The director’s mission is to bring crowds back to the cinema with intelligent epics like his new film The Killers of the Flower Moon - but, aged 80, time is running short.
Martin Scorsese comes at you like one of his films. In person, over coffee, the world’s greatest living film director tells stories of great hope and wisdom at a pace that takes you straight to the streets of his native New York. He is talking about his first visit to the Cannes Film Festival, five decades ago. It was 1973, he had just made Mean Streets and was 30. “Us younger film-makers would gaze upon the gods as they went by.”
Which gods? “I don’t recall, I’m sorry,” he says, sadly. He is 80 now. Then, suddenly, he remembers and clicks back into top gear. “Catherine Deneuve was around! So many beautiful actors and film-makers. I would be having a coffee and Werner Herzog would be there.” He pauses, smiles. “Brigitte Bardot! Oh my God, all these people . . .” His eyes are alive and the names keep on coming: A-listers, French directors, some who are still with us, but most who are not.
Mean Streets was his breakthrough, just when cinema was entering its most febrile decade, with Scorsese bursting on to the scene with his fellow “movie brats” Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. “When you make your first major picture,” he says, “you hope that it will become a whole series of films. Dare I say, you wonder if they will mean anything?”
Only rarely does Scorsese seem his age. (“I’m very old now,” he mutters, struggling to open a water bottle.) He is funny. I tell him I saw Hugo — his magical family adventure about clocks and toys in 1930s Paris — with my nine-year-old and that we can’t wait to devour his back catalogue together. Just not yet. That eye-popping scene with the vice in Casino, the grisly car boot in Goodfellas and the whole of Taxi Driver are a tad violent for my boy. “What, he’s nine?” Scorsese barks, his big bushy eyebrows arching. He claps with delight. “Wait until he’s ten!”
The director has so much to talk about and still so much to do. His 26th movie — Killers of the Flower Moon — is out next week to some of his best reviews yet.
The movie is an epic, an incredible but true American tale of greed, racism and murder from the 1920s. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, who travels to Oklahoma to work for William Hale (Robert De Niro). There, he falls for Mollie (Lily Gladstone), a Native American from the Osage tribe who own oil land and are very, very rich. A lot of charming white men circle the Osage, marry into their families and then a lot of Osage get murdered. You do the maths. The pile of Osage bodies became so high, the stench led to the formation of the FBI. “The story is hardly known in America,” Scorsese says. He felt he had no choice but to tell it.
Many years ago, though, Scorsese said film-makers have a drive when they are young and fearless, and “make five or six pictures in a row that say all the things you want to say”. He smiles. He knows the question that’s coming. So, I ask, what is driving him now?
“Well, the last explosive I threw up there was The Wolf of Wall Street,” he says. That was a decade ago — a vitriolic broadside at corporate, misogynist America. “That film was to shake it up and ask, ‘Is this really who we are?’” he says. “Then they elected him!” He means Donald Trump. The Wolf of Wall Street was meant to be a warning but ended up a premonition. “And it’s only got more dire since.”
Scorsese then runs through the films he has made since: Silence, the slow religious drama about missionaries in Japan, and the meditative gangster epic The Irishman. “It’s very difficult,” he says, trying to explain what motivates him, “because, without being pretentious or taking yourself too seriously, I have children and grandchildren and I’m trying to find out what it is to be alive. What do we do with this time here? For each other? The thing is, there is nothing else outside of taking care of each other. It is as simple as that.”
His voice has slowed to a croak. In his seventies Scorsese also made a couple of documentaries and even some TV (his record industry homage Vinyl, co-created with Mick Jagger, was a rare flop) while continuing his long-running passion to restore old films, like Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes. He’s not slowing down and he reminds me of Pablo Picasso, David Hockney and Paul McCartney — great artists who keep creating as they push into their eighties. Is it, I ask, because you all love the work or because you worry there is not enough time left to achieve what you want?
“Is it really a question of either/or?” Scorsese says. “Loving work, wanting to do more and achieve more — aren’t these the same thing? It grows out of devotion and dedication. You feel it in Picasso right up to the last minute. With Hockney, in his remarkable multi-camera videos. In McCartney’s music. They can’t stop. They don’t want to stop. Why would they? Why would I?
“When you’re young, you don’t really look at things that way because your life is before you and you see time as unlimited. At this point in my life, every moment is precious. Every frame of every picture is precious and every gesture . . . And so my work is to find the truth of existing — ultimately, that’s what I have always been trying to express, whether I was aware of it or not.”
Scorsese was born in New York in 1942, a third-generation Italian immigrant. His grandparents had moved over from Sicily and his parents spent most of their lives working in the clothing industry. He was brought up “at the height of the Catholic Church in New York” and talks about priests who introduced him to authors because, at home, his family did not have books. “I’m still trying to catch up with the Russian novelists.”
What they did have at home, though, was music, painting, sculpture, dance and, of course, cinema. He remembers being five and watching TV at home on a Friday night when they showed Italian neorealist films, like Bicycle Thieves, that told stories of real people. He thought they were entertaining but also intelligent. He never looked back.
Scorsese also had terrible asthma as a child — which is key. “Because my parents, not being educated, just said, ‘Don’t let him run! Or let him play!’ So I was always in a movie theatre and that opened up this world.” He loved westerns and, at about ten, saw a run of early 1950s films with Native American heroes: Devil’s Doorway, Broken Arrow, Apache. They educated him about that culture at a time when the received wisdom was to dismiss Native Americans as violent and brutish. He vowed that he would one day tell one of their stories, if he could do it with respect.
Hence Killers of the Flower Moon. Yet three decades ago Scorsese turned down the chance to direct Schindler’s List because he did not want to be a non-Jew telling a Jewish story. “Well, I’d just had a great deal of contention with The Last Temptation of Christ,” he explains, referring to his 1988 film, which had Jesus copping off with Mary Magdalene. “I could argue my points with that. However, with Mr Schindler I was uncomfortable. There were things that I heard that could be problematic and I didn’t want, as a gentile, to come in and cause more trouble.”
So why, as a non-Osage person, does he think his new movie is different? “You know, I am an American,” he says, giggling. “Even though it took me years to realise I was being excluded from many cultural aspects of America, due to my immigrant experience. I wondered if I fitted in at all with American society. Yet once I realised that I didn’t it was a relief because that still makes me American and means I don’t have to be part of that society’s values.”
As such he was free to challenge America with his films — never more so than with Killers of the Flower Moon, which is damning in its portrayal of the Osage killings. “Damning, yes, but it is a good thing for all of us to learn,” Scorsese says. “This country is very young. We have to pull it together, not tear it apart. To do that we must know what occurred in the past.”
Still, fury aside, Killers of the Flower Moon is not hard work to watch. DiCaprio sizzles and De Niro soars. The film feels vast in scope yet meticulous in detail. The director spent a lot of time working out what type of shovel people used in the Midwest a century ago. The result is a sweeping triumph. Watch it at an Imax cinema and Oklahoma will stretch for miles. “I’d never experienced such space,” he says with a gasp.
Scorsese — alongside Christopher Nolan with Oppenheimer and Ridley Scott’s forthcoming Napoleon — is trying to persuade adults who want meaty and epic fare back to the cinema. For too long multiplexes have been the domain of superheroes and Scorsese has been vocal about his disdain for that vacuous genre. I do not want to draw him into that again (it seems asinine to be given time with him only to ask for his opinion on the third Ant-Man), but I do want to know who is to blame for the dominance of comic book movies.
“It’s the studios, the establishment who are pouring money into [blockbuster] films and taking over cinemas,” he scoffs. Why does that matter? “We need to make room for films that are not tentpole movies, or else the audiences will think cinema is only that one way and there’s no place for the more subtle films we grew up with.
“What’s been lacking is richness and depth,” he says. “We’d be doing a great disservice if we don’t try to nurture an appreciation of a different kind of film. A different language. In doing so, you invest in the future of cinema.”
Next up for Scorsese is The Wager, based on a book about a high seas mutiny. It will be another huge production for the octogenarian. Shouldn’t he be making an easier film? “I have a couple,” he says, smiling. “I’m working on the Marilynne Robinson book Home. Religious subject matter about a family in 1960s Iowa.” That sounds smaller. “In production terms, yes — but it’s deceptive. I think, internally, it may be bigger.” He guffaws.
“I don’t want to slow down,” he says emphatically. “At my age, your body tells you at a certain point you need to pace yourself, but I’m still searching for, as I mentioned earlier, the answer to how we take care of each other. I thought that my films should reflect that.” He smiles. “I have tried the best that I can.”
Which actors have appeared most in his films?
Robert De Niro
10: Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, New York New York, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, Casino, The Irishman, Killers of the Flower Moon
Catherine Scorsese (his mum)
9: Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy, After Hours, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence, Casino
Leonardo DiCaprio
6: Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, Shutter Island, The Wolf of Wall Street, Killers of the Flower Moon
Harvey Keitel
6: Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, Mean Streets, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Taxi Driver, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Irishman
Killers of the Flower Moon is in cinemas now.
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London