Free Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert by Roger Ebert Page A

with Face to Face, and begin work on next year's screenplay.
    Copies will go out soon to Sven and Katinka and the others of the eighteen friends, and to the actors he has chosen to use this time. The female lead will probably be played by Liv, although Bibi was in The Touch and Ingrid and Harriet j oined Liv in Cries and Whispers. The male lead may be Erland, although Max von Sydow, who has been in eleven of Bergman's films, is said to be eager to return to Stockholm again after several pictures overseas. Shooting will begin in the late spring and early summer, and editing will follow in the fall.

    "I think I have ten years left," Bergman had said at the close of the interview.
    "There's a deal, sort of," Katinka Farago had said, speaking of Bergman's relationship with the people he makes films with. "One may get offers to work on other pictures ... but one doesn't take another picture without asking Ingmar first. He pays what the others pay; it's not a question of money. But there is no one else like him."

     

INTRODUCTION
    artin Scorsese and Paul Schrader come from different backgrounds, Scorsese from Catholicism and Little Italy, Schrader from Grand Rapids and the Dutch Reformed church. Both have highly developed ideas of sin and guilt. "Movies were forbidden," Schrader told me. "I saw my first movie when I was seventeen years old. It was The Million Dollar Duck. I walked out and thought, I can make a better movie than that."
    I was the first person to review a Scorsese film in print. That was I Call First, later retitled Who's That Knocking at My Door, at the 1967 Chicago Film Festival. He telephoned me, and when I was in New York we hung out. I mention those early meetings in the introduction to this book. I consider him one of the greatest filmmakers of his generation. He is unequaled in his fascination with film itself, which he views without ceasing, restores, and studies; he has made documentaries about the American and Italian film heritage. I mentioned Renoir's The River to him after viewing his personal print at the Virginia Film Festival. "I watch it three times a year," he said. "At least three times."
    One of my great experiences, also at Virginia, was doing a shot-byshot analysis of Raging Bull with Thelma Schoonmaker, his lifelong editor (and Michael Powell's widow). You might think you could learn all about a film by viewing it shot by shot with its director, but having had that experience with Schoonmaker, and having done shot-by-shot analysis at the Hawaii festival with the cinematographers Owen Roizman, Allen Daviau, Haskell Wexler, and Hiro Narita, I know that the editors and cinematographers know where the bodies are buried.

    MARCH 7, 1976
    I met Martin Scorsese for the first time in 1969, when he was an editor on Woodstock. He was one of the most intense people I'd ever known-a compact, nervous kid out of New York's Little Italy who'd made one feature film and had dreams of becoming a big-time director one day. It would take him five years.
    The first feature was Who's That Knocking at My Door, the major discovery of the 1967 Chicago Film Festival. It was the semiautobiographical story of an Italian American youth coming of age; it won praise and prizes for Scorsese, but didn't do any business, and he supported himself with editing, teaching, and odd jobs. The night I met him, we went to Little Italy and drank Bardolino wine and he talked about projects he was being offered.
    He finally took one of them-a Roger Corman exploitation picture called Boxcar Bertha-because he needed to direct again. "Corman thinks it's an exploitation picture," Scorsese told me, "but I think it'll be something else." He was right; his talent made the film, which starred Barbara Hershey and David Carradine, better than it had to be.
    The movie got him more work. In 1973, on a small budget but with total artistic freedom, he made Mean Streets, a sequel to Who's That Knocking. It was a ferocious, painful, deeply felt