To me though, this is actually the watershed film for me concerning Scorsese vis-a-vis Spielberg.
The fact was that Spielberg was supposed to direct the Cape Fear remake, but he ended up being an uncredited Executive Producer which basically means that either he or his name financed the film for Scorsese. Now, to me, this is easily the most Spielbergian film (stylistically) which Scorsese has ever made, but if you actually check Marty's subsequent filmography, he tried to make a couple of what would seem to be "earlier Scorsese personal" flicks, but afterwards, he seemed to gravitate more and more told Spielbergian populist films. The main reason I mention this is that people seem to set up some kind of wall between Scorsese and Spielberg, and I never really thought it mattered before the remake, and I think it matters no more now, although I never hear it discussed at all, and it's a worthwhile discussion. The Scorsese is an artiste and Spielberg is a hack dichotomy is BS and always has been, but you cannot help but get a backlash when people hate successful people, whether their "success" is artistic or monetary.
I don't know why you've made
Cape Fear a Spielberg vs. Scorsese THING, but the two men personally and professionally certainly have no gripes with each other and consider the other a friend. I think for critics or film fans using Scorsese and Spielberg as a contrast is easy if only because they were the first Film School generation and both started in the industry at the same time. But other than what some may foist on them in that respect, there's no real line of demarcation there.
As for how Marty became involved and how he changed the script, here's a bit from
Scorsese on Scorsese...
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SCORSESE: Spielberg was originally going to direct the film and the script I first read was written for him. It was more black and white than I could accept. For instance, the family was happy, sitting round the piano singing - the kind of thing Steven could do genuinely quite well because he believes in it. And the scene in the theatre between De Niro and Juliette Lewis, which I eventually played as a seduction, was originally written as a scary scene. Max was chasing the girl through the basement and classrooms of the school, and finally she was hanging onto a shade on a windowsill which she was breaking. She didn't fall into his arms but was saved by someone else. This was based on the scene in the original film where it's ultimately the janitor and not Mitchum who's coming after her.
It would have been a real tour de force Spielberg chase, but although I like seeing that kind of filmmaking, I would have been bored trying to do it. So we started to work on that scene in the theatre and built the film out from it. For me this is still the most upsetting scene. We were playing on the idea of evil being attractive and dangerous. Max uses uses logic and emotion and psychology very much the way Satan speaks in the Bible. I know a couple women friends who said that they had similar experiences of being attracted first to a dangerous character. He destroys what little respect and trust Danielle has left for her father.
The other level is that the weakness in the family is almost begging for someone to come in and disrupt it even further. It colors their judgment and they make mistakes. You even begin to think that maybe Max
is telling the truth. Because of their malaise, their disappointment with their lives, they are more susceptible to what he's saying, and to some extent Max has actually been created by Sam, because Sam made an ethical mistake. But what interests me is that anyone with a feeling of compassion would have been tempted to do the same thing, to let Max serve fourteen years in jail.
The way I saw Max, which may not be how Bob [De Niro] or [screenwriter] Wesley saw him, was that he becomes the collective guilt of the family. So when Bob had the idea that he wanted to be under the car, an entity which is almost unstoppable, like The Terminator, it fitted perfectly with my idea that they would never get rid of this guilt however far they ran, until they confronted it. What I tried to do is make Max's transition as emotionally and psychologically real to the apocalyptic ending, and the scene under the car is the key to this, and it should be audacious. Immediately before it, the movie begins anew when we cut to the sign that says 'Cape Fear'.
I think it's best if you see my version and the original
Cape Fear as well, maybe a week apart. There are many threads running between the films, with Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum and Martin Balsam, Bernard Herrmann's music, and Saul and Elaine Bass doing the titles. They didn't do the original titles, but the style of their work is extraordinary and we wanted the audience to be very aware of the lineage to this type of film. The sadness for me is that I can't make films in the old style, the studio system style, because I'm a product of a different world and society. And even if I regret the passing of the Golden Age of Hollywood and the studios, I have to remember it's a trade-off; what we lost in the past we gained in freedom in the present. Ultimately, I doubt very much I could make a true "B" film or genre film.
from Scorsese on Scorsese, 2003 revised edition
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I know I've read much more in other books, maybe the documentary on the DVD as well, but I don't feel like digging through the archives right now. The screenwriter wrote the script on commission specifically for Spielberg to direct. When Spielberg decided not to do it, Steven and DeNiro (who was already attached as Cady) asked Marty if he'd be interested. Once Scorsese became involved he went back with the screenwriter and made it much more morally ambiguous and thus darker. The original script would have been essentially
Poltergeist but with Max Cady replacing the ghosts, a nice suburban family being terrorized by a monster beyond their control, and it may well have worked as a straight-ahead thriller made by a master craftsman such as Spielberg. By making Sam Bowden culpable and the family already falling apart full of issues of their own, it changed
Cape Fear from the original quite a bit, even though the overall plot is essentially the same. All of those family dynamics and the sexual awakening of Danielle and all of that was not going to be in the Steven Spielberg vision.
I know that LOTS and lots of viewers, including plenty of professional critics, have problems with how intentionally over-the-top it all is. But as this was by design and for me goes perfectly with the amorality and the tongue-in-cheek playing with the thriller conventions, I think it all works and is a blast and a half. For anyone who takes it seriously and has a problem with the tone I try to ask, did Orson Welles do anything wildly different in terms of over-the-top characterizations or stylistic flourishes or lack of "reality" in
Touch of Evil? Now neither
Cape Fear nor
Touch of Evil are ever going to be confused for either director's best work, but if you can't enjoy them for what they are instead of what they aren't...well, your loss.
And until the success of
The Departed,
Cape Fear was by far Scorsese's most financially successful hit at the box office, and if you look at it in terms of relation to cost
Cape Fear is
still his most successful film, with a pre-advertising budget around $35-million and a worldwide box office take of close to $200-million, plus whatever they've made on TV, VHS, LD and DVD in the years since (
The Departed, The Aviator and
Gangs of New York all did decent to good box office, but they all had very high production budgets as well).
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