Martin Scorsese, super genius

SCORSESE: I chose to shoot the picture in black and white. And the main reason was, at that time the color filmstock that was being used, for prints especially, would fade to pink or red between anywhere from six to twelve years. And after coming off New York, New York and realizing that New York, New York was so designed in advanced and so well laid-out we thought, in terms of art direction and costumes and - it was really a painted film, in a way. And afterwards I began to realize that the prints that people would be seeing, maybe as short a time as six or seven years later, would fade.

Another thing, [British director] Michael Powell was visiting us a great deal at the time in New York in '77 and '78. And we were doing, in '78 especially, we were doing research on Raging Bull and Bob [De Niro] would do some work in a gym, and at that time there was no videotape, or videotape was just beginning, and they took some 8mm home movies of sparring in the ring, Bob sparring with one of the stuntmen, and we projected them on the wall in my apartment on 57th Street and Michael Powell was there. We were sitting on the floor, and they were 8mm color films, and at that time, and they still do I believe, use bright red gloves. And Michael, after screening it, we were just talking about the body moves and things like that, we weren't really getting into the look of the picture, and Michael says, "There's one thing wrong," and we said what's that, he said, "the gloves, they're red." It was too definitive a color, and it began the thinking in my mind about the possibility of draining out the color, maybe. Not black and white yet, I wasn't thinking black and white yet, and we realized too that the gloves of the '40s were ox-blood, they were kind of a brown, and maybe that would help.

Then later on it was clinched when, an old friend of ours [film producer] Gene Kirkwood coming by my office and saying, "Remember The Sweet Smell of Success. Remember that: black and white, The Sweet Smell of Success." And the other main reason for shooting black and white was a certain period look or impression that it gives. And at the same time there were about four other boxing films that were coming out: The Main Event, Matilda the boxing kangaroo, I think Rocky II or III and one other boxing picture The Champ [re-make]. I think they were all in color, and I felt that this would be special because it'll be black and white, not to be confused with the other pictures. And of course the best color boxing I had seen, it was so vivid in my mind, was the one color, the beautiful three-strip technicolor, sequence in John Ford's The Quiet Man. It was very vivid.

In terms of the black and white in the film we tried to, I really wanted it to look like the tabloid, like The Daily News or at the time it used to be The Daily Mirror, too. And pretty much like Weegee photographs, we studied those. And even the texture of the clothes we took many tests, we tested the clothes in black and white, and a lot of stuff was rejected because it didn't photograph the way we thought it would.

SCHOONMAKER: The black and white in the film is so beautiful. Marty would actually like to make more films in black and white, but it's quite difficult to convince the Studios of that these days....Black and white is a medium we would all like to work in more, I think we miss it very, very much.