“I’ve always been interested in people who suffer,” explains Martin Scorsese, whose “Bringing Out the Dead,” about a tormented emergency medical technician, opens on Friday.
Based on the book of the same title by Joe Connelly, a 10-year EMS vet- turned-author, Nicolas Cage plays a burned out medic named Frank Pierce.
Over three nights in Hell’s Kitchen at the height of the drug wars in the early ’90s, we speed in the ambulance with Pierce – sirens blaring, lights flashing – and witness him dealing with his own demons. He’s haunted by the dead he’s unsuccessfully tried to save.
“As a young man, Pierce wanted to help people and thought that being part of EMS would be right there – in the front lines,” says Scorsese, in his typically rapid-fire speech. “But there’s no rhyme or reason as to who lives or dies, and so you begin to wear down. You begin to burn out – not making a difference at all in the world.”
A native New Yorker, Scorsese believes we all eventually become desensitized. “In a funny way, when you hear a siren in the city, you turn your mind off. You say, ‘OK, they’re taking care of it. You delegate your responsibility about caring for other people to these men and women,” says Scorsese, looking dapper in a blue suit and blue knit tie at the Regency Hotel.
In “Bringing Out the Dead,” those “other people” and are most often junkies and drunks – familiar faces to Scorsese, who grew up on Elizabeth Street, right off the corner of the Bowery. As a boy, he remembers observing a steady stream of alcoholics who would ramble in and out of a shelter on his block.
“So many times, men were sleeping in the street, in the gutter, even in your hallway, and you thought they were dead,” recalls Scorsese. And that, he says, made a tremendous impact on him as a child.
Preparing for the film’s production also left a mark on the filmmaker. Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader, with whom he previously collaborated on “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull” and “The Last Temptation of Christ,” rode in Cabrini Medical Center ambulances a few times to gain a feel for the life of an EMT.
In one shift, Schrader’s run began with a man who was cut in half by a subway car and ended with the screenwriter watching a baby being born. Though Scorsese didn’t personally experience that death-to-life gamut, he felt his ambulance rides offered him an impression of what it’s really like.
“The lights flashing, the rock ‘n’ roll playing. You’re revved up. Then you don’t know what you’ll find – you’re just told that someone has ‘difficulty breathing.’ As you go up the stairs, you never know what’s going to be behind that door. It could be anything. If could have been an attempted murder, and the murderer’s still there,” says Scorsese with a hint of a smile.
For Pierce, the 56 hours covered in the film are filled with death and drug abuse. Joining him on the job are three partners. One night it’s the food-obsessed and detached Larry, played by John Goodman. Another night it’s Ving Rhames’ fire-and- brimstone-quoting Marcus. And the third night brings Tom, a violent EMT portrayed by Tom Sizemore and based, says Scorsese, on a real New York City medic.
Not surprisingly, each partner handles the situations they’re faced with in different ways.
On the first night, when responding to a call, Pierce strikes up a relationship with a dying man’s drug-addicted daughter (played by Patricia Arquette – Cage’s real-life wife) – taking on the burden of being a hero in his personal life as well.
Other than a few similarities between the film’s characters and the director himself – who once admitted he “went through so many drugs that I almost destroyed myself” – how does this film fit into the Scorsese canon, which includes such seemingly diverse films as “GoodFellas,” “The Age of Innocence,” “Cape Fear,” “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” and “The King of Comedy”?
Scorsese says that “Bringing Out the Dead,” like his previous pictures, is all about “how we treat each other in life. Every time I’m attracted to a film,” says the man who once thought of becoming a priest, “it’s about how one lives a moral life in our society.”
He believes that while you can criticize Pierce and the other EMTs, “they’re doing their best,” adding that “of course what they’re doing is just putting a Band-Aid on society, but somebody’s got to do that . . . and if he can’t save them, then [he has to] realize God steps in – or fate.”
In a way, Scorsese is also in the salvation business – the director works tirelessly to preserve classic films. In addition to being a founder of the Film Foundation, which works to restore old movies, in 1992, he created his own company, Martin Scorsese Presents, which has restored such classics as Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt” and Luis Bunuel’s “Belle de Jour.”
Scorsese’s love for films was a result of his having to “deal” with sickness. As a child he suffered from asthma and pleurisy. While his peers played in the streets of Little Italy, the young Scorsese spent much of his childhood indoors. His doting parents – who later had cameos in several of his films – often took him to the movies and were the first in the neighborhood to own a TV set.
A deeply developed interest in movies led him a few blocks north to New York University, where he studied filmmaking – and even became an instructor at the school. (One of his students was Billy Crystal, who got a C in Scorsese’s class.)
Three years after leaving his post at NYU, and having directed his first feature – the semi-autobiographical “Who’s That Knocking at My Door?” – and helming Roger Corman’s “Boxcar Bertha,” Scorsese’s breakthrough film, “Mean Streets,” was released.
Returning to the mean streets for “Bringing Out the Dead,” however, proved problematic for the veteran auteur.
“The city was another character” and a temperamental one at that, he says. In addition to having to drag around an ambulance on a picture car, with numerous lights so that there would be a continuous flow and look as they rode up and down the streets, for certain scenes the crew filmed the action over a space of 10 blocks, but “we weren’t allowed to go through red lights, which killed a lot of the scenes,” bemoans Scorsese.
Their permit required them to obey traffic laws, so if a light turned red while the cameras were rolling, the crew would have to stop, drive their caravan back to the starting point – 10 blocks up – and try another run, losing precious time and never knowing when another red light would halt production again.
But, as with many of his characters – Henry Hill of “Taxi Driver,” Jake LaMotta of “Raging Bull” – striving to beat unbeatable odds is in his nature.
And that’s fine by Scorsese. “People would say that I see the glass as half empty,” he confesses. “But I know it’s half empty. I don’t expect it to be half full. I don’t want it to be half full.”