Maslin: What has to happen to "Gangs of New York" for it to be marketable?

You know, I don't know; I never understood enough about the money. I just know that this was a tough one to make. We all made sacrifices. I put most of my salary in the picture, for the first time in my life. I believed in it that way.

[Question from the audience]: What do you think about your films' influence on America's fascination with the gangster, and the popularity of television shows like "The Sopranos"?

Well, the fascination with the gangster is interesting. I have to tell you, when I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, I was part of a world that had that as an element.

Maslin: I think you once said, "If I can buy toothpaste for 19 cents from a fellow on a truck, instead of buying it for 50 cents ..."

Oh, yeah. That was the thing. Hey, you know, sometimes my mother would ask, "Hey, what fell off the truck today?" Not that she's a thief, but you buy it. "Yellow sweaters! Hey, look what the guys got off the truck," you know, and you bring it around. You gotta beat the system somehow. They were not educated. A lot of the Sicilians, the Italian-Americans, were very, very suspicious about government and church. That's one of the reasons they ran away from Sicily. They certainly weren't going to, you know, put themselves in the hands of an American police force. You have to understand the cultural issues there. They wouldn't trust it. Just basically stayed with the family and everything else. And so for the first, and into the second generation, I think, it was difficult to get them to understand about taking advantage of America, the opportunity for education, which gives you power, makes you move and that sort of thing.

I never thought the things that I put on film could've been put on film when I was growing up. Despite the fact that you had the majority of the people down there [in Manhattan's Little Italy, where Scorsese grew up] being hardworking, working-class families, going to the garment district and coming back, you know. They were not underworld characters, the majority were really good, decent people. But it's that odd combination of knowing people and liking them, and then finding out later what they did. Or knowing some people and not liking them, and finding out what it was they did.

You never brought a camera into where I grew up; you weren't allowed to bring a camera. A motion picture camera, forget it. That would be outrageous. And then for "Who's That Knocking at My Door?" [1968], I was able to shoot [in the neighborhood] a little bit, and in "Mean Streets" very, very little; but my father had to talk to certain people to make sure.

But right after that, right around the time I helped Dean Tavoularis look for locations for "The Godfather" in my neighborhood, it started to pay off then, you see. They went into a couple of places in the Lower East Side, they paid the olive oil factory we found. St. Patrick's old cathedral, they shot the interior of the baptism of "The Godfather" in there. After that, the church had a little money and they fixed it up and that sort of thing. So it started to become: "Hey, we could be friendly to the outside world." They could let us in. I think "The Godfather" changed that, to a certain extent. But "The Godfather" deals with a very patrician level of the underworld, in a way.

Could you have ever imagined this turning into America's favorite television character?

No, no. No, that I can't imagine.

Have you ever watched "The Sopranos"?

No, not really. I saw one show a long time ago. I liked it. The actors are good and everything. Some of the actors I've worked with, they're really great. A number of friends of mine are real fans of it.

That period, by the way ... The films I made, "Mean Streets" and "Goodfellas" and even elements of "Raging Bull" -- because the whole thing is not about the underworld -- they're of a time and place, the 1940s and 1950s, early 1960s. I mean, "Mean Streets" is really about 1960 to '63. I shot it in the '70s, but it really is earlier. Like the girl groups, Phil Spector. It really was that sound right before the Beatles hit. And that way of life doesn't exist anymore anywhere.

I think "The Sopranos" is interesting, because it's modern, isn't it? It's a modern thing. New Jersey and they've got long hair and stuff. I mean, you know, it was a different thing. I'm used to the camel-hair coats and that sort of thing. I don't think I could ever do a film about that world now, what it's become.

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