In 2002, I was attending a screening of Howard Hawks’s “The Big Sky’’ at the inaugural Tribeca Film Festival when a short, bespectacled, intense man unexpectedly emerged from backstage. Choosing not to introduce himself — could anyone there not know who he was? — he launched into an erudite, triple-speed endorsement and explication of Hawks’s little-seen comic Western. And who wouldn’t want to have Martin Scorsese introduce any film they were watching?
“Conversations with Scorsese,’’ by noted film critic and historian Richard Schickel, is a continuation of that impromptu introduction. It is not a memoir — hardly any of Scorsese’s personal life seeps in — nor is it a biography, with Schickel, as questioner, treading gingerly around awkward lines of inquiry. Those of us used to hearing Scorsese’s rapid-fire patter — a product of his childhood asthma — may feel as if something of the director’s trademark breathlessness is lost in the translation to the page, but the director of “Taxi Driver’’ and “Raging Bull’’ is nothing if not a product of his enthusiasms, no matter the medium.
As a child, Scorsese’s father took him regularly to the movies, so theaters, along with churches and libraries, became refuges from the searing intensity of the streets of Manhattan’s Little Italy for the bookish boy. For Scorsese, even as a child, the neighborhood took on a cinematic tint. “[W]hen I looked out the window some mornings the light would be beautiful; other mornings it was dirty and filthy,’’ he remembers. “So in other words, what we consider noir images is what I grew up with.’’
His cinematic connection to home would serve as powerful inspiration. “I’m always interested in people who lose their world,’’ Scorsese notes of films like “Kundun,’’ “The Age of Innocence,’’ and “Goodfellas,’’ and the same could be said of the director himself, who spent much of his career documenting and preserving on film the ways of a working-class Italian-American world then in the process of disappearing.
Scorsese is nothing if not devoted to the movies. He tells Schickel how he nearly went bankrupt financing his dream project, “The Last Temptation of Christ.’’ He then proceeded to make the same mistake again, pouring much of his own money into 2002’s “Gangs of New York.’’ Scorsese’s devotion to film clearly extends well beyond the financial. In discussing his own work, his love and knowledge of the world of film are on display. The “Psycho’’ shower scene inspired the Sugar Ray Robinson fight in “Raging Bull,’’ with Robinson’s glove standing in for Norman Bates’s knife. The palette of “The Aviator’’ changes with the passage of time in order to follow the progression of color in American film, from two-strip to three-strip to Technicolor.
As Scorsese’s running buddy, interlocutor, and interrogator, Schickel must thread the needle between what readers want to hear and what Scorsese wants to discuss. The name of would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley, who was obsessed with “Taxi Driver,’’ never appears here, nor does any mention of Scorsese’s well-documented drug problems. Schickel and Scorsese tiptoe past potential minefields, discussing Jack Nicholson’s performance in “The Departed’’ at length while only obliquely acknowledging the diminution in the once-great actor’s work. Taking the book’s title at face value, Schickel is less interviewer than conversationalist, interjecting his own opinions on everything from “Mean Streets’’ to organized religion. The effect can be irritating until we realize that “Conversations with Scorsese’’ is intended to be just that: a conversation between equals.
In these conversations, recorded around the filming of 2010’s “Shutter Island,’’ there is a sense that Scorsese is once more at a career crossroads, unsure of whether to pour himself into more elaborate productions like “The Departed’’ and “The Aviator,’’ or transition into a second career as a documentarian in the vein of superlative recent pictures like “Bob Dylan: No Direction Home’’ and “Public Speaking.’’ Having passed the baton to successors like Quentin Tarantino, Scorsese has lost his taste for the bloody mayhem that once defined his work. “The last statement on that way of life and that world is the killing in the cornfield,’’ Scorsese says, referring to the horrific end of Joe Pesci’s character in 1995’s “Casino.’’
“At my age, having gone through what I have [with the major studios], I don’t know whether it’s worth it anymore.’’ The indefatigable director is tired, and yet every page of “Conversations with Scorsese’’ belies his own conclusion, revealing an energy and enthusiasm for the medium undimmed.
Saul Austerlitz is the author of “Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy.’’ 
