Shutter Island: From Lehane To Scorsese

Even more so than Lehane’s novel, which the author has said was inspired in part by his love of B movies, the screenplay brought to mind a pantheon of classic Hollywood movies, including Otto Preminger’s identity-shifting mystery Laura and Sam Fuller’s mental asylum exposé Shock Corridor. 

It was clear that doing it justice would require a director of particularly deep cinematic knowledge and an abiding love of psychological interplay. 
 
The first name that came to Fischer’s mind was Academy Award®-winning director Martin Scorsese.  It was on a wing and a prayer that the Phoenix executives approached the prolific, almost-always engaged director because they assumed that, fresh off his Best Director Oscar® win for the electrifying crime thriller The Departed, he would be a long shot. 

But their timing couldn’t have been better. Scorsese was not only available but passionate about the style and themes of Shutter Island. When Phoenix sent him the script, he was in the thick of narrating the documentary Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, a documentary about the distinctive creative force behind such hugely influential and wondrously ominous 1940s RKO horror films as Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie. 

Scorsese was in the mood for a modern take on existentially-complicated terror. "Marty was attracted to the idea of taking on a Gothic horror tale that’s shrouded in shadow and mystery," Fischer explains. 

"He jumped on the idea and his excitement was enormous from the get-go. When I got the call from Marty’s agent saying he wanted to direct Shutter Island, he told me, ‘Marty says it reminds him of this old German movie called,called...’  While he tried to recall the title, I happened to be staring across my office at a framed poster of the very film, one of my favorites, a classic silent from the Expressionist era of German cinema.  ’He said it reminded him of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,’ I suggested.  ‘Yes,’ the agent shouted.  ‘That’s it!’"

Fischer continues: "Learning that the script evoked for Marty thoughts of the same old Weimar-period horror film that it did for me was overwhelming.  Yet, I wasn’t surprised.  The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a film that always bore some similarities in my mind to Shutter Island. 

"It’s a film that Marty admires and one of many he would reference throughout shooting.  From this point, things started moving very quickly.  The things Marty saw in the story and all the levels he found in the material made the project so much richer than any of us had ever imagined."

Scorsese says it was his first read of the Shutter Island script that hooked him. "I didn’t know anything about the story and I started reading it at about 10:30 at night and I needed to go to bed because I had to get up early the next day, but I found I could not put the script down and was constantly surprised by the different levels of the story," he recalls.

He felt an instant link to the story’s mix of classic thriller genres, from shadowy noir to boldface horror. "This is the type of picture I like to watch, the kind of story I like to read," Scorsese explains. 

"Over the years, I think I’ve stayed away from certain kinds of pictures that emulate the style that I find nurturing in a way, but these are the kinds of films I go back to and view repeatedly. 

"I’ve always been drawn to this sort of story. What’s interesting to me is how the story keeps changing, and the reality of what’s happening keeps changing, and how up until the very final scene, it’s all about how the truth is perceived."

He continues: "But more than the way the story is told or the setting, for me, it’s really about what happens to the character of Teddy, which I found to be very moving.  That was the emotional connection."

Scorsese’s approach utilized the noir-like surfaces of Kalogridis’ adaptation to get at the deeper micro-dynamics and psychological machinations of the characters, fusing richly cinematic visuals with underlying emotions to lure the audience out on a thrillingly fragile edge along with Teddy Daniels. 

Right from the start of production, the director inspired cast and crew with a series of nighttime screenings of films, both legendary and obscure, that touched upon the themes and styles woven through Shutter Island.

Among Scorsese’s choices were Preminger’s Laura; Jacques Tourneur’s 1947 dark noir tale of double-crosses, Out of the Past; Edward Dmytryk’s 1947 thriller Crossfire, about the murder of a Jewish soldier after WWII; Nicholas Ray’s 1952 police drama On Dangerous Ground; Karl Malden’s 1957 directorial debut, Time Limit, an intensely psychological courtroom drama about an American soldier facing a court martial; Orson Welles’ 1963 The Trial, the screen adaptation of Franz Kafka’s surreal tale of a man inexplicably detained for an unknown crime; John Huston’s wartime documentaries San Pietro and Let There Be Light, the latter about returning soldiers suffering from what was then dubbed 'shell shock'; influential horror films including Robert Wise’s The Haunting and Jack Clayton’s The Innocents; and several of the Val Lewton films so essential to Scorsese’s appreciation of the horror thriller genre, including the shadowy The Seventh Victim, about a woman searching for her missing sister amidst a Satanic cult. 

An essential documentary was also included in the lineup: Frederick Wiseman’s controversial and, at one time, banned 1967 movie exploring the treatment of inmates at a hospital for the criminally insane called Titicut Follies, which gave the cast and crew a harrowing insight into what asylums were really like in the ‘50s and ‘60s, before modern reforms improved conditions and made patients’ rights a priority. 

Set inside the Massachusetts Correctional Institute for the Criminally Insane at Bridgewater, the film unflinchingly depicted a treatment facility in which patients were stripped naked, chained to their cell walls, force-fed and deprived of basic human dignity.  The film would have a major impact. 

Soon after its release, public outrage was so widespread that a class-action suit was brought against Bridgewater, which in turn led to permanent changes in the way state institutions were run across the country. 

"Watching Titicut Follies allowed the cast and crew to see firsthand the kind of world the film would be portraying," notes Fischer. "It was a very powerful experience for all of us."

Shutter Island is released 12th March

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