Behind the Scenes: The Age of Innocence (Scorsese, 1993) with Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer

In this rehearsal, we'll just try to get the correct size at least. And then we can work out who's blocking or whatever, you know, who goes out of frame, okay? But starting from this mark now, not those, okay? Well, it looks like everybody's here and the camera's here. You know, at a certain point, you keep talking about making a movie, you keep talking about it and talking about it, and then one day they all show up. Someone calls your bluff, then you'll really hit yourself off. Then you have to do it. Playback. I've never really done a period film before of this kind. And I was always interested because I've been a great fan of period films over the years. You know, I like very much The Heiress. Did you ever see that? Yes, I did. Montgomery Clifton and Ralph Richardson and Olivia de Havilland. And I think one of the things I liked about The Heiress a lot was the accessibility of the characters. Yeah. And I hope that when people see The Age of Innocence, there's a sense of being placed into that morality of the time so that they understand what these conflicts are. The themes, which are love, passion, conscience, commitment, they're pertinent and immediate and compelling at any time, whether it's 1993 or 2010. We have the same problems of wanting things that we can't have and having things that we don't want. And that's what this story is about. This is what we're doing over there. Elegant silver forks, knives, well, that's on the table. Delicate glassware on the table. I usually prepare very, very carefully. And it's wonderful because when I get to the set, I realize there's still many things I don't know about the scene, about the camera placements, about the lighting, about the costumes. You try on paper and in your mind the night before you're shooting. You try, you try. It certainly keeps you on your toes. Yeah, could you open up facing camera? Switch on the lights, even better. Good thinking. Marty is the kind of director who has the movie in his head when he starts the movie. He knows about the rhythm so much, how he wants the rhythm to work. And I understand so much about his rhythm and I like it so much that for me it's always, it's so much fun to read his shot list because it's like, whew, you're going on a trip, it's great. It's just, it's wonderful. He comes to a film, not with little bits and pieces, but he comes to it with the whole thing, it's already there. When we're working on stuff together, I'll send him a version I've worked on and then he'll work on it and send it back to me. And the versions I send him come back with pictures. He's already storyboarding, outline. He's got windows and he's got little arrows and he's got people, his little figures. And I get these things, they're so complicated and so involved and he's gotten so deeply involved in the material. He doesn't just see the characters, he sees their entire world around them and he's able to create the world. Through the set dressing and all the decorating and all the dishes and the food, you really know more and have a greater depth of understanding about these people and who they are. I work with the research, with all the books, but my best way for me for work is, I think, to live in that period. And I start to think like an architect or decorator or designer for that period. There's a lot of subtlety in the film. For example, when Archer enters the Beaufort house for the first time for this big ball, which is in the early part of the film, there's a table laid out with gloves. That is about the tradition in those days. You would go to a ball, if you were a man, with a stack of gloves and every time you danced with another woman, you would change your gloves. That's not explained in the film, but it's there as part of the texture, of the many textures in the film. I always envied the actors because they get to go back to school. Yes. Kind of like, you know. And that's most of it. Every movie. We're being total retro-based at school. At school, exactly. It gives us the momentary illusion that we're actually being rather good students. Yes. You have to do this, you have to go study that, you have to physically do certain things and learn a whole new culture. When you came to meet me in Paris in the hotel room, you were dressed already as Archer. Opened the door and you were already dressed, suit and tie. I suppose at some point I must have made a decision, although I don't remember making it, to go through that every day. I do that with actors a lot, where I call them by the character's name. But in this case, when I was working with you on the set, it was really Archer. This is the first time we're really talking about it, but it's interesting because I felt very comfortable with him, with Archer. And I knew that he would know how to go about things. The etiquette books that we read discussing just the gentleman's dinnerware, the dinner dress for gentlemen alone, they said, was an object of torture. An object of torture. So you begin with that understanding. And they had to eat these, what, 12 courses? Every night. I mean, even if only at home. A quiet dinner at home with the missus. And there you'd be in the full monkey suit and everything. And the minute you are laced up in that corset, it changes everything. Clothing was very symbolic of the way women were repressed in that society and restricted and unable to be free with expressing themselves or saying what they think or relaxing at all. I mean, in those dresses, you literally can barely breathe. There's a kind of sensuality about the rituals, the social rituals of the time. A real kind of beautiful precision to the manners, which can also be stifling. And that's part of the point of the drama. This is the first novel that you read by Edith Wharton. Yeah. And I think she's a remarkable writer. I mean, the story is so strong. I was particularly struck by her understanding of the men because it seemed extraordinary that she was able to have that understanding. I know. Sometimes it would get... As if she was seeing through their eyes. Yeah. And often you would tell me, my God, she's right again. Scary. It was scary. That's one of the reasons why I wanted to use the narration from the book, sections from the book read over the images, because of the insight. And, of course, her prose was so beautiful. Beautiful. You need the narrator to comment and to let the audience know what the world was like and to fill them in on what the social customs were at the time. It was not the custom in New York drawing rooms for a lady to get up and walk away from one gentleman in order to seek the company of another. But the countess did not observe this rule. I don't come from that world. Because, you know, I have made pictures before, and this is quite different. At least on the surface. I must see them sometime. You have to see them, yeah. I told you about a couple, and they're pretty good. But there's a whole bunch that are like... I mean, this is a very different world. The surface of it is very different. The situations, the interrelations between the people are not different at all, really. It's just another way of going about it. The form changes, but if somebody has to be taken out, they're taken out. She can't conform to their idea of innocence, which is not listening to your feelings, not listening to your passions, only going along with social protocol. The conflict between the countess' worldliness and Archer's straight-laced devotion to the rules of society, you can see a mirror of New York kind of changing and loosening up. Marty universalizes everything. So the city is New York City, because that's the one he knows in detail and intimately. But New York represents something beyond just the fact that this is New York City. It represents the city, all cities. From seeing his movies, New York is constantly evolving. New York was all the steam shooting out of the ground and these taxis marauding around the city. It's a very romantic, sexy view of it, I mean, as shocking and violent as it was. Going from seeing Travis Bickle in that yellow cab, and you then go to the other extreme of New York, New York, where everything was stylized. It's an intoxicating mix that you can get all of that out of one city. In all his movies, it's that yearning and that wanting something desperately that you know you can never have and could never be. And yet you still don't give up the yearning. You still somehow want to make it happen. I ain't never gonna get a chance to fight the best there is. And you know something? I'm better than them. I ain't never gonna get a chance. But you're crazy to even think about something like that. I mean, it's a heavyweight or a middleweight. It's impossible. It'll never happen, so why go crazy thinking about it? It's not normal. Marty isn't the guy in Taxi Driver, and he's not Jake LaMotta, and he's not Newland Archer, but he understands what's inside all of these people. What's going on underneath among all these people are many of the same things that you've seen in Marty's movies. It's a person caught between the dictates of his conscience and the directions in which his heart is impelling him. The flowers go off, and he's made a decision there which is going to affect the rest of his life. He doesn't know why he's made it. It is an instinctive response to some sort of attraction that he doesn't want to even begin to explain to himself, but he's done it. My character is, I guess, the black sheep of the family, but to me she really is the most innocent, and she's the most pure. For me, what I see happening to her is a shattering of that innocence when she comes across from Europe and has a certain kind of illusion about America. I love the characters, I love all of them. I can't make a judgment on them. I don't want to make a judgment on them because they work within a certain society and time. My heart went out to every one of the characters. People have so many different opinions and views on May. A lot of people think she was manipulative or she was mean. A lot of people think she was the victim and innocent. Basically, she was a combination of all of that, and you kind of hate her and love her at the same time, and above all, you really feel for her. People tend to think of the male characters when they talk about Marty, but the women are very strong. I think they stand up to the men and good fellows. Lorraine couldn't have been more tough. I think if you look back at his movies, his women characters are very, very strong. Are you a narc? Do I look like a narc? Yeah. I am a narc. Who's weirder, you or me? His women characters are just as vivid as his men. Certainly, they will be in this. Of course, it's a very different type of behavior from the type of characters I usually work with in my films. In a given situation, the characters in Age of Innocence say one thing and mean another. Oh, yes. One of the rules, in fact. Almost a rule never to say what you're... Right. I find the tension of that to be very, very dramatic. Age of Innocence is an especially interesting movie in terms of the camera because here the camera has the opportunity to tell the subtext of what's going on. We tell the story that they actually want to express, but they can't because they're just trapped by the society and by the century. Do you have any funny anecdotes that anything happened on the set... LAUGHTER Whenever anyone asks me that, it always makes me think that nothing funny has ever happened to me. Many things that did happen on the set were hysterically funny, but you had to be there. Right? I guess, yeah. Yeah. But suffice it to say that no matter how much fun you're having on the set, it's always torture. Marty always claims he's miserable, but he actually loves it. He does complain a lot when he's on the set and he complains a lot when he's in the editing room, but he actually, underneath, loves it all. He's a very emotional person, and he wouldn't be as sensitive and as great as I think he is if he weren't that way, if things didn't impact on him in a way perhaps much stronger than they do on a lot of us. After the movie's over, and if people like it, I think for five minutes he feels great, and then of course he's tortured because he has to go make another movie and top it.