MOVIES : Celebrating Suffering : Martin Scorsese has really cranked up the adrenaline on ‘Cape Fear,’ but the director’s feast of fear, sin, guilt and revenge isn’t what he’d call a remake

Martin Scorsese interrupts his remarks on the subject of fear and guilt and lies, and suddenly addresses the tape recorder: “Audiences planning to see the movie--when you read this, don’t listen to all that. It’s a picture about a man who wants revenge, and it’s a lot of fun.”

The picture that has occasioned this plea from its impassioned director is “Cape Fear.” The man who wants revenge is played by Robert De Niro--with Jessica Lange, Nick Nolte and young Juliette Lewis as the attractive victims he relentlessly pursues.

We’re about halfway through lunch, and the salmon and lentils Scorsese has been picking at seem already transformed into pure adrenaline. Silhouetted against one of those ambiguous Manhattan November skies, wearing a gray shirt open at the collar and a very well-cut black jacket, Scorsese looks pale, intense, compact, somehow at once friendly and ready to spring.

He talks faster than most human beings can think, trying to figure all the angles as he races along. The sum of the angles, of course, is the rich sensibility forged of the explosive Italian-American, Lower East Side life of the ‘40s, rock ‘n’ roll street culture of the ‘50s, aspirations to priestdom in the ‘60s, and then New York University Film School, cinema buffdom, Hollywood in the early ‘70s, and ensuing dramas, temptations and ordeals.

Scorsese’s career over the last two decades seems a map of the tribulations that must be endured by an American director who is compelled to make personal movies. Buffeted by Hollywood fashions and vagaries, forced to squander his energies in often futile quests for money, at the mercy of fickle word-of-mouth, he has nevertheless continued to make idiosyncratic films. Some Scorsese films--”Mean Streets” and “Raging Bull,” for instance--have come to be considered extraordinary documents of American culture. He explains his steadfastness: “You have to keep your own course.”

His work grapples with crises of the soul. In his movies there usually lies a moral contradiction in the hero’s heart: the hood who wants to be good in “Mean Streets,” the champion boxer who needs his opponents to defeat him in “Raging Bull,” the crazed vet in “Taxi Driver” who believes he can right injustice with violence, and, of course, the saintly yet flawed and insufficient Jesus of “The Last Temptation of Christ.”

There seems no stereotype Scorsese fears to defy, including that of himself as a master of only urban-jungle films. Yes, he did last year’s brilliant take on the Mafia, “GoodFellas,” but years before that was “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” He hopes one day to make a Western. “I don’t want to do a neurotic Western,” he says. “What I’d love to do is a Western where you’d be able to do a big landscape. Of course I’d still be shooting people in bars and long halls.”

And as if an ultimate proof of his versatility were necessary, his next project is a film version of Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence,” a novel of aristocratic Manhattan life in the 19th Century that Scorsese calls “a costume piece.” But that story, too, has its tormented hero.

To many of his fans, Scorsese is a one-man passion play, a stylist, a truth-teller, a populist, an aesthete, an ethicist.

He’s talking about guilt, fear, and all that is suppressed in families because this constitutes the added “layer” that enabled him to undertake a remake of the 1962 thriller that featured Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum. He had resisted the “Cape Fear” project, first developed by Steven Spielberg, for a long time. “What happened is, I finally started to listen to Steve and De Niro. I was down in TriBeCa one night and they finally forced me to read the script. I had read it twice before and I was very busy with ‘GoodFellas’ and with a lot of other personal things going on and I couldn’t focus on it. And it’s like, ‘Cape Fear’? A remake? Who wants to be bothered? This is insane.

“Finally I went to watch a reading of the script. Halfway through it I kind of zoned out. . . . There were about eight of us at the table and I finally told Steve, ‘I don’t like the people. I don’t like the family. I just don’t like it. I just don’t like the script.’ He said (Scorsese mimics Spielberg in a deep voice), ‘Well, Marty, if you don’t like it you know you can change it.’ ”

The way Scorsese changed it was to transform the happy family (something he says Spielberg knows how to film) into an unhappy family (something he knows how to film), a family that was “already wounded” from the inside--by the father’s infidelities, the mother’s anger and the child’s withdrawal--before it is threatened from the outside by the ex-con determined to destroy them.

Scorsese saw the De Niro character, the deranged and self-righteous rapist whose murderous grudge against his former attorney (Nolte) propels the movie, as “capable of anything . . . he ultimately represents more than revenge, he represents the individual and collective fear and guilt of the family” he threatens; he represents a universal terror “that can’t be suppressed.”

“That’s what we wanted to get at. Real evil. Like Satan uses the truth, so the ex-con twists the mind. He twists the truth, but he uses it. You can tell a great lie, if 80% is the truth.”

The director could go with this theme for hours, it

seems. But he suddenly pulls back, fork poised in midair, to address his potential audience via the tape recorder, with a message that reduces his new film to its essential, and presumably most commercial elements. (“It’s a picture about a man who wants revenge.”) It’s as if he’s learned the lesson not to be solemn or no one will go to see the movie. (“And it’s a lot of fun.”)

There’s a lot riding on “Cape Fear.”

When the reviews are in, will Scorsese still be seen as one of a small group of staunch, talented holdouts against the tide of Hollywood schlock?

“Cape Fear” also awaits another verdict: How big an audience will it draw?

The advance buzz is enthusiastic but Scorsese is no stranger to nasty surprises. Following the successes of “Mean Streets,” “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” and “Taxi Driver” in the early ‘70s (a decade now thought of by some directors and critics as “the second golden age” of Hollywood), he fell victim to a new national mood and his own personal excesses. His Hollywood stock dropped precipitously with the curious musical “New York, New York,” and his semi-documentary of the final tour of the Band, “The Last Waltz.” His descent was epitomized by a 1978 hospital stay that has since become legendary as the young director’s crucible of drugs and despair.

His rescue should have come with “Raging Bull” in 1980, but despite many admiring reviews, it was a big box-office disappointment. “The King of Comedy,” released in 1983, seemed to confirm Scorsese as a box-office disaster--although he points out that “King of Comedy” wound up as No. 10 on American Film magazine’s list of the best films of the 1980s. “Raging Bull” was No. 1.

Soon thereafter, Scorsese felt his career had been pulled out from under him. Financing was withdrawn from his project-in-progress, “The Last Temptation of Christ.” This is the crisis thought of by Scorsese as his own spiritual nadir.

“It was like somebody hitting me in the solar plexus and not catching my breath for another three months. It was painful. Terrible. There were a few people who cared but they couldn’t do anything about it.”

Where others might be bitter, Scorsese made a spiritual and practical comeback. “Temptation” was eventually finished, but received mixed notices. It would not be until “GoodFellas” that Scorsese would be rehabilitated in critics’ eyes. The movie was a best-picture Oscar contender last year, losing out to the box-office darling “Dances With Wolves.”

For him, a “Cape Fear” triumph would be the culmination of a trajectory out of the pit he reached when the financing of “Last Temptation” collapsed.

The first step was a brutal evaluation of his options. “Three months of realizing they don’t want you and they don’t care. And you’re washed up and finished with all the rest of them,” he remembers painfully.

Scorsese decided then he was going to learn to work within the rules of Hollywood, rendering unto Hollywood Caesars their due: He was willing to work on a tight budget and yield some authority to backers.

“So, OK, I said. What would I do if I weren’t allowed to make movies anymore? I’d still make movies. And I’d make them even if I didn’t have the control over them, no final cut, I’d make them. So I tried to combine a personal style without having the final cut.” ’

He agreed to make a segment of “Amazing Stories,” with Steven Spielberg’s television series. “We shot it in six days, with no final cut. It was the network’s. In fact, they changed the ending.”

Scorsese says he saw the TV project “as an exercise to see if I’d still be even remotely happy doing something that wasn’t mine or that didn’t belong to me as a filmmaker.”

From that successful exercise came his resolve to accept “After Hours,” a small, hip feature with Griffin Dunne and Rosanna Arquette.

Scorsese says, “I thought, well, this is really the kind of script I should make. It’s not part of the Hollywood product, it’s a different thing.”

He made it tightly scripted on an amazing schedule. Then, he says, “we did the same thing with stars” in “The Color of Money,” a box-office success for which Paul Newman received the best actor Oscar, forcing Hollywood to take respectful notice again. And he finally made even “The Last Temptation of Christ,” using the same methodology.

Scorsese disciplined himself so thoroughly that by the time he made “GoodFellas,” the script was so polished that the “shooting was almost an afterthought.”

At last, Scorsese seems poised to to make both art and money. For his fans, those who have been rooting for him since “Mean Streets” and “Raging Bull,” “Cape Fear” is the movie that will perhaps bridge the gap between brilliant auteur and popular director, the gap between individualism and Hollywood’s unqualified approval, the gap between cinema and movies.

Scorsese cares about the Oscar thing. He says he remembers himself “as a young kid watching (the awards on) television.” And he admits “there are still certain things psychologically that ring a bell. Even though you know that the Oscar is for a certain type of picture--you still want that kind of acceptance.

“I would have liked a career like John Ford’s. He got five Academy Awards. But look at the films that Ford made. They trace the history of America. He was the perfect filmmaker for that. I would have loved to have the recognition of the Academy on that level, but what do you do? My films aren’t as embraceable as ‘Grapes of Wrath’ or ‘How Green Was My Valley’ or ‘Young Mr. Lincoln.’ ”

Scorsese even says he likes Los Angeles. “I lived in Hollywood 12 years. Well, 11 years. Every time I talk to somebody it goes up a year, I’m sorry. Without going to Hollywood there would have been no career, because that’s how I met Roger Corman. And Roger gave me ‘Boxcar Bertha’ (his first commercial feature). That’s how I met Jonathan Taplin and we put together ‘Mean Streets.’ ” But New York is his town.

Filming in Florida, he half-jokes, “was one of the reasons I didn’t want to make ‘Cape Fear.’ ” He unrolls an anecdote about putting down his director’s chair on the very first shoot and then when he picked it up again there were ants, thousands of red ants, which had bitten his ankles. “You feel that bite about three days,” Scorsese explains with the sincere horror of a New Yorker.

And then there was the problem of all that water, in the dazzling and terrifying ending of the film. Though the cameraman used a wet suit, Scorsese stayed on shore and used a video monitor. When he had to talk to the actors, they’d put out gangplanks or he’d go out in a boat.

Lunch is over. Scorsese stops talking so a photographer can work. As I look at him sitting still and good for the camera, I am reminded of a photo taken of him in 1951 for his first Communion, when he was a little boy living on Elizabeth Street who loved movies and wanted to grow up and be a priest. Big bow under the chin, serious look, sensuous mouth. There’s something wrong with this picture: The eyes don’t match the posture. The posture is of a little boy trying to be good. The eyes are too lively.

I ask a final question. He’s often been quoted as saying that “Raging Bull” represented the working out of a personal crisis. Is there a parallel now? What does “Cape Fear” represent?

Scorsese hesitates: “I’m not a philosopher, I’m not a theologian, I’m not a politician.”

“You’re something of a theologian,” I say. “Maybe the other two as well.”

He laughs, then allows that maybe what “Cape Fear” is about is suffering. “I really believe that suffering is a thing people have to go through to be redeemed in life. Some may never. Some will, some won’t. . . . One needs a sense of a spiritual in life. I really believe that.

“And from our culture in the early ‘80s on to now I think the emphasis has become the worst possible kind of materialism. You make a lot of money. You spend it. And then what? You still feel funny when you go to sleep. You still wake up. You still have a chill when you think about dying and the void. Don’t you?

“You know, when I talk like that I sound like Jeremiah.” He laughs. “I get like really Old Testament. . . .”

“You mean this movie is really like a wages-of-sin document?”

“For me it is. That’s part of my idea of the guilt.”

It seems more than materialism that Scorsese is expiating. What was the sin? Perhaps he knows. Perhaps it is merely generic sin, the original sin viewed through either a Catholic or a Freudian eye, or merely the sin of feeling human, divided, confused, askew, disoriented, defiant, willfully humble and vulnerable in the America of the ‘90s.