There’s a muzzle pressed to the back of your head. You’re suddenly forced to name Martin Scorsese’s single most underrated movie in five seconds or less. What is the first thing that comes to mind? Kundun? The Age of Innocence? Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore? Maybe The King of Comedy or After Hours? It’s a tough call, especially since the greatest living American filmmaker is so synonymous with New York crime movies like Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York, The Departed, you name it. Speaking of such flicks, one explosive charge in Scorsese’s canon always goes unnoticed, despite sharing an accoladed pedigree with Taxi Driver. That’s right, Scorsese reunited with screenwriter Paul Schrader on the criminally unheralded 1999 bleak, pitch-black crime-comedy Bringing out the Dead. The film marks the only time Scorsese worked with Nicolas Cage, Francis Ford Coppola’s nephew, who was suggested by Brian De Palma following Snake Eyes.
In addition to detailing as much of the production history as possible, it’s worth reflecting on Bringing Out the Dead as it celebrates its 25th anniversary this October to discover what inspired the movie, the challenges Scorsese and Schrader faced, what the filmmakers were trying to say, and ultimately, why the film failed to resonate among the masses when it was released in the fall of 1999. If nothing else, we encourage those who’ve never seen the movie to watch it at once and those who have seen it to revisit what is easily one of Scorsese’s best and most underappreciated in his illustrious career. Yup, it’s time to find out What Happened to Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out The Dead!
Okay, so the first thing to know about Bringing Out the Dead is that it is inspired by the 1998 debut novel of the same name by Joe Connelly. For those unaware, the story follows an embattled NYC paramedic named Frank Pierce, played with a pallid, soporific wooziness by Nicolas Cage in one of his best performances. Haunted by the horrors he’s seen on the job and the inability to save a homeless teenager, Frank’s bleary hallucinations take on a spiritual quality as he tries to atone for his past sins and find salvation. A man who’s burned the wick to the wax, Frank gets a chance to redeem himself through a woman he meets named Mary Burke, played by Cage’s real-life wife at the time, Patricia Arquette. Mary’s father is ill and admitted to a chaotic E.R. by Frank, and Mary and Frank form a bond as her father is treated for cardiac arrest.
Meanwhile, Pierce and his three crazy-colorful co-workers – Larry, Marcus, and Tom – patrol the streets of Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan at night, navigating a nocturnal hellscape populated by drug users, pushers, prostitutes, killers, rapists, and other troubled souls living in the stygian shadows of Hell’s Kitchen. Much like John Merrick the Elephant Man, Frank’s salvation is the ever-elusive sleep her needs to soothe his soul and calm his conscience. As Frank struggles to stay awake, his insomnia and drug-induced torpor blur the line between reality and a dreamy phantasmagoria. Much like Scorsese’s Cape Fear, there’s a religious undercurrent to the story, that starts with Connelly’s novel and continues with Schrader’s Calvinist upbringing.
Now on to the pre-production process. Once producer Scott Rudin acquired the rights to Connelly’s novel, he immediately considered Scorsese to translate the material to the big screen. Meanwhile, Cage expressed interest in making the movie for the chance to work with Scorsese for the first time in his career. No big shocker there. Before Cage was cast to play Frank Pierce, Schrader envisioned Edward Norton in the role as he was penning the script. Working together for the fourth time following Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Last Temptation of Christ, Scorsese sought Schrader to adapt Connelly’s novel because he felt no one was better at “writing about New York in the middle of the night.”
To prepare for writing the screenplay, Schrader rode around with real NYC paramedics and ambulance drivers to get a feel for their nightly routine and understand the various challenges they face on any given shift. According to Schrader, his first ride-along ended with witnessing a homeless man gorily sawed in half by a subway train car. Scorsese and Cage also prepared by riding with real NYC paramedics and EMTs, which helped them understand the daily challenges such first responders face.
Cage also rode with emergency responders in Los Angeles, which proved far more alarming than his NYC ridealongs. In L.A., Cage was strapped with a bulletproof vest and taken to witness the aftermath of a fatal drive-by shooting. Joe Connelly was on the set during production and acted as a technical adviser for the cast and crew, assisting Cage on the tortured psychology Frank grapples with in the film. Connelly also makes a cameo appearance in the E.R. as a catatonic patient in a brown coast wheeled across the lobby by a nurse. Scorsese also voices the radio dispatcher who comments on the action. If you never noticed, Queen Latifah voices the female dispatcher. Elsewhere, Judy Reyes, who plays an unnamed ICU nurse, would go on to star as Carla Espinoza on the hit medical sitcom Scrubs. The late great Michael K. Williams also plays a nondescript drug dealer, doing so three years before his iconic breakout role as Omar Little on The Wire. Ever the eye for talent, Scorsese is always ahead of the curve.
In a lengthy interview with film critic Roger Ebert, who gave the film a 4-star review, Scorsese immediately thought of Cage when reading Connelly’s novel. According to Scorsese:
“The first things I thought of, when I read Joe Connelly’s book, were Nic Cage’s face and his eyes. I know his films over the years. He’s inventive and he goes from an expressive style, almost like silent film, like Lon Chaney, whom he adores, to something extremely internal. So I thought immediately of Nic for this.”
In 2022, Cage told Rolling Stone that Bringing Out the Dead was one of the best movies he had ever made, a public sentiment that hopefully becomes more popular. But more on the movie’s perception later…
Strapped with a $32 million budget, principal photography on Bringing Out The Dead commenced on September 18, 1998, and lasted until January 7, 1999. Although the shoot lasted roughly four months, the film was photographed in 65 days. The majority was lensed in Hell’s Kitchen at night and early morning, with much of the action occurring on 11th Avenue and 54th Street. When promoting the film, Scorsese told Charlie Rose that roughly one-third of the film was shot inside an ambulance, mostly at night. Due to the harsh conditions and cold weather of the fall and winter shoot at long hours into the night, Scorsese also admitted to disliking the filming process throughout.
Even so, the ambulances featured in the film were personal for Scorsese, despite the story deriving from Connelly’s experience as a former NYC paramedic. As Scorsese tells Ebert:
“I had 10 years of ambulances. My parents, in and out of hospitals. Calls in the middle of the night. I was exorcising all of that. Those city paramedics are heroes — and saints, they’re saints. I grew up next to the Bowery, watching the people who worked there, the Salvation Army, and Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Movement, all helping the lost souls. They’re the same sort of people.”
Three-time Oscar-winner Robert Richardson was hired as the cinematographer, marking his second collaboration with Scorsese after Casino. Richardson has since won Academy Awards for his work on the Scorsese movies Hugo and The Aviator. Richardson also shot Shine a Light and Shutter Island for Scorsese. Although Scorsese curates a pitch-perfect soundtrack of pop needle drops, Elmer Berstein composed the Bringing Out the Dead score. Meanwhile, Production Designer Dante Ferretti was tasked with bringing the streets of New York to life at midnight, marking his fourth collaboration with Scorsese following The Age of Innocence, Casino, and Kundun. Ferretti would later win three Academy Awards, including Scorsese’s The Aviator and Hugo.
In an early scene that establishes his existential turmoil, Frank is shown failing to revive Rose, a homeless teenager. Looking closely, you’ll notice the snow rising rather than falling. This is because Scorsese opted to amplify the surreal dreamlike aspect of Frank’s haunted psyche by filming the sequence in reverse.
After admitting Mary’s father to the E.R., Frank learns she is a former addict and friends with Noel, a junkie played by Marc Antony. To no one’s surprise, Tom Sizemore, who plays Frank’s militaristic partner Tom Wolls, did not get along with Marc Antony while making the movie. The two almost came to physical blows on the set one day. Sizemore long had a reputation for being an erratic actor who was difficult to work with. Despite their near clash, both actors stand out in Bringing Out the Dead with their terrific performances.
Speaking of performances, Cage was so immersed in the character and Rita Ryack’s costuming that he wore at least 10 different shirts per day of filming to accommodate the blood, sweat, grime, mud, and filth that Frank is covered in by the end of his graveyard shift. The physical tatters Frank finds himself in as the night unfolds represent his worn-out psychological state, with several other subtle clues of the sort shading Frank’s sickened soul. Beyond Cage’s costumes, Ryack’s most difficult challenge was outfitting the background extras and creating a believable, slightly heightened visual aesthetic.
One of the biggest differences between the film and the novel comes at the end of the story. As Scorsese tells Ebert:
“The last scene that Paul wrote, it’s not that way in the book. Nic says, ‘Rose, forgive me. Forgive me, Rose.’ And she says, ‘Nobody told you to suffer. It was your idea.’ And when Schrader wrote that, I said, ‘Oh – of course.’ And that’s the connection between us. We never really discuss it, but over the years, we’ve had this similarity to each other. I said to him, ‘It’s so beautiful. And you’re right because you can’t forgive yourself. You want everybody else to forgive you.’ We’re tied to each other with this sort of thing.”
As for the heightened horrors Frank and his partners witness during the nocturnal sojourn through Hell’s Kitchen, Scorsese maintains that, in New York, nothing is out of the ordinary. A memorable scene in the film comes when drug dealer Cy Coats, played by Cliff Curtis, falls from a high-rise and is brutally impaled on a fence post below. Scorsese recalls:
“Right after we finished shooting, another guy fell on a fence in New York. This happens all the time. Every few months there’s an impaling like that. We shot in the emergency room in Bellevue on the ground floor; we built the set down there. A few stories above, one of the doctors had a section of the fence they took out of the man, as a showpiece in his office. That was the incident that inspired the scene in the movie.”
Despite Scorsese’s trademark violence, the director had always maintained that the film adheres to a dark, morbid sense of humor. The director recalls a classic skit from Monty Python and The Holy Grail, in which John Cleese’s character urges the others to “Bring out your dead” with overt gallows humor. Unfortunately, the joke Connelly felt was funny enough to name his novel after was lost on the audience when the film nosedived at the box office, grossing roughly half its budget in October 1999.
Yes, 1999. The year most scholars and cinephiles site as among the best and most productive cinematic periods on record. As filmmakers raced against the turn of the millennium and rushed to submit what could have been their final film ever made, some of the best filmmakers delivered some of the all-time greatest movies in 1999. Whether Bringing Out the Dead was unfairly judged against Scorsese’s early superior work, or if the film was lost among such innovative works as Fight Club, The Matrix, Being John Malkovich, American Beauty, The Green Mile, Eyes Wide Shut, The Sixth Sense, The Blair Witch Project, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Run Lola Run, Election, The Insider, and many others, is unknown. Likely a combination of both, the high quality of cinema in 1999 hindered Bringing Out the Dead’s popularity. Then, of course, was the return of Star Wars to the Multiplex with Phantom Menace, a phenomenal cultural movie event that ruled the box office in 1999.
Slated for a Halloween release, Bringing Out the Dead opened on October 22, 1999. With mixed reviews from critics, the film underperformed commercially, grossing just $16.7 million against its $32 million budget. Adding insult to injury, Bringing Out the Dead is the only Scorsese movie released in the 1990s not to earn a single Academy Award nomination.
Scorsese’s longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who won Academy Awards for cutting Raging Bull, The Aviator, and The Departed, publicly defended Bringing Out The Dead almost 20 years later. When promoting Scorsese’s 2016 film Silence, Schoonmaker told Den of Geek that Bringing Out the Dead was grossly mismarketed as a car chase action movie. According to Schoonmaker:
“It’s the only one of [Scorsese’s] films, I think, that hasn’t gotten its due. It’s a beautiful film, but it was hard for people to take, I think. Unexpected. But I think it’s great.” She claims that the film initially was mis-marketed as a car chase film: “What happened was, that film was about compassion, and it was sold, I think, as a car chase movie. When I saw the trailer I said, ‘Wait a minute! That’s not what the movie’s about!’ I think people were made nervous by the theme of it, which I think is beautiful. I think it’ll get its due.”
As for those who feel Bringing Out the Dead is an inferior rehash of Taxi Driver, Scorsese notes how the key differences lie in the timing of the project and the maturity of the talent involved. In Jim Sangster’s Scorsese biography Virgin Film, Scorsese states:
“There’s a correlation to Taxi Driver, there’s no doubt. Only it’s 25 years later and we’re a little mellower now. Instead of killing people, our protagonist is trying to save people. We were all about 30 and 31 years old – Schrader, De Niro, and myself – when we made Taxi Driver. But now we’re 56. It’s a different world, and we’re different, too.”
Scorsese and Cage are incredibly proud of Bringing Out the Dead, and fortunately, the highly underrated movie is becoming more accessible in 2024. The film was recently upgraded to a 4K digital release and is finally set to be released via 4K UHD disc in September 2024 for its 25th anniversary. Along with Sleepy Hollow, Bringing Out the Dead was one of the last films released on LaserDisc, and its 4K UHD upgrade finally brings the home release full circle.
So yeah, that’s pretty much what happened to Bringing Out the Dead! Despite failing to strike a commercial cord among filmgoers, it remains one of the best and most unheralded movies of Martin Scorsese’s decorated career. Nicolas Cage has publicly stated that Bringing Out the Dead is one of his finest movies, a sentiment supported by Thelma Schoonmaker, Roger Ebert, and others. Even as a loose spiritual predecessor to Taxi Driver, Bringing Out the Dead proves that even a Scorsese retread has the horsepower and velocity to trample its competitors and leave them in the dust!