co-workers, old acquaintances,

he became a pariah,

a guy you crossed the street to avoid running into.

But something else happened to Kazan after his testimony.

NARRATOR: (AS KAZAN) The only genuinely good

and original films I've made,

I've made after my testimony.

The films after April 1, 1952 were personal.

They came out of me.

Now you take it easy, slugger.

SCORSESE: If you're talking about the work, the art,

this is a moment when a director became a filmmaker.

Joey!

SCORSESE: Ultimately, a great filmmaker.

All right! What do you want?

Hey, I got one of your birds.

Yeah, must be Danny Boy. I lost him in the last race.

Listen, don't worry. I'll take him up to your loft.

Okay, I'll see you on the roof.

SCORSESE: Something began for me with this picture.

The drunk getting thrown out of the bar,

these guys standing there in their big overcoats, hanging out.

The harsh light, the cold.

How goes?

He's up on the roof.

The pigeon?

Yeah, it worked.

(SCREAMING)

I think somebody fell off the roof.

SCORSESE: At the time I saw the picture, I mean, that's where I lived.

I was growing up in these places. I knew them.

I knew rooms like this with that kind of paint job

and the crucifix on the wall.

Faces like this.

People I didn't ordinarily see in movies.

The way they looked, the way they moved.

And I knew the roof, the pigeons.

Hi.

What are you doing up here on the roof?

Just looking.

Hey! This bum here is my shadow.

SCORSESE: There was this way of being with each other,

tough guys knocking each other around, just kidding,

but it could turn on a dime.

The people who wanted to let you know they were tough.

Joey used to raise pigeons.

SCORSESE: But also, it was sensitive in some way.

Yeah, he had a few birds.

SCORSESE: I grew up around all that.

You know, I've seen you a lot of times before.

SCORSESE: There was a stylized version of it

in the studio pictures that I'd been seeing...

...had your hair...

Braids.

...but what Marlon Brando did was different.

You had wires on your teeth and glasses. Everything.

You was really a mess.

I can get home all right now, thanks.

Hey, listen. Don't get sore. I was just kidding you a little bit.

I just mean to tell you that you're...

You grew up very nice.

Thanks.

You don't remember me, do you?

Come on, come on!

SCORSESE: The awkwardness, the sense that you're nobody,

it was all there.

You just stay here and finish your drink.

Oh, no. No. Listen, don't go. I've got my whole life to drink.

SCORSESE: These were guys you loved and hated at the same time.

Are you sore at me?

SCORSESE: I used to find myself looking at them and wondering,

"Who could be with them? Who could love them?"

If I had my tuxedo, I'd ask you to dance, but...

Come on. You want to spin?

Huh?

Come on, don't be afraid.

Oh, you dance divinely.

SCORSESE: You could feel their desire to be with

somebody who'll make all their pain just go away.

I want you to stay away from me.

I know what you want me to do,

but I ain't gonna do it, so forget it.

I don't want you to do anything.

You let your conscience tell you what to do.

Shut up about that conscience!

That's all I've been hearing!

I never mentioned the word before. You just stay away from me!

Edie, you love me.

I didn't say I didn't love you, I said stay away from me!

I want you to say it with me.

Stay away from me!

Raise your right hand.

SCORSESE: Now, there was an official theme to the picture,

the part that's always been seen

in the light of Kazan's testimony...

"I do." I do.

Be seated, please.

SCORSESE: ...standing up for yourself

and breaking through the wall of silence.

But Brando's character, Terry, triumphs at the end.

...you were the last one to see him before he was pushed from the roof?

SCORSESE: And where I came from,

we knew that this was, in a way, a fantasy.

Wait! Except for the guys that pushed him off.

SCORSESE: Because people like Terry Malloy

wound up dead in the river for informing on a regular basis.

At the time, I just accepted this as a convention

that supported what was so special about the rest of the movie.

What are you going around with his sister for?

I'm not... Just shut up!

SCORSESE: The moments where Kazan and Brando pushed each other...

You...

Let's go!

Wise up!

All right. Do you think Johnny's going to jeopardize the whole set-up

for one rubber-lipped ex-tanker who's walking on his heels?

What the...

SCORSESE: I remember being really disturbed

by all that resentment and anger

coming out into the open.

Well, make up your mind before we get to 437 River Street!

SCORSESE: Betrayal. The worst thing you could do.

Betrayed by your own brother.

Before we get to where, Charley?

Before we get to...

Listen to me, Terry.

Take the job. Just take it. No questions. Take it!

Charley.

Terry, take this job, please.

Charley!

Please take it!

Charley...

SCORSESE: Every time I see this famous scene,

I forget about the camera.

It's just one brother confronting another.

When you weighed 168 pounds, you were beautiful.

You could have been another Billy Conn.

That skunk we got you for a manager,

he brought you along too fast.

It wasn't him, Charley. It was you.

Remember that night in the Garden?

You came down to my dressing room and said,

"Kid, this ain't your night.

"We're going for the price on Wilson."

You remember that?

"This ain't your night."

My night? I could have taken Wilson apart!

So what happens? He gets the title shot outdoors in the ball park,

and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palookaville!

You was my brother, Charley.

You should have looked out for me a little bit.

You should've taken care of me just a little bit

so I wouldn't have to take them dives for the short-end money.

I had some bets down for you. You saw some money.

You don't understand, I could have had class!

I could have been a contender.

I could have been somebody.

Instead of a bum, which is what I am. Let's face it.

It was you, Charley.

Okay. Okay.

SCORSESE: Now I see the mastery. Brando and Kazan's,

but also Rod Steiger's, Eva Marie Saint's,

Leonard Bernstein's score, Budd Schulberg's language,

Boris Kaufman's cinematography.

But back then, at the Loew's Commodore,

I wasn't thinking about technique or mastery,

I was living through the film,

through the movie,

taking it all in.

And, I suppose, on some level,

what hit me on the deepest level

was what went on between the brothers.

And the betrayal.

Maybe because of my relationship with my own brother,

who was older than me.

We all lived together in three rooms then,

and it seemed like there was always some kind of tension.

Everybody knew each other in my neighborhood.

Actually, it was like a little village.

You got the best of it and the worst of it.

It wasn't a place where anyone wanted to live,

I mean, they just had to.

And you'd see things there, in the streets and in the hallways

and at night under the el, that would stay with you.

But in Saint Patrick's Old Cathedral,

our church around the corner,

I found a kind of refuge.

And I also found it at the movies,

at the second and third-run theaters that were on 2nd Avenue.

That was where I was learning that life around me, the world around me,

could be made into some kind of art.

And I'd go inside, and after I'd paid about

12 or 15 cents at the time

and found my seat,

I was safe.

And I was at peace.

Another universe, another time.

1917, just before the country entered World War I.

California by the sea.

Wide-open space.

And vivid color.

The original CinemaScope, real widescreen.

And in this movie, the shape became dynamic.

I watched the picture,

and I started to feel like I was right there,

in the movie, with this boy,

as he wandered into a place that was off-limits.

It was forbidden.

This was James Dean's first starring role,

and you had to look at him.

You couldn't take your eyes off him.

And he gave a performance that didn't care what you thought about it.

I mean, he may have been 23 years old when he made the picture,

but up there on the screen, he was a teenager

who found himself sneaking his way into an adult world

and then daring to go as far as he could...

Thank you.

...down the hallway.

What are you gonna do?

Please, kid, don't make any trouble...

(SHUSHING)

(WHISPERING) Not gonna make any trouble.

I'm gonna wait till you're gone. Okay?

SCORSESE: For me, this instantly became "the" hallway.

He went inside, and he took me with him.

I mean, what was going on here?

Had she taken morphine, or heroin?

Why did her hands feel so naked?

I mean, it felt profane, and blasphemous, even,

because she was his mother, and she was a whore.

Let me talk to you. Please.

I've gotta talk to you.

Joe. Joe!

Get out of here.

Get him out! Punish him!

Get him out of here! Get him out of here!

Cal! Stop! Stop that, Cal! What are you doing? Stop it!

Why did you push that ice down?

SCORSESE: Family...

I don't know.

...the dinner table,

a battle ground.

Was it vengeance?

SCORSESE: One brother was supposed to be good...

Fear that I would punish you for not coming home last night?

...and another was supposed to be bad.

ADAM: What was it?

I wanted to see it slide down the chute.

Perhaps you'd better read from here on.

I'll read it, Dad.

No, it's for Cal to read.

SCORSESE: The father has told them that their mother is dead,

but the bad son knows the truth.

"I acknowledged my sin unto thee,

"and mine iniquity have I not hid..."

SCORSESE: And his knowledge gives him a kind of power.

"...forgavest the iniquity of my sin." See? Look.

ADAM: Go on.

SCORSESE: At first glance,

I projected the role of the bad one onto my teen-aged brother.

And I suggest a little slower, Cal.

"And surely in the floods of great waters..."

SCORSESE: By default, that made me the good one.

"Seven..."

Not the numbers, Cal.

"Thou art my hiding place, thou shalt preserve me from..."

SCORSESE: But I became conflicted.

I was having the same feelings that the bad brother had.

"Eight..."

You have no repentance! You're bad!

Through and through, bad.

SCORSESE: Only I wasn't allowed to express it at home.

The way he loved his father,

and the way he hated his father.

Seeing his father vulnerable.

It's going to work.

And wanting to please him,

to bring his grand dream to life.

A dream of progress, a brighter future,

a better America.

We were feeling that back in the '50s, too.

The dream of a country, a father and a son.

Well, it's still a good idea.

Cold can preserve things.

Someday, somebody will prove it.

Dad. It was your idea.

No!

It was presumptuous of me to think it would be I.

SCORSESE: He sees his father humiliated, and he wants to reverse it

and make up for the loss.

And there is only one place to go.

At certain moments,

East of Eden had the sense of being almost like a horror film.

The same kind of unease.

A mother and son who've never known each other

literally crossing paths in a misty landscape.

Aren't you afraid to come around here again?

Yeah, I am. No. Well, kind of.

What do you want?

Just to look at me?

I want $5,000.

Caleb. Yes, ma'am.

Caleb and Aron.

Your father still thinks he's living in the Bible, huh?

Maybe you know what I'm talking about, huh?

Always so right himself?

SCORSESE: Sharing a laugh at your father's expense.

ADAM: You have my blessing.

ARON: Thank you, Dad.

SCORSESE: That film kept making me uncomfortable.

What's this?

What is this?

It's for you.

It's all the money you lost in the lettuce business.

It's for you.

I made it for you.

Cal, you will have to give it back.

No, I made it for you, Dad. I want you to have it.

Cal!

I sign my name and boys go out,

and some die and some live helpless without arms and legs.

Not one will come back untorn.

Do you think I could take a profit from that?

I don't want the money, Cal! I couldn't take it!

I'll keep it for you.

I'll wrap it up and we'll just keep it in here...

I'll never take it! Son!

If you want to give me a present, give me a good life.

That's something I could value.

SCORSESE: Thinking you're doing something good,

and instead, being told you've done something terrible,

without even realizing it.

Most movies I've seen just didn't deal

with private feelings like that.

Abra!

SCORSESE: And so I thought I was alone,

that it was just between me and the movie.

I mean, when I was watching it that first time,

I still wasn't focused on film technique or film acting,

I was just responding to what was genuine and what wasn't.

The framing,

the control of movement within the frame,

it all led to a sensation, a feeling,

that the people making the movie knew me,

maybe better than I knew myself.

ARON: Don't you ever touch her again.

I don't trust you.

You're no good.

Father and I have put up with every mean

and vicious thing you could think of

ever since you were a child.

And we've always forgiven you.

But now I don't want you to go near Abra.

SCORSESE: Everything led back to that sinful place.

Oh, Cal.

Hello.

SCORSESE: The mother, it's frightening how open she is,

how vulnerable for the first time.

I sensed what was coming, I wanted to look away,

but I couldn't.

Mother,

this is your other son, Aron.

Aron, say hello to your mother.

Oh, Cal.

Say hello to your mother, Aron!

KATE: Joe! No! No!

SCORSESE: The emotions spinning out of control,

the song in the background clashing

with Leonard Rosenman's powerful score,

the brothers exchanging identities,

it had all become full-blown, real-life horror.

No one's good, no one's bad.

It was frightening,

because I knew from experience it could happen like that.

CAL: Father.

SCORSESE: And then there was the calm after the storm.

Julie Harris as Abra.

Like an angel,

her role is to unite them.

You never gave him your love.

You never asked him for his.

You have to give him some sign that you love him,

or else he'll never be a man.

Please help him.

SCORSESE: They say what they always wanted to say.

A man has a choice.

You used to say that was where we differed from an animal

and that the choice is what makes him a man.

SCORSESE: But the movies let so many emotions loose,

and they're still flying around,

and they can't be contained and wrapped up so neatly.

Look.

SCORSESE: At the time, we were so moved by this scene

because it's the kind of resolution we wanted to have...

Do something...

...that we thought was still possible.

...for me.

Yes.

SCORSESE: I look back now

and I realize just how important East of Eden was for me.

I mean, everything I couldn't articulate at the age of 12,

the picture articulated for me.

So I kept going back and reliving those feelings

and those struggles with my family over and over again,

and having that catharsis, of watching that film, repeatedly.

Of course, James Dean in East of Eden

became symbolic of adolescent angst,

but I didn't know what that was back then

because I was going through it.

It was all new to me,

and to all the other teenagers

who looked at James Dean in this movie

and saw a reflection of themselves

and their feelings and their lives in some way.

And I had an inkling of something else.

The more I saw the picture,

the more I understood the presence

of an artist behind the camera.

Later, I went back and tried to figure out how he did it,

why it affected me so powerfully.

Say hello to your mother, Aron!

SCORSESE: Color, the acting, the editing...

KATE: No!

...the sound editing,

camera movement, lighting,

I studied them.

Back then, 50 years ago, watching East of Eden,

re-watching East of Eden,

I put my own struggle, my own rite of passage, into this picture.

It spoke to me in a way that no one else I knew in my life

seemed to be able to do.

And, I guess, ultimately, I came to project onto Elia Kazan,

the man behind these two extraordinary experiences,

wherever he was, wherever he came from, whoever he was,

the role of a father.

A different father, but a father.

After those formative pictures,

I made sure I saw everything by Kazan.

Studied it.

Movies like A Face in the Crowd,

which was quite unusual and perceptive

about television and the monsters it could create.

It's dangerous.

What, baton twirling?

No, power.

(GIRLS SCREAMING)

SCORSESE: But what really stayed with me, and still does,

was the relationship between Andy Griffith and Patricia Neal.

Did I call you a cold fish, Marcia?

Marcia.

SCORSESE: Kazan kept looking at couples,

the battleground between men and women.

My little marshmallow.

SCORSESE: How they can break apart...

Baby, please.

But I'm afraid.

Oh, Bud.

Don't, Bud.

SCORSESE: ...and how they could come together.

(MAN SINGING)

I think the picture that meant the most to me, at this time,

was one of his best, and least appreciated, Wild River.

I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.

I just don't know.

SCORSESE: The scenes between Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick

were so delicate,

and so frank.

All the polite facades around romantic love

that we were used to seeing in movies...

It's getting dark out.

SCORSESE:...just gave way.

Don't go.

Please don't go.

SCORSESE: Kazan's couples felt real longing.

Hold still.

They craved each other.

Anyway, now it's wonderful. Right now.

You can't get enough of me right now, can you?

Tell me! Tell me!

I can't get enough of you.

SCORSESE: When I was at New York University,

Kazan was the only major filmmaker who came to talk to us.

This was in 1964.

I remember one student asked him a question,

"If you had to start your career over again, what would you do?"

He answered, "I'd start in the editing room."

In those early days when he was brought out to Fox,

instead of being in the editing room, it was done for him,

the way it was done for most directors at that time.

But he loved movies and he loved the craft of making movies,

and he approached movie-making with the same spirit

as many of the younger filmmakers

who were just starting out at the time.

He was one of the artists who gave me the desire and the confidence

to try making my own movies.

And it was an exciting time,

because everyone seemed to be trying something new with film.

Suddenly, there was an overwhelming sense of freedom

to reinvent and redefine cinema.

And it was happening all around the world at the same time.

New stories, new approaches to film grammar,

new emotions.

We saw everything, discussed everything

and absorbed everything.

And it was around this time that I saw America, America.

It came out when I was 21 years old,

right after the Kennedy assassination.

For Kazan, it was significant in many ways.

His first completely personal picture,

his total break with Hollywood,

and it premiered just after his first wife's sudden death.

For me, it was a touchstone,

because it felt personal, hand-crafted,

but it was also an epic.

It was about leaving what you know,

doing absolutely everything you can to get where you want to be.

Come on!

SCORSESE: Stavros, in that picture,

humiliates himself to get to America.

He goes through hell, sacrifices everything,

and he's totally ruthless.

You like me? STAVROS: Yes.

Would you tell me if you didn't?

No, I wouldn't.

But I do like you.

The way a husband should like a wife?

I don't want to be my father!

I don't want to be your father!

I don't want that good family life.

That good family life.

All those good people, they stay here and live in this shame.

The churchgoers who give to the poor, they live in this shame.

The respectable ones, the polite ones, their good manners.

But I am going.

No matter how, no matter, no matter. I am going!

(CRYING)

What will happen to you?

I believe...

I believe that, in America...

I believe I will be washed clean.

KAZAN: What America meant, that is a good part of the film.

What America meant. Liberation, freedom.

When somebody says bad things about America, I bristle,

because it meant so much to me, I saw the other side.

(MEN CHATTERING)

SCORSESE: For Kazan, you had to be ready to struggle,

to fight, to get to America,

to make the movie you need to make,

to become yourself.

KAZAN: I think, finally a film director

has to get a shot, no matter what he does.

We're desperate people.

And one way or another, no matter what we have to do, we'll do it.

SCORSESE: I was leaving the old world behind myself

when I saw this picture.

It was a world that had formed me,

and one that would always be a part of me.

But if I was going to make my own way and my own movies,

I knew I had to say goodbye.

And I also knew that it can never be easy.

(ALL CHATTERING)

John Cassavetes, another tough Greek,

once said that, to be a filmmaker,

you need to not be afraid of anybody or anything.

The money, the pressures, all the little worries and difficulties,

they're all unimportant.

There's nothing but the movie.

I first understood that from watching Elia Kazan's pictures.

MAN: Hey, you! You, there!

Keep moving now, you're blocking traffic.

Come on, now. Yes, you. Move it along...

SCORSESE: I met Elia Kazan in person for the first time

around the time he came to NYU to speak.

It was not an auspicious occasion.

I wanted to work as an assistant

on his new film, The Arrangement,

and I actually got lost trying to find his office,

which was above the Astor, the Victorian theater,

on Broadway at the time.

I was a little late, and he was already standing there,

dressed in a trench coat, ready to leave.

He wished me luck, and that was that.

I was young and ambitious, and he didn't have the time for me.

It's a good thing, because I don't think I would've lasted a day.

I would have asked him too many questions about his old movies,

and told not to come back.

He was still trying to get his own pictures made.

He wasn't ready to be the old master.

Maybe you learn more from the work than the man.

That's something I didn't really understand at that time.

Later, after I'd made a few of my own pictures,

our paths started to cross again.

Over the years, we got to know each other a little.

He liked some of my pictures, and told me,

and he disliked others, and he told me that, too.

He'd always let me know everything straight out.

We'd get together, look at movies,

sometimes his own.

There was a kind of understanding between us.

I mean, I never tried to tell him

how much his films meant to me.

I don't think it would've been fair.

When somebody's work has touched you that deeply,

you can never expect them to understand how much they mean to you.

It had to stay between me and the pictures.

When he was given an Oscar for lifetime achievement

near the end of his life,

Robert De Niro and I were asked to present it to him.

The old controversies came out again,

and there were a lot of people

who felt that he didn't deserve that award.

And there still are.

I knew I had to be there by his side.

Those pictures mean so much to me

that I can't imagine where I'd be without them.

When the lights dimmed, I was standing in the wings,

and I looked at the images from his tribute reel.

It was an overwhelming feeling.

It was as if I was seeing layers of my own experience,

my own life, unfolding right there up on the screen.

I'm not my brother's keeper.

Where did you go? For a ride.

What did you quarrel about?

You.

Still there.

NARRATOR: (AS KAZAN) What kind of a person

must a film director train himself to be?

The subject he must see,

in the greatest detail and in the most pitiless light,

is what?

Right.

Himself.

SCORSESE: The last time I saw him, he was alone in his room.

His hearing wasn't so good then,

and that was a real blow to him, he used to tell us,

because it made him lose contact with people.

He was sitting there

and he was wandering through his memories of his family,

back in the old world.

His walls were lined with their pictures.

He looked at me and he told me, "I talk to them,

"and, you know, sometimes they talk back to me."

It always had to stay between me and the movies,

and the only way I could tell you how much you meant to me

was by making movies.

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