Martin Scorsese, super genius

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But you still paused. Whether for a minute or a day, the flow of the film is still interrupted and the "contract", such as it is, is technically voided.
No. Remember, in my original post I said,
A film is a unit. A movie is a meal. That's the deal. The unspoken contract is that you complete it in one sitting.
We still completed the film in one sitting. We viewed together and we did not disperse (engage in any other major activities, collectively or individually) until the ritual of viewing was complete.

If your went out to dinner a friend who excused herself to use the bathroom, you would not say that she'd disrupted the flow of the dinner or broken a contract. So long as she returns in a reasonable amount of time, the flow of the dinner is just fine.

The contract, as I described it in my OP is still very much intact for a brief pause, as is the social contract of dining out when someone takes a break to power their nose. The contract is not voided in letter or spirit.

Indeed, people leave the theater all the time to use the bathroom (audience members filter in and out of the room throughout the movie) "at the movies." The only difference is, no one is pausing the movie for you.
In any case, watching them in "one sitting" (with temporary pauses) is your prerogative but can you sincerely speak to that being the way that everyone else watches films? It honestly describes how I try to watch films (hate leaving them unfinished if I can help it), but I don't think people are automatically wrong if they make the choice to resume at a later point.
Keep in mind that I am being descriptive here and not prescriptive:
I wonder... ...there is a sociology of viewership.
I am only speaking in terms of my impression of how people typically do watch movie relative to a sort of unspoken contract implicit in format and presentation. It's not about whether people are wrong, but rather people will feel a sort of "completionist" pressure to watch a 3.5 hour long movie "all the way through" given our cultural sociology of viewership. That people can take up and leave off anywhere they like doesn't mean that they will. For another example, when I binge watch with family, we will complete a chapter (an episode) and agree to stop when the credits roll on a given episode. Those chapter breaks are exit ramps. We never quit "mid-episode" although it is entirely true that could do so. We (apparently) feel some sort of completionist pressure to get through the "relevant chunk" before stopping. A film without chapters is a whole mass that appears to demand our entire attention for one sitting.

Perhaps I'm old? Perhaps the younglings are hip and are only watching a quarter of the film on the bus to work on their BIGphone. It's an empirical question. The answer is about what people actually do and not what they should do. I am simply asking the question and offering my case as to why I perceive that "completionist pressure" is a thing. Hell, I've been yelled at by members our august assembly for not watching films all the way through (e.g., walking out of movies) on moral grounds(!) that one must watch the whole movie (if that is not completionist pressure, I don't know what is). At any rate, I think I've got a prima facie case for why the question is, at least, worth asking. And if it is, that raises questions for the prospects of increasingly lengthy films.
A sociology of viewing that that happens to correlate with how you watch movies - you'll understand if I question its overall applicability to the average moviegoer.
Sure. I don't think my experience is atypical. However, my experience may only be typical for my generation. Again, it's an empirical question. We'd have to do a survey to find out how many people actually commit (and feel a pressure to do so) to watching a film "all the way through" even when it is long.
In any case, Scorsese was pushing 40 when home video dropped and pushing 80 when he made his first film for streaming so I think he's got enough awareness about how film-based technology changes in order to try to make it work for him wherever possible.
Or... ...he's an old dog that you think is learning new tricks? When Scorese complains about hero movies not really being cinema and when he gripes about watching movies on phones, I don't get the sense that he's hip to changing times. Marty wants you to watch the movie on a big screen. He wants you to put your phone away. My guess is that he wants you to watch watch the film all the way through. This is not to say that his intention is regulative of our consumption (or should be), but rather to say that it is a stretch to imagine that he's making longer films as a feature for streaming (starting and stopping at random places). I don't think his intention matters that much either way and that if it did, he would seem to be more likely to apply completionist pressure to as rather than not.
What exactly is the difference between "never long enough" and "not too long"?
The difference is the assumption that a film, no matter how good, cannot overstay it's welcome. There is an arrogance in asserting that a good film can never be long enough, which completely disregards an important variable for the medium (i.e., length).
In any case, at least three of the highest-grossing films ever made are over three hours in length and you can include an actual four-hour film like Gone with the Wind if you factor in inflation.
True. But some of these films are from a different era when intermissions were offered to allow the audience a break.

And how many of the top grossing films are over four hours long? Five? Six? There are limits. You cannot arbitrarily push the variable of length indefinitely.
There is also a difference between spending four hours on one film and six-ish hours on three films (and as someone who has watched the first eight Halloween films back-to-back in a theatre, the latter really doesn't seem like that big a deal).
OK, let's take a 1,000 random movie watchers. Stick them in a theater house and make them Clockwork Orange their way through EIGHT Halloween movies back-to-back(!!!!). What is the average viewer response going to be? My guess is that they're not going to be happy campers, in the main.



I'd like to return this conversation to the main topic that I originally posed, and note that Scorsese has reduced the reported run time of "Killers of the Flower Moon" to 3 hours and 26 minutes, which is still very long, but significantly shorter than 3 hours 54 minutes.

https://deadline.com/2023/04/killers...io-1235329903/

I'd also like to note that my topic of discussion was narrowly tailored to align with the topic of the thread, as I was specifically seeking to discuss Scorsese's films and their length, but this conversation has taken on a life of its own and is now focusing on the merits and drawbacks of long movies in general, in addition to other issues larger in scope, so it may benefit this thread to either return to discussing Scosese's films, or end this conversation, so we can avoid having someone visit the thread looking to discuss Scorsese's films and seeing something else that they didn't expect.



I'll leave this here as an encomium for the length lovers.



There has been a pause in the posting so I think the hall monitor won't be able to check for hall passes.





The trailer for Killers of the Flower Moon did debut at Cinemacon last week, but Apple has only screened it that once, so far. Gotta believe it'll be coming any day, now. My birthday is on Friday, Apple, if you're looking for last-minute gift ideas.

Scorsese's sixth movie with DiCaprio and tenth with DeNiro.
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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra



This movie is going to be EPIC!
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“Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It's a very mean and nasty place and I don't care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard ya hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done!” ~ Rocky Balboa



Excellent piece by Deadline...


Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Robert De Niro On How They Found the Emotional Handle for Their Cannes Epic Killers of the Flower Moon
by Mike Fleming Jr., May 16, 2023

EXCLUSIVE: In 2016, the hottest book in Hollywood hadn’t even been published yet. Circulating in galley proofs, it was the latest non-fiction work from author David Grann, whose 2009 book The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon had recently been filmed by James Gray and produced by Plan B. His new book was another mouthful — Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI — and it proved just as tasty.

Seven-figure bids materialized, with talent attachments that included Leonardo DiCaprio, George Clooney, Brad Pitt and J.J. Abrams. The deal ended with a statement buy by Imperative Entertainment’s Dan Friedkin and Bradley Thomas, who went well beyond the bids and took it off the table for $5 million. With Martin Scorsese directing, they would set it up at Paramount, casting DiCaprio alongside Robert De Niro in the most iconic pairing since Michael Mann’s Heat with De Niro and Al Pacino, but on opposing sides of the law.

Killers of the Flower Moon had all the makings of a classic Western. DiCaprio would play Tom White, an incorruptible Texas Ranger-turned FBI agent sent to Oklahoma in the early 1920s by J. Edgar Hoover to answer a desperate call from the Osage Indian Nation. The Osage had recently become the wealthiest people per capita in the world due to the vast supply of oil being harvested from their lands. At the same time, many of them were beginning to die in alarming numbers — and under highly suspicious circumstances.

It was the perfect set-up for a murder mystery, but something didn’t feel right. Scorsese, DiCaprio and De Niro began to realize that the situation was more complex than that. More explicitly, it would be inappropriate to serve up a white-savior Western since white people were also the bad guys: the outsiders who insinuated their way into the Osage and took advantage of their naivety, empowered by apathy from corrupt local law enforcement and townsfolk eager to shake money out of the pockets of their trusting Osage friends.

So, Scorsese started over, seizing on the chance to tell a story that would resonate in a modern era, forcing audiences to confront their own darkest instincts: how far would they be willing to go for the love of money? The lightbulb moment came when DiCaprio wondered if the focus should not be the lawman but rather one of his suspects: Ernest Burkhart. Burkhart is apparently a loving husband, married to Osage tribe member Mollie, and they have three children together. Mollie is at death’s door when Tom White — now to be played by Jesse Plemons — arrives. Is Ernest just in it for the money?

This much darker take and much more expensive take reportedly led Paramount to back out as financier. But to Apple heads of Worldwide Video Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht, this had the potential to be an important historical epic, a beachhead project for their fledgling film program. They went out and got the package, just the way they did at Sundance with CODA, which went on to become the first Best Picture Oscar winner for a streamer. The deal orchestrated by Scorsese and DiCaprio’s rep Rick Yorn left room for Paramount, which had certain rights. The deal called for a full global theatrical release through Paramount, before it lands on the Apple TV+ streaming site in the heart of awards season.

Despite the radical change of angle, De Niro, marking his tenth collaboration with Scorsese, held on to the role of Bill Hale. He is Ernest’s uncle, who presents himself as a loving patriarch and ally to members of the Osage, but who enlists his nephew in a nefarious plan to help fulfill his darker motives. “I’d read the book a few years earlier and the Tom White character was more prominent,” he says, “That was right for the book, but Marty and Leo’s idea to focus on the relationship between Bill and Ernest made sense to me. They wanted to focus more on that dynamic instead of Tom White coming in and saving the day.”

That shift makes it a much more personal story, De Niro explains, one that fleshes out the story to ground an exploration of human nature, weakness and greed. “It made the most sense to show what’s going on in that world, the dynamic between the nephew and the uncle,” says De Niro. “I don’t know if you would call it the banality of evil, or just evil, corrupt entitlement, but we’ve seen it in other societies, including the Nazis before WWII. That is, a depressing realization of human nature that leaves people capable of doing terrible things. [Hale] believed he loved them, and felt they loved him. But within that, he felt he had the right to behave the way he did.”

He continues: “Tom White and the FBI set up law and order in the Wild West, where laws were made by the people who were right there and felt they could do anything. They were entrenched in the community, and nobody was accountable. It was racism, really.”

In retrospect, casting De Niro as DiCaprio’s uncle was a masterstroke, playing into the idea of family and subverting the concept of the father-son relationship that had developed off-screen. After all, says DiCaprio, “My film career was launched by doing This Boy’s Life, auditioning with Bob and then getting the role. Working with him, watching his professionalism and the way he created his character was one of the most influential experiences of my life and career. It got me to do all these films with Marty and now, thirty years later, all of us getting to work together and collaborate, it’s such an incredible and special experience for me. Those are my cinematic heroes. It is so very special to me.”

To DiCaprio, the original script just didn’t live up to the story’s epic potential. “It just didn’t get to the heart of the Osage,” he says. “It felt too much like an investigation into detective work, rather than understanding from a forensic perspective the culture and the dynamics of this very tumultuous, dangerous time in Oklahoma.”

DiCaprio was keen to tap into the innate spirituality of the piece, and also the place, a feeling that followed him onto location. “We were shooting there during the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre,” he says, “which was a half-hour car ride away from where the Osage reign of terror occurred and happened in the same year, 1921, as the first Osage murder. We were there for the Tulsa massacre and the return of the Flower Moon. It was cosmic insane coincidence that we were telling this story, a hundred years later.”

This subtle reworking of the material, with its new emphasis on shifting moral values, also helped the movie to become more of a traditional Scorsese movie. “We did a lot of work to try to help Marty do what he does best, which is to tell a very human story,” says DiCaprio. “To get to the dark side of the human condition but also understand the complexities. Here you had the wealthiest nation, the richest per capita people in the world. You had this melting pot in Oklahoma where freed slaves had created their own economy, and the Osage emerged as this wealthy culture. But you also had during that period the rise of the KKK and white supremacy and this clash of cultures. For some of these white settlers, it was like a gold rush to take advantage of people of color.”

Surprisingly, in amongst all this darkness is a love story, between Ernest and Mollie. “Ernest and Mollie really represented how twisted and complex some of this stuff was, culturally,” DiCaprio says. “A lot of Osage women were marrying white men who really came to prey on them, to take over their headrights and seize their oil money. And yet, at the same time, what struck me was one scene in the initial draft we had, the real testimony of Ernest and Mollie, as he explains his part in this horrific plan. They still loved each other. That was the twisted complexity of what made this a truly dark American story.”

This is really where the film departs from the path laid down by the book. “The biggest challenge became pulling off the trick of not making this a mystery, but exposing Ernest early on for who he is and then watching this very twisted relationship unravel. Not only with Mollie, but also with De Niro’s character as well. That wasn’t easy and it took years to figure out.”

So many years, in fact, that Scorsese had enough time to go off and make The Irishman. “There was just more and more development,” DiCaprio recalls. “The script is based on an amazing book, but when I spoke with David Grann after we had this idea, he was all for it. He said that getting into a forensic look at the culture at that time, the clash between white America and the Indigenous people, would be the perfect way to tell the story, if it could be done. I really think we accomplished that. At the end of the day, it works.”

Another approach would have felt rote, he says. “When you see our characters, you’re going to know something’s wrong. You see the dynamic within the first twenty minutes, and where do you go from there except explore, in depth, that crazy family dynamic? That decision allowed us to really make what I feel is a throwback to a 1940s or ’50s golden age of cinema epic drama, the kind we don’t often get to see nowadays.”

The king of New York reflects on the life choices that brought him together with long-time collaborators Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.

DEADLINE: In Killers of the Flower Moon, the depiction of the exploitation and murder of Osage tribe members for oil money — and the indifference shown by the U.S. government and law enforcement — is just gutting. Why did you want to tell this story?

MARTIN SCORSESE: What I responded to when I read David Grann’s book was the natural order of things. The idea that one could rationalize that if the Osage are not going to be of any use, if they’re going to be phased out anyway, why don’t we just, you know, help them go? And, ultimately, do we really feel any guilt for that? I don’t mean you and I, but when you’re doing what was being done to the Osage, and if you tend to dehumanize someone…

DEADLINE: …You can rationalize abhorrent behavior, if it lines your own pockets?

SCORSESE: Do [the Osage] behave differently, culturally? Yes, on all levels. There’s no way they could fit in to the European model, the capitalist model, in terms of money and private property. So, then [the attitude is] we’re coming, and we’re not going away. Either you join us, or you have to go. Now, we love and admire you, by the way, but it’s just that your time is up.

I heard someone recently say, when they fire an executive, well, their time is over. And the person behind that fired person, it’s their time. Is this the natural order of who we are as human beings?

DEADLINE: Your movie supplies a bleak answer to that question.

SCORSESE: Well, the answer is: probably yes, if you’re driven by how much money you can make. All that land’s just sitting there, what are they doing with it? The Europeans are thinking, ‘We come here, and look at this place. Look at the riches! And what are they doing? Killing some buffalo. Fighting amongst themselves over hunting areas. Communal living. And, excuse me, nobody owns the land?’ The very fact they don’t understand, in European terms, the value of money means they can’t exist in this world.

DEADLINE: So rather than take David Grann’s book and turn it into a mystery-thriller with murders solved and the FBI established, you decided that making it an exploration of human nature was your way in?

SCORSESE: Leo DiCaprio looked at me and said, “Where’s the heart in this movie?” This was when Eric Roth and I were writing the script from the point of view of the FBI coming in and unraveling everything. Look, the minute the FBI comes in, and you see a character that would be played by Robert De Niro, Bill Hale, you know he’s a bad guy. There’s no mystery. So, what is it? A police procedural? Who cares! We’ve got fantastic ones on television.

The least material available to us was about Ernest. There’s much written about Bill Hale, Mollie, and many of the others. Eric and I enjoyed working on that first version; it had all the tropes of the Western genre that I grew up with, and I was so tempted to do it that way. But I said, “The only person that has heart, besides Mollie Burkhart, is her husband Ernest, because they’re in love.”

We went to Oklahoma to the Gray Horse settlement, the Osage gave us a big dinner, and people got up and spoke. One woman got up and said, “You know, they loved each other, Ernest and Mollie. And don’t forget that. They loved each other.” I thought, ‘Whoa. That’s the story. How could he have done what he did?’

DEADLINE: Presumably, the other version would have been more in the spirit of Westerns told from a white male perspective.

SCORSESE: It was something we’ve seen before. We researched Tom White. He was super-straight. In the book, he’s the son of a lawman who instilled incorruptibility and empathy in his son. We tried to do more research, hoping to go deeper on Tom White. Does he have difficulties? Maybe he’s drinking? I finally said, “What are we making? A film about Tom White, who comes in and saves everybody?”

The woman who mentioned the love story said she’d told her mother about this film, and her mother said, “Tom White? You mean the man who saved us?” So, there’s still recognition of what they did, Tom White and what was then called the Bureau of Investigation. Even though a lot of people got away with what they did. We’ll never really know everything about what happened.

But the love story [changed everything]. I said, “How do we do the love story?” We couldn’t figure it out. And then Leo said, “What if I play Ernest?” I realized, because there is the least amount of research on Ernest, that we could do anything. If we did that, we’d take the script and turn it inside out, make it from the ground level out, rather than coming in from the outside. I said, “Let’s put ourselves in the mindset of the people who did this.”

DEADLINE: How much did this whole experience leave you questioning the Westerns you grew up loving, with the white heroism, and white hat/black hat iconography, especially when it came to the depiction of Native Americans?

SCORSESE: Well, the white hat/black hat tradition has more to do with mythology that is deeper than folklore. The gunslingers evolve into the outlaws of the ’30s that the FBI made their name on — Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson — and then to La Cosa Nostra. There was a Robert Warshow essay called The Gangster as a Tragic Hero that laid it out: as long as we see the gangster fall, it’s alright. The western mythology comes under that heading.

The most beautiful of them came from John Ford and Howard Hawks, and then, of course, there’s Shane, which is the most mythological. But there were movies we grew up watching where the native Americans were for the most part depicted unfairly.

The first Western I remember seeing was Duel in the Sun, in which Lionel Barrymore calls [Jennifer Jones] a squaw. I was six-years-old, and I remember thinking, ‘Why are they so angry at these people?’ Gypsies, Native Americans. It’s like England, where you had Madonna of the Seven Moons. Phyllis Calvert plays an aristocrat, but she also has Gypsy blood in her, and at night she runs out and does crazy things with the Gypsies.

I didn’t quite get it then [laughs]. I guess it had more to do with sex than anthropology and social issues. But I grew up watching films like Red River, where the Native Americans force the wagons into a circle and Joanne Dru gets the arrow in her shoulder. That incredible scene, where Montgomery Clift pulls out the arrow and she doesn’t blink. And he has to suck out the poison. I think one of the problems in the genre is that none of the Native Americans are played by Native Americans. I mean, in Taza, Son of Cochise [Douglas Sirk, 1954], the star is Rock Hudson.

DEADLINE: In your movie, you feature a glimpse of the 1921 massacre in Tulsa, where white supremacists destroyed the Black Wall Street. Was that an extension of the attitude among white people — a kind of passive-aggressive civility — that could turn violent with the slightest provocation?

SCORSESE: I don’t know. We only became fully aware of what happened in Tulsa a couple of years ago. We knew about race riots, about lynchings. We didn’t know about the destruction, the wiping out of a whole people out of fear of economic superiority, of people of a different color. You see they’re doing well and next thing you know… I think it has to come down to pure racism. This country’s a big experiment. Everybody’s together.

DEADLINE: Had DiCaprio played Tom White, it would have been like putting him in the role Kyle Chandler played in The Wolf of Wall Street. It’s better to see you put him through the emotional blender. Bend and twist him to see what happens.

SCORSESE: What’s great about Leo, and it’s why we work together so often, is, he goes there. He goes to these weird places that are so difficult and convoluted, and through the convolution, somehow there’s a clarity that we reach. And usually it’s in the expression, in his face, in his eyes. I’ve always told him this. He’s a natural film actor. I could shoot a close-up of him, he could be thinking of nothing, and I could intercut anything with it, and people will say, “Oh, he’s reacting to such and such.” It’s the Kuleshov experiment. You could do that with him. There’s something in his face that the camera locks into, in his eyes. The slightest movement, we know it. Thelma [Schoonmaker], editing his footage with me over the years, she often goes, “Look at this. Look at the eye movement here. I think we should keep it.” It’s very interesting, what goes on behind the eyes. It’s all there.

DEADLINE: His first breakthrough came opposite Robert De Niro in This Boy’s Life, and it was De Niro who told you about him. Do you remember what he said?

SCORSESE: Not exactly. He usually didn’t say much at that time. It was ’92, ’93 and we hadn’t worked together for almost 10 years since we did GoodFellas. Bob wanted me to do Cape Fear. After GoodFellas, he did This Boy’s Life. We were talking on the phone, about what I’m not quite sure. He said, “I’m working with this young boy. You must work with him sometime.” That was the first time I heard him recommend somebody to me. “The kid is really good.” he said.

DEADLINE: Did he say why?

SCORSESE: Bob doesn’t talk a lot [laughs]. He’ll say, “He’s good.” Or, he’ll say, “He’s right for this.” Or he’ll say, “I don’t know, there’s something.”

DEADLINE: This is your tenth film with De Niro and your sixth with DiCaprio. But aside from a short film, it’s the first time you’ve had them together. Why did it take so long, and how close were you to having them both in a film like The Departed?

SCORSESE: We talked to Bob about it, but he didn’t want to do it. Look, there are some people I work with a lot because I find that I’m…in the margins, in a way. I look back, and I feel lucky enough to have gotten the films made that I got made. By “in the margins”, I mean it in the sense that there are many actors over the years I would’ve loved to work with, but…I don’t fit in with the industry thinking. I’ve tried. I was lucky with Paul Newman and Tom Cruise. It all fit together right. But I didn’t work with Bob for ten years until we did GoodFellas; we went off in different directions. Then we made another two, three films. And then, for another nineteen years, we didn’t. In the meantime, there were two with Daniel Day-Lewis, and for years I wanted to work with Jack Nicholson, if work is the word.

There are others whose names I won’t mention that I tried, and it just never fit. People I admired so much. I feel I missed it. And yet what happened is that I found that, because of the subject matter in many of the films, there seemed to be a comfort level [with Bob and I], not easy by the way at all, but a comfort level in knowing we could get to a place. What that place is, I may not be able to verbalize, but together we could probably find something.

But that took also long periods of not working together, because, you know, people change. He still wanted to do certain things. Casino really solidified it for me. That was the ultimate, in terms of that type of picture for him and me. Leo then became that way too, and a lot of it happened on The Aviator. There were some scenes he did with Cate Blanchett that left me stunned, I thought it was so beautiful. And he learned a lot as a person; he told me he did. Maybe he was a young kid, just growing. I have daughters. I don’t have sons, so maybe it’s like we’re stumbling along and it’s almost like parenting in a way. But, wow.

And then we did The Departed and he just blossomed. That character he plays, Billy, is so wonderful. That kid caught in this Celtic street war where, for fun, they kill the Italians from Providence. This poor kid is in the shooting war in the streets. They’re like, as Roger Ebert said in his review, “This movie is like an examination of conscience, when you stay up all night trying to figure out a way to tell the priest: I know I done wrong, but, oh, Father, what else was I gonna do?” This was his character, and he did it beautifully. He’s not a religious guy, but he understood the human condition, and that boy. I thought that was incredible.

So, with Bob, after Casino we stopped for a while and I did Kundun and Bringing Out the Dead. And then Gangs of New York. We always checked in, on that and everything else. He wanted me to do Analyze This, and I said, “We already did it. It was GoodFellas.” I talked to him about other projects, and at one point he said, “You know the kind of stuff I like to do with you.” I said, “OK.” That became The Irishman, and it took nine years. We were always looking. “What about The Departed?” “Nah, I don’t wanna do that.” “OK.”

DEADLINE: He turned down Gangs of New York?

SCORSESE: That was just a check-in. Literally, he said, “What are you doing?” “I’m doing this. You interested?” “Nah.” “OK.” We always talked about that kind of thing, because he is the only one around who knows where I came from and who I am, from that period of time when we were fifteen or sixteen years old. He knows that part of New York. It was all instinct between us and his courage and his humility, in terms of how he’ll say, “If a scene plays on my back, fine, but if it plays better on the other person’s face, play that.”

Now, that was a certain period of time. Does he still think that way, ten years later? Turns out he did! But is he the old Bob? No. You’ve got to see where they are. Like when Leo said, “Where’s the heart of this thing?” I said, it’s Ernest. He loves her and she loves him. And yet…when does he know he’s poisoning her? Is it really insulin they’re giving her for her diabetes? All of that is unknown. But he’s obviously harming her, and how does someone who’s in love with this person, has a family, kids, do that? Clearly, he’s being manipulated by Bill, his uncle. The weakness of the character. He’s like Kichijiro from Silence.

DEADLINE: That character who keeps betraying the missionaries, screwing up and asking for absolution in confession?

SCORSESE: Yes. He was a disaster.

DEADLINE: The way it unfolds, you don’t really know if Ernest is in denial, or if he is just ignorant. He could have just been doing what he was told by the doctors who said the medicine would help her diabetes and slow her down.

SCORSESE: That’s the key. That’s the scene. And that scene took until the day we shot it, to write it. We just kept working on the scenes day by day, weekend by weekend. And when he nods, when Leo says, “Well, you know, it’s just gonna slow her down.” He’s saying, “I accept in denial what all of you are forcing me to do.”

DEADLINE: Lily Gladstone, as Mollie, is the movie’s conscience. What kind of direction did you give her? She’s stoic and often doesn’t say much, which leads to a critical payoff.

SCORSESE: Lily had her own thoughts. She has an intelligence and a groundedness about her, in her mind and heart. It’s almost instinctual. When Mollie says, “You know, Coyote wants money,” he says, “Right, I love money. Let’s have some fun!” She goes, “You’re right. I’m with you.” She loves him. That’s Mollie’s issue. She didn’t leave him until after the trial.

I think she just really loved him. She talks about his eyes and that sort of thing. Her sister says, “Oh, I like the other one, the red-haired guy. But, you know, they both want your money.” Mollie says, “It doesn’t matter, his uncle’s rich, and he doesn’t need that much.” I would use the phrase ‘beautiful failure’ here, and hers is that she trusts and loves. Maybe we see it as a failure, but it’s not a failure for her, because she’s loving and trusting. She has heart, and she cannot accept the fact that he would do anything like poison her intentionally.

DEADLINE: But Mollie’s relatives were dying in suspicious circumstances all around her.

SCORSESE: He has nothing to do with it, in her mind.

DEADLINE: You’ve described the shorthand that you have with De Niro. How does it work with DiCaprio?

SCORSESE: With Leonardo, there’s no shorthand. It’s longhand. We hang out and talk and get all kinds of research. I give him stuff to read, and music. He’s very good with music. As I say, he prompted me to think about Ernest rather than Tom White for him, even though there was very little written on Ernest, and he is the weakling, a man who was in love with his wife, but he’s poisoning her. He was like, “Yeah. OK. How are we gonna do that?” He wanted to go into that uncharted territory. That’s the excitement. We did, and it’s hours and hours and days of work. On set. On the weekends. The film was day and night. Same with Bob, to a certain extent.

DEADLINE: When Deadline did a long interview with Coppola recently, he said that after all the studio meddling on The Godfather, he only wanted to write The Godfather Part II with Mario Puzo, but he had the perfect young director to take over: you. Paramount turned him down. What do you remember about that?

SCORSESE: He told me, and, honestly, I don’t think I could have made a film on that level at that time in my life, and who I was at that time. To make a film as elegant and masterful and as historically important as Godfather II, I don’t think… Now, I would’ve made something interesting, but his maturity was already there. I still had this kind of edgy thing, the wild kid running around.

I didn’t find myself that comfortable with depicting higher-level underworld figures. I was more street-level. There were higher-level guys in the street. I could do that. I did it in GoodFellas particularly. That’s where I grew up. What I saw around me wasn’t guys in a boardroom or sitting around a big table talking. That took another artistic level that Francis had at that point. He didn’t come from that world, the world that I came from. The story of Godfather II is more like Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. It’s wonderful art.

DEADLINE: I always wondered why you gave up Schindler’s List to Steven Spielberg. You grew beyond the street level mobster thing with breathtaking films like Kundun, Silence, and now Killers of the Flower Moon. When you decided Schindler’s List wasn’t for you, was it like Godfather II, outside a world you were most familiar with?

SCORSESE: Oh, no. Godfather II, Francis just mentioned it to me. For Schindler’s List, I hired Steve Zaillian, and Steve and I worked on the script. I was about to direct it. But I had reservations at a certain point. Don’t forget, this is 1990, I’d say. I did The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988. The whole point of that movie was to start a dialogue about something which is still important to me, which is the nature — the true nature — of love, which could be god, could be Jesus. I’m not being culturally ambivalent here, it’s what’s in us. Is god in us? I really am that way; I can’t help it. I like to explore that. I wanted a dialogue on that. But I didn’t know about all that yet. So, I did Last Temptation, I did it a certain way, and Schindler’s List was scuttled by its reception. I did the best I could. I went around the world. Any arguments, I took ’em on. I may have been wrong, but I’m not sure you can be wrong with dogma. But we could argue it.

In the case of Schindler’s List, the trauma I had gone through was such that I felt to tackle that subject matter…I knew there were Jewish people upset that the writer of The Diary of Anne Frank was gentile. I heard that there were people who complained about Schindler, that he used the inmates to make money off them. I said, “Wait a minute.” I could…well, not defend him, but argue who he was. I think he was an amazing man, but I didn’t know if I was equipped for it at that time. I didn’t have the knowledge.

I remember Steve Spielberg, over the years, mentioning it to me all the time. He held up the book when we on a plane going to Cannes, and he said, “This is my dark movie and I’m going to make it.” That was back in 1975. And I said, “Well, I have The Last Temptation of Christ, and I’m gonna make that.”

I used the phrase at the time, “I’m not Jewish.” What I meant was, it’s the old story that the journey had to be taken by a Jewish person through that world, and I think Steven also learned that. He came from…[pauses] where is The Fablelmans set, Phoenix? He told me there were only two-hundred Jews in Phoenix. I couldn’t believe it. Because I come from the Lower East Side, and grew up with the Jewish community. I wasn’t being altruistic, but it just made sense to me that he was the person who really should go through this. I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to do justice to the situation.

DEADLINE: That journey changed Spielberg’s life. When you finally watched Schindler’s List, how did you feel?

SCORSESE: Let me put it this way, and you may say that it’s deflecting the question. But I guarantee you, if I did it, it would not have been the hit that it became. It may have been good, that I can tell you. I had some ideas. Most of it’s there. I had a different ending. I admired the film greatly. But I know that my films just don’t go there. They don’t go to the Academy. You’ll say, “But you’ve got so many nominations!” Yeah, that’s true. But when Paul Schrader and I were not nominated for Best Screenplay and for directing Taxi Driver, that set the tone. I realized, just shut up and do the films.

Raging Bull? We thought, for a second, we’d win, but I said, “It’s not going to be.” I was fine. At least it was recognized by the industry. In the ’80s, I wasn’t recognized at all. From King of Comedy, up to GoodFellas. Nothing on Last Temptation. I realized, ‘You just don’t make these films, Marty. You don’t do them. Just shut up make your films. And if you want, maybe you should make films in Europe. Maybe you should make low-budget, independent films.’ But I tend to start that way, and then they usually wind up being part of the mainstream. In the ’80s, I went low budget with After Hours, and did an industry film with The Color of Money. Then, Last Temptation was made for very, very little. And then I did another industry picture, which was GoodFellas. But, you know, even GoodFellas, I was treated in a tough way. No special treatment at that time, in 1989, even by Warner Bros.

DEADLINE: Why?

SCORSESE: Budget, dammit. I’m responsible for it, man. I was fifteen days over schedule on GoodFellas. Here’s the thing. [First AD and second unit director] Joe Reidy boarded the picture at seventy days. They said, do it in fifty-five. And we tried. Towards the end, we were stumbling over ourselves, exhausted. I even had a doctor tell me, “Don’t take coffee, because it might make you too nervous.” And we ended on day seventy.

DEADLINE: Exactly as you originally planned it…

SCORSESE: Yeah. Now, that doesn’t mean we were right, and they were wrong. “Do it cheaper, do it faster.” I get it. But we weren’t treated very nicely by them when we started going over. It was, “Oh my god, two days over! Oh my god, another day over!” Geez. I mean, it was a nightmare.

They did well with it. They enjoyed it, and they were great in the end. It’s just that, at the time, they weren’t great. Nobody knew. I knew it, but they didn’t. I had a feeling there was something special with that picture. This is different, Killers of the Flower Moon. We did it day by day. We discovered it as we went along. It’s wild. I mean, I had it structured. It was exotic in a way. It didn’t make for a very relaxing time.

DEADLINE: Sounds like the act of discovering left you feeling alive.

SCORSESE: Yeah. In terms of GoodFellas, it was visceral but it was there on the page, with Nick Pileggi and I, and then it was a matter of pushing, pushing, pushing. It was also designed on the page. Some things were spontaneous. Like, Joe Pesci would come in and say, “I wanna do this scene…” With that whole movie, we were like, “Just do it.” We did it in rehearsal, rewrote it from rehearsal.

DEADLINE: What this the ‘how am I funny’ scene?

SCORSESE: He said, ‘something happened to me.’ We were in a restaurant. I said, ‘tell me.’ He goes, ‘I can’t tell you here.’ I said, well, let’s go to my place. So we did. He says, ‘I’m gonna act it out.’ And he did it. I said, ‘I know just where to put it.’ It’s not even in the script. I didn’t write it in. Said, we’re gonna squeeze it in on one day shooting. And Mark Canton had a couple of the other guys from Warner Brothers with him that day, and we hear laughter off camera. It was them.

DEADLINE: Just recently, Super Mario Brothers has minted money, while Air, Ben Affleck’s movie about Michael Jordan’s Nike shoe endorsement, had box office that didn’t match its rave reviews. The media narrative behind Killers of the Flower Moon is obsessed with its runtime and its $200 million budget. Apple’s decision to put the film through a wide global release through Paramount might ultimately be the future that connects streamers and theatricals, because the P&A makes it more culturally relevant than if it just landed on a streamer. Where is all this headed, the future for ambitious theatrical films?

SCORSESE: It’s the question, really. Who said cinema was going to continue the way it has for the past hundred years? In the past twenty-five years things have changed, in the past five years things have changed, and just in the past year, things have changed. Who says it’s going to continue to exist that way? Where people would go see a film like Out of the Past or The Bad and the Beautiful, in a theater on a giant screen with 1,000 or 2,000 people in the audience on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon or evening? I would like it to continue that way, because I knew it that way. And I do know that a communal experience with an audience, with any film on a big screen, is better than one where you’re watching alone. I know that. Well, the nature of the technology is such that a whole new world has been created. In that world, there are certain films, for example, that even I would say, “Let’s wait and see it on streaming.”

But you’re talking to an 80-year-old man. People in their teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, they should be experiencing films in a communal experience in a theater. Films like Mario Brothers are excellent for younger people. But they also grow into mature people. What about that part of their lives? Are they going to think movies were only for game movies or, what do they call them, tent shows?

DEADLINE: Tentpoles.

SCORSESE: Yeah. Are they going to think that’s what cinema is? To a certain extent it is, and when I was a kid, Around the World in 80 Days was like the tentpole thing. The screen was amazing, it was Todd-AO. I’ll never forget the Technicolor intro, with Edward R. Murrow. And then the rocket goes up and the screen opens, the curtains open, and you had this giant screen, and on it this magnificent travelogue that is Around the World in 80 Days. So those things happen, but it’s not for all of cinema.

I do think there has to be a concentrated effort to nurture an appreciation for films that that audience will go see in a theater as they grow. Which means the theaters also have to help us. The theaters say, “Well, we played a smaller indie film.” Everything has become pigeonholed. But what if that screen is in a place that is comfortable? Not a closet with a screen that is smaller than the one you have at home. That means a person will come out and go to that theater with a few friends and respond to that picture. And you never know. That person may come out and write a script or a novel that becomes a script that becomes a tent-pole film that’s going to make more theaters more money in the future. Because maybe, like Spielberg and me, we go see Jules and Jim, and he becomes friends with Truffaut and Fellini. Those films influenced him. I think we can create this experience with Killers of the Flower Moon in a theater for people who want to see this kind of picture.

And when people talk about how much money I’m spending, it’s really how much money Apple is spending. If Apple gave me a certain amount, I think, ‘OK, I have to do it for that amount.’ You might want to say, ‘You got more?’ But sometimes more money is not the best thing. You try to make it for what you’ve agreed to, and believe me, I do. It’s different from The Irishman, where Netflix gave us the extra money for the CGI.

DEADLINE: When the press narrative is your budget, DiCaprio changing roles that left Paramount stepping out as the principal financier, and the runtime, does that ratchet up the pressure for you?

SCORSESE: It certainly does. The risk is there, showing in a theater in the first place. But the risk for this subject matter, and then for running time. It’s a commitment. I know I could sit down and watch a film for three or four hours in a theater, or certainly five or six hours at home. Now, come on. I say to the audience out there, if there is an audience for this kind of thing, “Make a commitment. Your life might be enriched. This is a different kind of picture; I really think it is. Well, I’ve given it to you, so hey, commit to going to a theater to see this.”

Spending the evening, or the afternoon with this picture, with this story, with these people, with this world that reflects on the world we are in today, more so than we might realize.

DEADLINE: You’re eighty. Do you still have that fire to get right back behind the camera and get the next one going?

SCORSESE: Got to. Got to. Yeah. I wish I could take a break for eight weeks and make a film at the same time [laughs]. The whole world has opened up to me, but it’s too late. It’s too late.

DEADLINE: What do you mean by that?

SCORSESE: I’m old. I read stuff. I see things. I want to tell stories, and there’s no more time. Kurosawa, when he got his Oscar, when George [Lucas] and Steven [Spielberg] gave it to him, he said, “I’m only now beginning to see the possibility of what cinema could be, and it’s too late.” He was eighty-three. At the time, I said, “What does he mean?” Now I know what he means.

https://deadline.com/2023/05/martin-...ro-1235359006/



De Caprio with an affected drawl and a curiously fat face.

Visuals vaguely similar to There Will Be Blood.

White people are "wolves." Can you see the wolves in this picture?

Native Americans good. Could anyone dare make a film in which first peoples were anything less than "the goodies"?

Oil Bad.

Looks like Leo will be that one good cracker with a spiritual connection to noble natives. Haven't seen that one before!

Capitalism Bad.

Looks like another hopeful progressive Passion Play dangling as Oscar bait. We've gone through the looking glass of white-washing American history to wallowing in it.



One can't tell too much from the trailer, although the cinematography of Rodrigo Pietro (Argo, The Irishman) might stand out.

I think I can trust Scorcese not to lean too heavily on SJ, although the story seems to lend itself to that. But what a crew! And if it's well done, 3-1/2 hours is a helluva good value for the buck...



Scorsese's good friend and frequent collaborator, Robbie Robertson, has died at the age of eighty.

Scorsese released this statement...

Originally Posted by Scorsese on Robertson
Robbie Robertson was one of my closest friends, a constant in my life and my work.

I could always go to him as a confidante. A collaborator. An advisor. I tried to be the same for him.

Long before we ever met, his music played a central role in my life — me and millions and millions of other people all over this world. The Band’s music, and Robbie’s own later solo music, seemed to come from the deepest place at the heart of this continent, its traditions and tragedies and joys.



Scorsese first met Robertson and The Band filming their set at Woodstock, footage that was ultimately not used in the landmark documentary. Most obviously Robertson and The Band had Marty film The Last Waltz. Robertson would go on the be the music supervisor and sometimes composer for Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, The Color of Money, Casino, Gangs of New York, Shutter Island, The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence, The Irishman, and the upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon.




Scorsese's good friend and frequent collaborator, Robbie Robertson, has died at the age of eighty.

Scorsese released this statement...





Scorsese first met Robertson and The Band filming their set at Woodstock, footage that was ultimately not used in the landmark documentary. Most obviously Robertson and The Band had Marty film The Last Waltz. Robertson would go on the be the music supervisor and sometimes composer for Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, The Color of Money, Casino, Gangs of New York, Shutter Island, The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence, The Irishman, and the upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon.

Robbie trying to catch the fly always makes me laugh.
__________________
I’m here only on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. That’s why I’m here now.



A new piece on Marty from the current issue of Time Magazine...


___________________________________________________


Martin Scorsese Still Has Stories To Tell
By Stephanie Zacharek for Time Magazine
September 12, 2023


Martin Scorsese is wearing a blue shirt. It’s a nothing-special medium-dark blue, at least as it’s backlit by the afternoon sun streaming through the window. But later, in the crisp-soft light of the screening room located in his office, it becomes a blue of a different color, a hue you see most commonly in wildflowers, and in the movies. Almost iridescent, it shimmers toward purple; in an unreal sky, it would be the shifting point between dusk and outer space. It’s proof of the illusory nature of color, but as metaphors go, it’s a humble one, a trick of cloth and dye and light. Let’s call it—after the ace cinematographer behind the Technicolor marvels of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, among Scorsese’s favorites—Jack Cardiff Blue.

Color is important to nearly all filmmakers, but Scorsese may be more attuned than most to both its language and its evanescence. In 1990, having been alarmed for decades by the deterioration of so many aging film prints, he established the Film Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving film history. In his screening room, we watch a clip outlining the restoration of Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, which Scorsese saw with his father in the theater when he was eight. It’s transportive to watch Moira Shearer leaping and pirouetting, her image freed from the murky mold damage that had been digitally removed from the negative. The before-and-after comparison illustrates why it’s crucial for the entities that own these films to ensure they’re around for future generations. “This means a lot to a lot of people, spiritually, culturally,” he says. “Like reading a book.”

Scorsese’s encyclopedic knowledge of film has made him the patron saint of film bros, and though it’s a title he most certainly never asked for, he’s happy to talk about movies for as long as you like. But the stories he tells me during our three-hour interview—about falling in love with Westerns as an asthmatic kid, or about his Aunt Mary taking him to a double bill of Bambi and Jacques Tourneur’s great obsessive noir Out of the Past at age six—are about so much more than movies. Even people who love movies often talk about them in a way that disconnects them from life; it’s easier to jaw on about camera angles than it is to explain how a film speaks to our soul. Scorsese can articulate all of it.

There are still many of us who see the past, present, and future of film as a continuous, regenerative strand, who find pleasure in the filmmaking of the past even as we harbor hopes for its future. If you think that way, you might imagine everyone does. But the reality is more dismal. Content is king, and entertainment billionaires want to keep shoveling it our way, at the lowest possible cost to themselves. In their eyes, we’re no longer moviegoers—a word that, in 2023, has a painfully romantic ring to it—but consumers of content, and the consumers have spoken: They want art on their own terms. Their fandom must be served. Both moguls and audiences are leaning into their worst impulses. Scorsese hesitates to use the word art when he’s talking about movies; he knows how it sounds, and he knows as well as anyone who’s seen a double bill of Out of the Past and Bambi that art and entertainment can blur and fuse, wonderfully. But the very idea of movie artistry is in crisis, and it doesn’t look as if it’s getting better anytime soon. Scorsese is worried about that, and if you care about movies, you should be worried too.

“It should be one cinematic culture, you know? But right now everything is being fragmented and broken up in a way.” We’ve always had film genres, he says, but when he was growing up, people who loved movies would just go. “Not everybody liked Musicals. Not everybody liked Westerns. Not everybody liked gangster films or Noirs. But at the time, we just went to the movies, and that’s what was playing.”

By itself, knowing a lot about film means nothing. That bank of knowledge needs to be entwined with curiosity about the world; seemingly definitive answers lead only to more questions.

Projects like Killers of the Flower Moon are part of why he’s spent his career pushing for something that can only be called a radical truth—certainly in the films he makes, but even more so in his everyday reckoning with the world. Plenty of young filmmakers want to be the next Scorsese; few have any sense of what the act of becoming entails.



Scorsese found his way to Killers of the Flower Moon shortly after filming his 2016 picture Silence, about Portuguese Jesuit missionaries facing a crisis of faith in 17th century Japan. Something about the juxtaposition of “flower moon” and “killers” in the title struck him: “It was an impression, like a haiku, almost.” He slipped right into Grann’s book, and knew he wanted to film it.

Killers of the Flower Moon, which arrives in theaters on October 20th, is a grave, urgent picture, less overtly violent than the films—Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Raging Bull—that helped build Scorsese’s reputation, yet perhaps more attuned than any of his movies to the insidious, selfish nature of human beings. It’s about a different kind of violence, born of greed, racism, and a sense of entitlement. But it’s also about a marriage, between the characters played by Leonardo DiCaprio and the extraordinary Lily Gladstone. DiCaprio is the sometimes sweet, sometimes wily World War I veteran Ernest Burkhart, in thrall to his seemingly magnanimous uncle, big-shot cattleman William K. Hale (Robert De Niro). Gladstone plays the Osage woman he marries and builds a life with, the former Mollie Kyle. The oil rights on her land have made her rich, but she watches in anguish as members of her family begin to mysteriously die off; her own health deteriorates as well, at an alarming rate.

Grann’s book focuses largely on the birth of the Bureau of Investigation—now known as the FBI—and specifically on one of its most upstanding agents, Tom White (played by Jesse Plemons). Originally, DiCaprio was supposed to play White. But something about that framework bothered both him and Scorsese. “After a certain point, I realized I was making a movie about all the white guys,” Scorsese says. “Meaning I was taking the approach from the outside in, which concerned me.” Eventually, he and DiCaprio realized that the heart of the movie wasn’t the birth of the FBI, but the love story between Ernest and Mollie. That became the film’s core.

That shift in perspective also opened space for one of the film’s greatest performances, from Gladstone. In her, Scorsese says, there’s “a fierceness and serenity at the same time. And it’s encased in this intelligence—the eyes say it all.” Gladstone also spurred some of the movie’s finest improvised dialogue. Early in Ernest and Mollie’s courtship, she calls him a coyote, but in Osage. DiCaprio, in character and, as always, quick on his feet, counters with an unscripted line: “You must mean handsome devil.” Gladstone laughs, just as Mollie might have in real life. The moment made it into the movie, because you can’t buy that kind of spontaneity.

Not only is this story drawn from fairly recent history; it’s also part of a community’s painful past, filmed largely in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, not far from Fairfax, where the events occurred—places where the descendants of the story still live, carrying memories of their forebears. Chad Renfro, an interior designer who grew up in the area with Osage grandparents, became involved in the production at the start, eventually becoming a consulting producer. The story told in Killers of the Flower Moon, horrific enough by itself, is part of a much larger pattern. “Marty made a story of trust and betrayal,” Renfro says. This community had suffered so many betrayals, he explains, “over hundreds of years of dealing with governmental agencies, and people who came in and took advantage of us.” It was understandable that Osage from the area—from Pawhuska, Gray Horse, and Hominy—would be wary of a white filmmaker coming in to tell their story, particularly one whose films are so often charged with violence.

Scorsese and his team worked closely with Osage Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear and his office, Renfro says, and hundreds of Osage were involved in making the film. “The first day of filming, we had an elder, Archie Mason, come and say a prayer,” Renfro says. That amazed and thrilled some of the cast and crew; they’d never before started a film with a prayer.

Spending time with Scorsese—listening to his ideas unspool in stanzas that are somehow both operatic and streetwise-colloquial, shot through with spirited digressions and invisible exclamation points—is great fun, but you’ve got to pay attention. He talks fast and covers a lot of ground. Even his office decor speaks of a sensibility that can’t be reduced to bite-size quotes: dozens of family photographs share space with vintage movie posters—there’s one for Vincente Minnelli’s juicy 1952 movie-biz masterpiece The Bad and the Beautiful hanging right behind his desk. There are books everywhere, but also an enviable collection of Classics Illustrated, comic-book versions of great works (The Iliad, Moby-Dick) that fired up lots of little brains from the ’40s through the ’60s.

It’s a place where the past merges seamlessly with the present, and where ideas seem to hang in the air, which perhaps explains why Scorsese has so many of them. But it’s a fallacy, albeit probably a common one, that he has always been able to make any movie he wants, whenever he wants, with bounteous funding. Silence was on hold for years, thanks to what Scorsese calls a Gordian knot of legal problems and rights issues. He was supposed to begin filming The Last Temptation of Christ in 1983, but the project, controversial from the beginning, fell apart. Though he was able to make the picture four years later, he had to make do with a small fraction of its original budget.



That’s a long way of saying he knows all about the connection between filmmaking artistry and the more prosaic art of dealmaking. He also understands that commercial pressures are more brutal than ever. “Young people expressing themselves with moving images, they’re going to find a way to be seen,” he says. “But they have to fight, they have to really, really fight and not be co-opted.” He worries that the blockbuster ethos, as it’s currently playing out, may mean the end of personal filmmaking. He spins this observation into a rueful joke about how he and his cohorts Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Cimino were viewed after they’d made complex, ambitious films that tried the patience of studio heads. “Ultimately, they say, ‘Well, who wants personal filmmaking? Look what happened in the ’70s. By the end of it, you all went mad! And you went over budget and schedule, and you made these three movies, Apocalypse Now, Raging Bull, and Heaven’s Gate!’” The point is that a filmmaker’s vision—the very thing that makes him distinctive—is what’s held against him when the money doesn’t roll in.

Scorsese seems driven to open the world to people the way others have opened it to him. “You know, I was lucky because my parents were really good with me and my brother. And we were part of a very big family.” There wasn’t much money, and his New York City neighborhood was sometimes rough, populated by the kinds of street toughs who would later find a place in his movies. But he knew nothing but love at home. “The real love that I found, acted out as best as possible under the circumstances, was in that apartment on Elizabeth Street.”

He speaks, as he often has in interviews, of Father Francis Principe, the progressive young priest assigned to Scorsese’s neighborhood when he was a kid, an altar boy who was simultaneously attracted to Catholicism and unsure how it connected with real life. Father Principe would take Scorsese and his fellow altar boys to the movies, and they’d discuss what they’d just seen. He introduced the kids to writers—Graham Greene, Dwight Macdonald—they wouldn’t have otherwise read. There are reasons, maybe, why so much of Scorsese’s work—including Killers of the Flower Moon—seems to seek a role for the spiritual self in a hostile, almost inhuman world. “How does human decency, or how does love even come into the picture?” he wonders aloud.

He talks about the time, in 2010, he took a rare vacation in Egypt and visited St. Catherine’s Monastery, in Sinai. It’s located right near the spot where Moses received the tablets; the burning bush is nearby. “It’s no longer burning, but it’s there,” Scorsese says.

As he and his wife Helen and daughter Francesca wound through these dark, 6th century corridors, a maze of white walls with small windows dotted with paintings and cases of artifacts, they turned a corner and a vision—or perhaps it was a challenge—lit up in their path. “All three of us were, like, stunned,” he says. The specter before them wasn’t a ghost at all, but one of the oldest Byzantine icons, an almost life-size encaustic painted on a rounded surface, lifelike and mystical at once, known as the Christ Pantocrator. Symmetry is pleasing in art, which makes the asymmetry of the Christ Pantocrator at least slightly unnerving: one eye is larger than the other, and Scorsese found himself in a stare-down. “The look, you know, the look was a loving sort of confrontational look. Like, who are you? What are you doing with your life? Who are you? What next? All these questions. Like, what, what, what do I do? It shook me, in a way.”

Mention Scorsese’s name, and everyone wants to talk about Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Raging Bull—or maybe, even, about the delightful cameos he makes in Francesca’s TikTok videos (in one of them, she asks him to identify common “feminine items,” among them an eyelash curler and a Beautyblender). A surer way to clear out a dinner party is to bring up Silence or Kundun, Scorsese’s ardent 1997 film about the life of the Dalai Lama, or, heaven forbid, The Last Temptation of Christ, which drew ire upon its release for its suggestion that Jesus wanted to sleep with Mary Magdalene. But those movies aren’t just outliers in Scorsese’s body of work. In their questioning spirit, they may be foundational for everything else, up to and including Killers of the Flower Moon, a picture that peers, deeply and uncomfortably, into the inhumanity of humans, knowing there’s no valid way to ask the forgiveness of those who’ve been wronged.

Scorsese has lots of movie projects he wants to get to, among them an adaptation of Marilynne Robinson’s Home. He would also like to make another movie about Jesus, as he alluded last May, after having met with Pope Francis. “I don’t know what it’s going to be, exactly. I don’t know what you’d call it. It wouldn’t be a straight narrative.” It would, he suggests, build on some of the ideas he explored in Silence. “But there would be staged scenes. And I’d be in it.”

It sounds, frankly, unfilmable—all the more reason to believe he’ll pull it off. The Christ Pantocrator will somehow be a part of Scorsese’s Jesus movie; he’s not quite sure how he’s going to get there, but he will. What is he doing with his life? He’s spent a lifetime figuring that out, and he’s nowhere close to being finished. The bush is still there; it’s still burning.

https://time.com/6311403/martin-scor...oon-interview/
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A system of cells interlinked
*Waits patiently for Holden's take on Scorsese's new film*
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“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” ― Thomas Sowell



My opinion is that this movie took Scorsese into God level. He was all ready in all time great level, but this one put him amongst the God's of movie Directors.

Taxi Driver in the 70s
Raging Bull in the 80s
Goodfellas in the 90s
The Departed in the 00s
The Wolf of Wall Street in the 10s
Killers of the Flower moon in the 20s

You'd struggle to find a director that has directed gems in six consecutive decades. And if you have found one, then they'd be at God level.

He should retire now. He's left his mark forever.



My opinion is that this movie took Scorsese into God level. He was all ready in all time great level, but this one put him amongst the God's of movie Directors.

Taxi Driver in the 70s
Raging Bull in the 80s
Goodfellas in the 90s
The Departed in the 00s
The Wolf of Wall Street in the 10s
Killers of the Flower moon in the 20s

You'd struggle to find a director that has directed gems in six consecutive decades. And if you have found one, then they'd be at God level.

He should retire now. He's left his mark forever.
He has said that only now in recent years has it all come together in a totality that is beyond anything he understood as a director before, and that, in retrospective he can only regret that this newfound understanding of film should come at such a late number in life. He felt as though he has begun but sees that it is sadly near the end of his career, that the end feels like the beginning and he can do so much more.

I thought about that a lot and helpless as I was to affect his misnomer it only served to push myself in my own life to make sure I could reach that point before him.


* that was a paraphrase
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Signed,