Kent Jones: We started this movie half a decade ago.
Martin Scorsese: We started talking about it a year or so after Kazan passed away. I wanted to make something that honored him and his place in my life and my approach to the work, but that was also honest, that reflected his honesty about himself, and I asked you to work on it with me.

KJ: You wanted to be able to express what you couldn’t express to him when he was alive…
MS: Which eventually became part of the subject of the movie. (…)

MS: The thing was to convey something about the relationship, and by that I mean my relationship to the films, and that meant going back to the way that I received them when I saw them as an adolescent.

KJ: And the distinction between your relationship with the films and your relationship with the man, and the way you saw the films when you were young and the way you see them now. (…)

MS: You don’t get interested in lms because of camera angles or editing choices. You get involved in them. You’re drawn into the world of the film and the emotional lives of the characters and the conflicts between them. You get older and more sophisticated, and you begin to understand the differences between the pictures that work and the ones that don’t, you start to understand the way films are assembled from so many elements, what direction and editing and lighting and sound design are, how they all fit together, and you develop a growing awareness that every movie is a series of choices. But then, when you make films, you come back to the understanding of what those choices are for. If you’re making narrative films, you’re dealing with emotions, conflicts, trying to build a world in which the characters come to life and the audience connects with them.

KJ: I remember you once telling me that you’ve been drawn, more and more, to simplicity, in your own work and in the movies of others.

MS: Sure, but that’s what you’re always striving for when it comes right down to it. The term “director” is kind of odd and even wrong in a way, but in one sense it’s on target: you’re directing the audience’s eye, their attention, from one moment to the next, through all kinds of means. And yes, when you look at something like the taxicab scene in On the Waterfront between Brando and Rod Steiger, you have the kind of absolute simplicity you’re aspiring to. […] Kazan, in his autobiography, says that he didn’t really “direct” the scene, he just allowed it to happen. He made some choices with Boris Kaufman, he let Brando and Steiger, who already knew their characters so intimately, interact, and it came alive. Sometimes, that’s what direction is – letting things happen, not interfering.

Kent Jones