Howard's end: Scorsese and 'The Aviator' | Interviews

More to the point, I thought, was the movie before that, "Bringing Out the Dead" (1999), with Nicolas Cage as an ambulance driver in Hell's Kitchen. This I thought was a brilliant film, a descent into the underworld. "But it failed at the box office," Scorsese said, "and was rejected by a lot of the critics."

I was astonished by its energy and dark vision, by its portrait of a man venturing nightly into hell to rescue the dying and the damned. "I had 10 years of ambulances," he said. "My parents, in and out of hospitals. Calls in the middle of the night. I was exorcising all of that. Those city paramedics are heroes -- and saints, they're saints. I grew up next to the Bowery, watching the people who worked there, the Salvation Army, Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement, all helping the lost souls. They're the same sort of people."

Saints, I said. A lot of saints in your films.

"Despite everything, I keep thinking I can find a way to lead the spiritual life," he said. "When I made 'The Last Temptation of Christ,' when I made 'Kundun,' I was looking for that. 'Bringing Out the Dead' was the next step. Time is moving by. I'm aware of that."

Do you still read all the time, and watch movies all the time?

"Both of them, all of the time. On our top floor, I have a projection room, a big screen, I'm always watching something, and my daughter's bedroom is at the other end of the hall. She knocks on the door: 'Daddy, turn the movie down!' It's supposed to be the daddy who tells the kid to turn down the noise. And reading. George Eliot. All of Melville -- everything he wrote. I'm fascinated by whale boats, but I'm afraid of a picture on the water, so many technical problems. Then I got sidetracked by Ovid, and he took me back to Propertius."

He spells "Propertius" for me.

"You gotta read Propertius."

The movies? He sighed. "It's almost like I've seen enough of some of the old films. 'Citizen Kane,' it's a masterpiece, I'm in awe of it, but I know it. I know it. It comes up on TV, I don't stop. Now 'The Trial,' by Welles, 'Touch of Evil,' I'll stop and watch. And music. Leadbelly. If you sit through all the credits after 'The Aviator,' we play a song written and performed by Leadbelly:

Get up in the morning/Put on your shoes/Read about/Howard Hughes.

"He wrote that. Leadbelly wrote that."

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