Martin Scorsese: People would say anything, do anything in the backseat - it was like he didn't exist.
Andy Rooney: I go down there to Florida and look around and I said, my God, who wants this?
Scorsese: Guilt.
Rooney: Yes, a lot of strange elements to the story, it seems to me, from what little we know of it.
Scorsese: Yeah. The goddess-whore complex.
Rooney: Of course, they don't get it from the pope because the pope is in no condition to give it.
Scorsese: Like the moment when he burns the flowers before he goes out to kill. And when he's buying the guns and the dealer lays them out one at a time on the velvet, like arranging the altar during Mass.
Rooney: I just sat there looking at television, sort of dumb and thought how horrible it was. But I worry about it myself, losing it mentally. No hope.
Scorsese: But the Catholic thing?
Rooney: That’s not a question.
Scorsese: But that’s the thing about hell – it goes on and on.
Rooney: I mean, to hell with your local broadcast.
Scorsese: Every film should look the way I feel.
Rooney: Well, that seems sort of silly.
Scorsese: And he goes back again and again to where the violence is.
Rooney: And something comes up and I say, do I really want to look at another story about some unpleasant subject? And it comes on, and invariably I become engrossed.
Scorsese: The next morning, the day of Christmas Eve, he was found dead.
Rooney: That’s what a patriotic American does.