Before the festival began, Esquire contributing editor Kim Masters met with Scorsese and Harvey Weinstein in the first joint interview the two men have given on the state of their rumor-plagued and long-delayed picture. She was also the first journalist to see a twenty-minute compliation of scenes, which she viewed with Scorsese in his Manhattan office. What follows is an advance look at her story, which will appear in the July issue of Esquire, on sale in early June.

In the case of Gangs, Weinstein has had to wait a lot. The film, a costly period piece about gang warfare in nineteenth-century New York, went months past its exceptionally long shooting schedule, soared way over an already enormous $83 million budget, and missed two release dates. It is now set to arrive in theaters in December, a full year late.

Many of the industry's most hardened veterans would love to get a look at Scorsese and Weinstein in the same room at this point. Hollywood has an avid—and not always good-natured—fascination with what an executive at another studio calls this "dream matchup" between the intimidating Weinstein, who has been the unlikely midwife to so many Oscar-winning films, and Scorsese, an idol, an icon, and—in the eyes of several executives and agents who have struggled with him on other films—a hot-tempered killer in his own right.

"Harvey finally got the director he deserves," says one observer close to the Miramax king, "and it's a fair fight."

After finishing his point on this late-April afternoon, Scorsese sets off down the hall to his corner office, where his colleague and adversary waits. The impatient Weinstein, a hulking presence who brings to mind a boy in detention, leans back in an armchair as Scorsese, small and animated, sits down beside him to discuss what is by far the riskiest and most expensive film that he, or Weinstein, has ever made.

Weinstein has had his share of business travails lately, including the very public failure of Talk magazine and an unusually disappointing Oscar season. (The company captured just one award, for Jim Broadbent's performance in Iris.) And with Gangs, the payoff is far from assured. The film—a long, dark, violent, and sometimes eccentric costume epic—doesn't seem to be the stuff of blockbusters. In the course of its production, close relationships have been strained and dreams have turned into nightmares. Whether the resulting film will justify the agony, or whether it's an ill-fated collaboration between an executive and a filmmaker who are losing their touch, is a question that cannot be answered before December.

But what is driving Weinstein visibly crazy this afternoon is the idea that anyone would mock his struggles as he supported the making of this film or that he has done anything to Scorsese that would merit such mocking. "I've been a bad boy on movies—mea culpa," he says grudgingly. "[Director] Jim Ivory will not sing my praises anywhere. But I was good with Marty."

As Weinstein gathers steam, Scorsese turns toward him and cuts in with hands held aloft in the traditional director's pose. "I have you framed with a crucifix behind you," he says, referring to a carved depiction of the suffering Christ hanging on Scorsese's office wall. Weinstein the martyr. Undeterred, Weinstein forges ahead. It's not just that he was good with Marty; he was better than good. "Protect and serve," he says. "He never heard from Disney. . . . He never heard from anybody. We kept them away. . . . I'm sick of my image of killing and maiming! It's complete horseshit!"

Now he's rolling. All he wants is a little credit for taking a chance on a film that no one else was willing to make. "I didn't do this movie for money!" he exclaims. "And I'm a little different from some of your friends in La-La Land. I normally don't care what they write about me, but this time around, it's personal." As these two formidable and emotional men sit next to each other, a couple of things seem obvious. One is that Weinstein, fifty, is thrilled to be working with the great Scorsese despite it all. And the other is that Scorsese knows it. Just a few weeks ago in this very office, the fifty-nine-year-old director says he and Weinstein had a spectacular blowout over the fact that the film wasn't finished. "I still saw that he was restrained," Scorsese says with a mix of pride and gratitude.

Not that Scorsese has made it easy. In December 2000, at the Christmas party on the meticulously built set in Rome, Weinstein presented Scorsese with an unusual gift. The picture had been shooting for three months, and the end was nowhere in sight. With the price tag shooting past $90 million, the budget was busted. It was Weinstein's urgent wish that Scorsese get on with it. So he gave Scorsese, the devout Catholic, a lovely gold Star of David and exhorted, "Think like a Jew!"

"I'm trying," Scorsese replied. But whatever Weinstein had in mind—if he meant that Scorsese should speed it up, cut the script, save a buck—none of that was on the director's agenda. Now, nearly eighteen months later, with the picture still not quite finished, Scorsese admits that he was so enraptured with the film that he indulged his greed. "It's my kind of provoking the danger," he explains. "They would say, 'You have to finish,' and I'd think, Well, can I go a little bit further?"

HOWEVER WEINSTEIN may resent it, Scorsese appears to savor his role as the director who boxed in the mighty Harvey Weinstein. Given that he's one of perhaps two living filmmakers who could pull it off, the feat is his to enjoy. Once, Weinstein phoned him on the set in Rome and berated him for not going faster. "He said, 'Marty, it's like you're having a party on the set,' " Scorsese remembers. "So we decided the next time he was there, we'd get confetti and little noisemakers."

Another time, Scorsese took a photo of his one-year-old baby on the set in a raunchy bar where—in the movie—patrons sip a vile brew of leftover drinks through a tube. After arranging things so it looked as though the tube was in his baby's mouth, Scorsese sent Weinstein a picture along with a note that read, "This is what your budget cuts have done!"

Still, the making of Gangs of New York has hardly been a matter of merry pranks for Scorsese. "The pressure was very hard," he says. "Very hard." In fact, as he was ushering me into his office, Scorsese suddenly excused himself. He was not stepping away to take a call; he simply walked a few extra steps to use another entrance. That particular doorway, which allows him to arrive in a space beside his massive desk, makes him feel safer, he explains later. "I do become obsessive about certain things," he acknowledges with a wince. The route he walks to the elevator, for another example. Or, in the past, when the stress was bad, the way he dialed the phone. "It deals with superstition," he says. "It deals with the worst elements of ignorance that Christianity is not supposed to have."

Getting Gangs of New York on the screen has turned into one of Scorsese's more painful and protracted obsessions. This story of so-called native Americans, actually the descendants of mostly Dutch and English settlers, and their resistance in the mid-1800s to the arrival of a great tide of Irish immigrants has fascinated him for years. In the film, a ruthless Daniel Day-Lewis, his face obscured by an enormous mustache, embodies the old guard. A beefy and grimy Leonardo DiCaprio plays the Irish boy who sets out to avenge his father's murder but finds himself waylaid by the comely (and grimy) Cameron Diaz and his own good heart. As his struggle plays out, Manhattan is convulsed by the ultraviolent Civil War Draft Riots—a part of history, Scorsese points out, about which most Americans know nothing.

If making the picture has taken a long time, Scorsese can't even discuss its genesis with brevity. He begins the story decades ago, touching on the change in Hollywood's appetites during the seventies, the advent of his relationship with then-agent Michael Ovitz in the eighties, and the moment when the idea began, to Scorsese's utter shock, to become a reality in the nineties.

Scorsese's dream came to life four years ago with the formation of Ovitz's company, Artists Management Group. Among many other things, Ovitz wanted his new firm to manage clients and produce their films. He knew that Scorsese had been dreaming about Gangs for years, and it seemed to provide a rich opportunity for him as well. Recently dethroned as president of the Walt Disney Company, Ovitz was making his Hollywood comeback, and he wanted to wrap his company around a high-profile project. At a 2:00 a.m. meal break on the set of Bringing Out the Dead in New York, Ovitz told Scorsese that the time for Gangs might be ripe.

Then he dispatched his young partners, Rick Yorn and Cathy Schulman, to genuflect and get things started. Scorsese told them that he and his longtime writer friend Jay Cocks had already spent more than ten years wrangling with the project, based on a Herbert Asbury book published in 1928 and subtitled An Informal History of the Underworld. Scorsese told Yorn and Schulman that the film would be dauntingly expensive to make. And he said the film needed a bright young star. Yorn, whose bejeweled client list includes Leonardo DiCaprio, had a ready answer for that problem.

But when the two hopeful AMG executives looked at what Cocks had written, they felt a flicker of panic. It was a violent, sprawling script in a peculiar nineteenth-century patois. It was complicated and opaque. Still, Yorn and Schulman pressed ahead. DiCaprio turned to his friends at Twentieth Century Fox, where he had recently made three films, including the mighty Titanic. At the time, Scorsese had a deal with Disney—bestowed, not coincidentally, during Ovitz's brief tenure there. But Disney chairman Michael Eisner hadn't been pleased with Kundun, Scorsese's passion project about the Dalai Lama, which made no money and threatened to queer the company's relationship with China. Disney signaled clearly that Fox or anyone else was welcome to Gangs of New York But a top executive who caught the pitch at Fox says the script was "very violent [and] didn't deliver a clean idea." And having lowballed prospective partners on the cost of making Titanic, Fox wasn't buying the purported budget of $83 million. Finally, the studio passed. "[Scorsese] has had one movie that grossed over $50 million," says the executive, referring to the 1991 remake of Cape Fear. "Jim Cameron may be crazy as a loon, but his intention is never to do anything other than make movies that people want to see."

As Scorsese admits, worrying about whether a film will have box-office appeal—well, that's something he doesn't know how to do. "I learned early on—I don't know what's commercial," he says with a shrug. It's not that he doesn't care exactly, but all he really wants to do is capture the movie he sees in his head.

The other prospective suitor was Warner, where Scorsese has owed a picture for so long that it's become a bitter joke there. Warner executives were expecting Scorsese to make the Dean Martin story with Tom Hanks and resented what they perceived as Ovitz's play to switch him to a project bearing an AMG stamp. The studio wasn't about to accept Gangs as a substitute. Before it was over, virtually every production company in town had passed.

GRAHAM KING, A BURLY Englishman who runs an overseas-distribution company called Initial Entertainment Group, didn't know that. All he knew was that his agent called in the autumn of 1999 offering a dream opportunity "to be in the Leonardo DiCaprio business"—something that King could achieve simply by writing an enormous check. King wasn't concerned about the violence; foreign customers aren't so squeamish. Taking a deep breath, he offered to kick in $65 million for foreign rights. He didn't think he had a chance. "They didn't exactly tell me there was no one else out there," he says a little sheepishly now. "I was green on this deal." But King quickly sold off pieces of the foreign rights and snapped his purse shut. He was capped at $65 million, he says, and he wasn't putting in a penny more.

With the bulk of the financing bagged, Disney offered to hand the picture over to its Miramax division. Disney Studios chief Joe Roth knew that Weinstein—the gangster-priest of art-house movies—yearned to do a Scorsese film. "It was not only an infatuation with Marty but the idea of making a huge-budget movie and not paying for it," says an executive familiar with Weinstein's thinking. Weinstein's exposure, theoretically, would be $18 million—less if he sold off TV rights. (He's held off doing that, he says, expecting to get a better deal when the movie is finished.)

To this day, Weinstein claims that the film cost $97 million and that Miramax is on the hook for only $15 million, with another $15 million coming out of Disney's pocket. Virtually any executive or agent in Hollywood would wager heavily that the picture cost more than $115 million, but even assuming that Weinstein's figures are correct, Miramax and its parent company are still in for at least $30 million. And that doesn't count the few million in interest that has piled up because the film has been delayed so long, or the cost of releasing and advertising the picture, on which Weinstein insists he will spend no more than a thrifty $25 million. (The studio got some relief from Scorsese and DiCaprio, who are personally covering $7 million because of the overages.)

Back in the late fall of 1999, even with his exposure theoretically limited to $18 million, Weinstein refused to go forward with the script as written. Scorsese had tried to stick with Cocks, his friend and collaborator since 1968, but finally relented. Hossein Amini (The Wings of the Dove) took a pass at the script, and in December, when Scorsese told Weinstein that the construction of the massive set in Rome had to begin if he was to shoot in the precious summer light, Weinstein pulled the trigger.

Filming was supposed to begin in April 2000, but the script still wasn't working. Steven Zaillian (Schindler's List) reworked it, and Amini took another pass. Just before shooting was finally set to begin in September, Kenneth Lonergan (who wrote and directed You Can Count on Me) was brought in to sharpen the characters. He wound up staying in Rome for more than three months and continued working on the script, off and on, through this spring. "I tried to make it a little less episodic and more character driven," he says.

BY THE TIME THE cameras rolled, it was September and the summer light had faded away. At Disney's suggestion, manager Rick Yorn had put another star client, Cameron Diaz, in the film. Daniel Day-Lewis was cast as Bill the Butcher (replacing Robert De Niro, who bowed out) and prepared for his role by hacking up meat for hours a day at a London butcher shop. He and DiCaprio also took knife-throwing lessons. The sprawling, 1.5-square-mile Dante Ferretti–designed set that was built at the historic Cinecittà Studios in Rome was a wonder to behold. Lonergan says when he saw it for the first time, "I was thrilled out of my mind. You could just stand in the middle and be surrounded by hackney coaches and fishmongers and immigrants getting off a ship and look far into the distance and see a nineteenth-century woman in a window. It was just unbelievable."

"With Marty, everything has to look more than real," says a member of the crew. "He was anal about every detail possible. At the beginning, he came across as a very difficult and strict man, but when you understood the vision, it was a pleasure to do the work." Indeed, Scorsese was wise to film in Italy. He was far from the prying eyes of the mainstream media, and he had a worshipful crew. "A movie by Martin Scorsese is like a statue or a painting by Michelangelo," says a typical production source. Another calls him a "living genius." A third acknowledges being "brainwashed in a really positive way."

After filming got under way, the gossipmongers had some fun. There were reports that DiCaprio was too fond of pasta, that the director screamed at him for tardiness in the mornings. One production source says these tales were overblown: "They said he was late, but we were always late anyway because to set up each shot was such meticulous work."

Meanwhile, Day-Lewis remained moodily in character. "Daniel Day-Lewis is scary," says a member of the crew. "Wonderful, but scary. When he got into the part of Bill the Butcher, you couldn't look him straight in the eye. I'm telling you, Leo was scared. . . . At the wrap party, he said, 'I'm sorry about the hard times I gave you, but I really get into my part.' "

Some who are familiar with the picture say DiCaprio is no match for Day-Lewis on the screen. Many agents and producers in Hollywood say DiCaprio seems to lack professional focus overall, but in this case, he also had a tough job, says a sympathetic executive who worked on the project. "It's all in dialect . . . peculiar dialect and very hard to master. And Daniel's just incredibly hard to act with. He's amazingly talented, but I don't know that he helps the other actors. He goes into character, and I don't know how cooperative he is."

Everyone loved Diaz, who kept her nerve even during repeated takes of a harrowing scene in which Day-Lewis throws knives at her. She had such sangfroid that one of the crew presented her with a bouquet to express his admiration.

Nevertheless, working with those massive sets and hundreds of extras and dozens of stuntmen caused logistical problems that made this a "movie multiplied by ten," as one source on the set puts it. "Doing a day's work for one shot—it's something that Mr. Scorsese and only two or three other people in the world can do," says an admiring crew member. There were exterior shots that took so long to set up that by the time the crew was done, the light was gone. "The unusual thing is that all the exterior sets were so big, so huge," one crew member explains. "In other films, you can try to match the light using covers, and so on. If you have to see an entire square, it can't be done. If you start a scene that you know you have to shoot for five days, and you shoot three days and the weather changes so you don't finish the scene, after a while, you have a lot of scenes that are not completed."

The schedule was constantly and expensively revised. Scorsese wanted Liam Neeson to play DiCaprio's father, but the actor's time was limited by another commitment. That meant revamping the schedule and redressing the set to reflect the period for Neeson's scenes, which take place twenty years earlier than most of the other action in the film. And Scorsese wanted many takes. "The director was exigent," says a source who worked on the film. "He wanted everything perfect." The effort to keep the extras suitably attired was exhausting. "Imagine washing three hundred costumes after a battle scene because the day after, you have to shoot a scene [that takes place] before this battle," a member of the crew says.

SCORSESE HAD BEEN NERVOUS about dealing with Weinstein from the beginning, and when filming was under way, there were "a bunch of explosions," as one source on the set puts it. Yorn spent many nights on the phone listening to Scorsese's diatribes about Weinstein's intrusions. "I'm kind of dramatic, operatic," Scorsese admits. "I need to talk to someone or phone to give details. To pour out my anxiety and my troubles and my stress."

To the crew, it was clear when things had gone especially badly. "A couple of times Marty came in a couple hours late, really pissed off," one member of the production remembers. "The first [assistant director] would say, 'There's been a discussion with Harvey.' " Scorsese's habit of mounting rearview mirrors on monitors (to ensure that no one is looking over his shoulder) gave a crew member the inspiration to play a joke. He posted a picture of Weinstein on the mirror with a warning: "Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear." Scorsese left it in place.

The cast, too, was aware of the stress. In a scene where Bill the Butcher plunges his knife into an anonymous man's hand and his victim screams, Day-Lewis added an improvisation to his next line. "Don't make that sound—Harvey," he said. Ultimately the film went eight expensive weeks over schedule in a shoot that lasted from September through March. When it was time for the wrap party, however, Scorsese and Weinstein celebrated together. Miramax presented the director with a mosaic of the Pantheon, and the crew got silver key chains with a figure of an angel copied from the bow of a ship in the film. One crew member says he will keep it always, even though its wings protrude, making it impractical to use.

THE BATTLING CARRIED into postproduction, however. Scorsese was infuriated when he learned that Weinstein had looked at some of the edited footage before the director himself had reviewed it. Then Scorsese put together a version that was three hours and forty minutes long. Though one of Scorsese's associates says it was an "assemblage" and never meant to be anything like a final version, Miramax executives were alarmed at what they saw. "It doesn't know what it wants to be, and it's just a mess," a company veteran said at the time.

"I think [Scorsese] is just wrong," lamented another at that stage. "He's so caught up in the making of it and the look of it without worrying about story or characters you give a shit about. . . . Does the word succinct ever occur to him? Martin Scorsese is enjoying the view of his navel." Scorsese admits that for him, cutting is always agony. "I don't want to hear anybody tell me about the [running] time," he says. "I get very angry." But he responded, however reluctantly and slowly, to the audience reactions at test screenings.

"Marty's as mean and difficult as Harvey," says an executive who was involved with the project. "He has an extraordinary temper, and he won't bend at all for anything. It's actually admirable. He will not bend. He sees what he sees and that's it. And Harvey wants what he wants and that's it. It was a crazy combination of personalities." "Marty puts his foot down," says a person on the crew. "Even being a short little guy, he gets his way. He more than once said, 'I'll walk away and let someone else finish it.' " Or he'd tell Weinstein to put someone else's name on the film. That was Scorsese's trump card, of course: The picture was inconceivable without him.

Sitting in Scorsese's office now, Weinstein freely admits as much. He says he didn't get a bond to protect against overages because there was no point. "What are they going to do? Replace Marty?" he says. "Cut twenty pages out of the script? You got the wrong guy. . . . The bond people would have been dead, and I would have had insurance claims to pay."

Weinstein's biggest desire was to curtail the endless filming, but he had substantive issues as well. For one thing, there was the language. When DiCaprio first sees Diaz, for example, he marvels, "She's a prim-lookin' stargazer." In the argot of the day, that means she's hot. Weinstein pleaded unsuccessfully to slide a bit of glossary into a voice-over that Lonergan was crafting for DiCaprio late in postproduction.

Then there was the violence issue. In the film, one gang cuts off rivals' ears, which wind up in a large jar in the Satan's Circus bar. "I tried to get that out of the goddamned movie three years ago," Weinstein bursts out now when the subject is raised. "I said, 'I hate that in the script.' Who wants to see a goddamned jar of ears?"

"There's a jar of ears. Big deal," Scorsese says.

"She pays with the ear and gets a drink!" Weinstein continues. "It's disgusting!" (The ear, incidentally, is one that a character named Hell-Cat Maggie has bitten off her victim.) "It's done like the fight scenes in Raging Bull. You never see her bite," Scorsese replies. "It's all done through suggestion."

"That ear is bloody and in the jar," Weinstein says. "He couldn't resist."

So far, the scene remains in the film. As does the depiction of Towser, a dog that entertains by mauling rats. "I could say, 'Marty, I promise you, you'll get your $3 million back if you take out the ears and the rats,' " Weinstein says mournfully. "He doesn't give a shit."

AFTER THE RELEASE date was postponed from December 2001 to July 2002, Miramax had the grace to satirize the whole mess at its annual pre-Oscar party in March. The company traditionally presents skits, which are usually about as polished as a grade-school talent show. But one bright spot in the evening's entertainment was a video purporting to be the beginning of Project Greenlight, Part 2 (the company's HBO reality series about its financing of a movie by a first-time filmmaker). In it, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon pluck a script from the pile. It's written by "a kid from New York" named Martin Scorsese, which Affleck and Damon carefully pronounce "Scor-seese."

The project is Gangs of New York, but when the two stars call to deliver the good news, Scorsese (playing himself) declares that the million-dollar-prize budget won't be enough. Cut to Affleck and Damon telling Weinstein they're going to need a little more money. "How much?" Weinstein demands through a speakerphone. "Oh, a hundred . . ." Affleck begins. "Twenty-nine . . . million," Damon continues. The line goes dead.

Shortly afterward, Miramax pushed the film back again, from July to December 2002, and then put out the word that Scorsese had a wonderful two-hour-and-forty-minute cut. A December date means the film will collide with DiCaprio's upcoming Catch Me If You Can, a film directed by Steven Spielberg and set to open on Christmas Day. At this point, Miramax has apparently backed Gangs into a date earlier in the month. All this means that the Cannes Film Festival in May wasn't the coming-out party that Miramax had hoped. Weinstein had to content himself with showing some sequences from the film. Scorsese was still tinkering and adding some shots.

Weinstein insists he didn't make this film to make money, which might be just as well. As the rain beats outside Scorsese's office windows, he nonetheless argues that Miramax will do fine if the picture grosses $50 million in the U. S., counting revenue that he anticipates from such sources as video and television. "There's no risk," he says airily. And even if the picture loses money, he says, Miramax can rely on his brother, Bob, who's been churning out commercial hits on the company's Dimension label. "There's no gamble," Weinstein says, "as long as there's Halloween and Spy Kids and whatever other shit he does."

In a way, Weinstein has already won a partial victory. At least in the film industry, where feelings about Weinstein can be described as mixed, many do appreciate his willingness to make a film that really was an impossible dream. If it doesn't work, it will be seen—in some quarters, at least—as a noble failure.

As for Scorsese, he seems to feel that the struggle has been worth it. "It's the period, it's the people, and the ending in the draft riots—that's what I wanted to get," he says. "Everything else was workable." The characters, the crowds, the violent denouement—Scorsese got it all, almost, and he smiles. "I could have kept on shooting for another six years," he says.