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Martin Scorsese

The Departed

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"You know, the idea is to capture the spontaneity of the group, and the word 'capture' means you have to control in some way, but you can't control spontaneity. Therefore the cameras have gotta be in the right position. Then I wanted to go a little further and have them all be moving cameras, but you can't have them collide with the performers, so you have to be very careful and all this sort of thing."

Additionally difficult was the decision to use 35mm film, which runs out quickly, instead of video, which doesn't. "I was concerned that we got as much as we could on film, because the film was running out of the magazines at ten minutes a clip. So I wanted to get the first three songs, completely, with all ten or fifteen cameras, whatever it was. But inevitably, some of them are going to go out. So we had to have backup cameras."

Interspersed throughout the concert, in between the songs, are a number of short clips from old Rolling Stones interviews. "David Tudesky's the editor of the film, and we worked together almost nine, ten months," Scorsese says. "The music came together rather quickly in the film, and that was very enjoyable. The hardest part was putting together the clips. I think David had over four hundred hours of footage that he sort of culled for the documentary sections. Archival footage. And then he chose about forty hours for me to see. And we worked from that forty hours, and it was a matter of balancing: saying something [with a clip], but not saying too much, and then saying nothing with it. That was the key. And balancing it so it wouldn't unbalance the music in the piece. Because to do a film with all archival footage I think would be a four or five hour documentary, yeah. That's another movie."

Up next for Scorsese is Shutter Island, which like The Departed is a Boston-centric film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. The film is currently shooting. "It's great to be back in Boston, it's a little cold right now. A little cold, especially at night. Yeah, yeah. But, we're working in Medford and a few other places outside of Boston, and it's really good."

More Interviews withMartin Scorsese

More Interviews with
Martin Scorsese