![]() I’d seen something of Scorsese’s behind-the-scenes originality in Jonas Mekas’s documentary about the making of Scorsese’s 2006 gangland drama, “The Departed”-the movie for which Scorsese finally won the Oscar for Best Director, after five previous nominations ended in disappointment, and which heralded his great outburst of work in the past decade and a half. ![]() I wanted to ask about his methods because I’ve long felt that a huge part of the art of directing is producing-that the originality of a finished film usually has its roots in the distinctiveness of its director’s approach to the systems and methods that get it made. That said, there was much that I wanted to know about Scorsese, not least because of the paradox of his artistic position: he directs extraordinary movies on hundred-million-dollar budgets yet makes them deeply personal and packs them with artistic flourishes-spectacular camera moves, intimate observations, dramatic shocks, and moments of performance-that are as daring as they are distinctive. When I met Scorsese several weeks ago, I told him, before we got started, that I do very few interviews, because, well, I have a director’s films, and, if watching them doesn’t give me enough to think about and to write about, then I’m in the wrong profession. In other words, the first of the mysteries that Scorsese’s new film poses isn’t in the plot-it’s the mystery of its own genesis. And now his forthcoming film, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” his first attempt-as an octogenarian-at a Western, is essentially a marital drama akin to Stanley Kubrick’s final film, “Eyes Wide Shut.” It borrows more from such intimate psychological dramas as “Phantom Thread,” “Suspicion,” and, yes, “Gaslight” than from any of the Western classics of John Ford. ![]() His modern-gothic horror-thriller “ Shutter Island,” from 2010, is primarily a refracted personal essay about his childhood spent watching paranoid film-noir classics in the shadow of nuclear war. His 2013 film, “ The Wolf of Wall Street,” based on the true story of a large-scale financial fraudster, is also his wildest and wackiest comedy, closer in inspiration to Jerry Lewis than to Oliver Stone. Martin Scorsese has the best curveball in the business.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |