Street caught up with legends Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio and Sir Ben Kingsley to discuss their new film, Shutter Island
Street: How did you approach this film, and what drew you to the material? Martin Scorsese: I think I just tried to approach it from my own reaction to reading the material. I sort of gave myself to the material along with the actors; I didn’t quite know where we would be at any given time, and I think we discovered this as we went along, at least for myself. In other words, it was a process of discovery throughout, and that includes the editing of the picture.
Leonardo DiCaprio: Once we started to unravel who this man was, and his past, and what he had been through, and the nature of what was going on on Shutter Island, I think it took us to places that there’s no way we could have foreseen. It got darker and darker and more emotionally intense than we ever expected.
And that was the real surprise I think for both of us making this movie. We felt surprised at the depth of the material, because a lot of this film is very much being publicized as and is, you know, a thriller in a lot of ways, with a surprise ending or with terrifying elements to it, and very much a genre piece.
But at the end of the day it is what Martin Scorsese does best, and that is portraying something about humanity, and human nature and who we are as people. And that’s what makes it stand out and makes it different than just being a normal genre piece, to me anyway.
Sir Ben Kingsley: I think stemming from Marty, there was another vital ingredient to this character-driven piece, because the miracle of filmmaking is that actually you make something out of nothing. There’s nothing there at all. And then our collective imaginations create something that fill cinemas which is I think extraordinary.
It is in a sense a love story; Marty directs like a lover. Everything is held together by affection, affection for his craft, affection for his actors, affection for his crew, affection for the material and affection for the great journey of cinema in our lives. And what you perhaps don’t see on the page, and even when we were reading it together in the hotel room, Leo and I and Mark [Ruffalo], what did emerge was an extraordinary level of tenderness between the characters. [...] That is an ingredient that you can’t rehearse, you can’t anticipate, is always surprising, and can only be brought to film by the director.
Street: The film draws upon many different genres. How did you approach the film’s visual style?
MS: I think the trappings of the story — doctor and his hospital, the patients, the island, a storm, two detectives, an escaped patient — automatically brings to mind certain genres, certain images that go back several hundred years. And so I had all this to draw upon.
The issue was ultimately to have them work for our story and our characters, and at the same time refer to other material, other films, other, as you may say, genres, in the past. In other words I think the more you see the past, the more you can draw upon that and the more you can make the present and the future.
It’s how you process the past, and often times in the picture there are references to certain imagery from certain pictures and certain novels. But is that literal? On the one hand it’s a reference to that type of storm; a shot of a mansion at night in a storm creates certain reactions, because that’s part of our DNA to a certain extent in film. But what does it mean to our story, what’s the angle to use, what’s the camera angle, what’s the use of music there that relates to our story that doesn’t at all refer to the cliche of a genre, let’s say. And this is part of the elements of the visuals.
Street: Teddy was a very emotionally complex character. How were you able to find the clarity to play this role?
LD: The clarity comes from research. I’ll say in reference to shooting in a mental ward on an island, obviously mental illness was thematic in this movie. We were surrounded by it every day. I mean we were around dilapidated walls of an old mental institution. We actually had somebody who was there sort of guiding us through the history of mental illness, the past ways of treating it, the different forms of treatment.
And as far as the emotional depths of the character, it was like a giant jigsaw puzzle, and the more we started to unearth and peel back the onion of who this guy was and what happened to him in the past, [...] we realized to explain one set of circumstances, we needed to go even further with another set of circumstances. And for one thing to be believable, we needed to push another story line even further.
Street: Our perceptions of the characters fluctuate throughout the film. How were you able to portray this while also maintaining some consistency?
LD: Very simply put, it was a very difficult character to take on in that respect. Obviously this film depends on you not knowing where you’re at in any given situation. And so with that in mind, every day on set was a challenge for me, how much I let on as far as what Teddy was really going through. But a lot of it started to become a lot more natural when I got to work over a long period of time with the other actors.
BK: I think it’s life and art. When you have a great working environment provided by Marty, one of the blessings of working under his love and guidance is that whatever you offer the camera, he will see every single scrap. He doesn’t miss anything. The slightest movement of your eyebrow and elbow, an inflection of a certain word, everything is noticed, everything is gathered. You don’t sentimentalize your performance, you don’t embellish your performance. The environment forces you to be utterly dependent between “action” and “cut,” because the environment is perfect.
