Movie maestro, but Scorsese is still learning

Even master director Martin Scorsese, whose films include the acclaimed Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, admits he has things to learn about moviemaking.

Scorsese's The Aviator, starring Leonardo DiCaprio in a tale of eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, hits United States cinemas this month with the expectation that it may be the year's best movie and earn Scorsese his first Oscar. He dismisses such talk as hype that could ultimately ruin the movie for audiences.

The director is known, mostly, for his small-scale films. But like 2002's Gangs of New York, The Aviator is a big, flashy Hollywood movie. It comes to audiences chock full of digital effects that the 62 year-old director has used rarely in a career spanning more than 40 years.

"The problem is, there is a certain expectation," he told Reuters.

"Will that experiment - every time you make a film it's kind of an experiment - but will that be accepted by an audience that wants something else? I don't know."

Scorsese was among a group of maverick directors in the 1970s making hit movies outside Hollywood. He focused on low-budget, urban stories of tormented characters seeking personal redemption.

In the 1980s, he suffered setbacks like the controversial The Last Temptation of Christ, then rebounded in 1990 with GoodFellas, a drama about a turncoat Mafia foot soldier, cementing his reputation as a maestro of moviemaking.

Gangs Of New York, about rival gang warfare set in 1860s New York, was hyped by Hollywood pitchmen as the film that would finally win Scorsese a best director's Oscar. But he lost to Roman Polanski, director of The Pianist.

The Aviator, too, comes heaped with Oscar buzz, and already the US film group, The National Board of Review, put it at No.2 on its list of top 10 films behind Finding Neverland.

At first, that would seem to be a good thing. But Hollywood pitchmen sometimes forget that fans often want to judge for themselves which film they think is best and which directors and performers they think deserve accolades. They don't want to be told.

"Audiences begin to resent that," Scorsese said of the buzz.

The Aviator covers roughly 20 years in the life of Hughes, who went from film-producing wunderkind in the late 1920s to aviation genius of the 1940s, before slipping into the madness that plagued him until he died in 1976.

The film opens with Hughes (DiCaprio) in his early 20s when he was making 1930s aerial war film Hell's Angels. It moves through his love affairs with Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) and Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale), and depicts Hollywood's Golden Age and the nightlife at clubs like the legendary Cocoanut Grove.

At the same time, the movie covers Hughes' aviation genius. He developed the fastest plane of his day and flew around the world in a record three days and 19 hours in 1938.

There were bad times, too. Hughes and his Trans World Airlines fought the US government and rival Pan American World Airways over international flight routes. The battle nearly landed TWA in bankruptcy.

Hughes suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder and germ phobia. He is shown scrubbing his hands raw and locking himself alone in a room for weeks.

The Aviator is a human drama, yet it also has elements of big-time moviemaking. Some of the flying scenes were produced with digital images, while others were made with plane models.

Scorsese first shot The Aviator traditionally, then used digital technology to, in effect, reprocess the film to make it look like movies of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.

"The nature of filmmaking is changing ... we're going to have to change with it," he said of using technology. He added, however, that "the problem is the technology can take away from what you're saying ... it takes the heart, sometimes".

In many ways, The Aviator harkens to what Scorsese does best. It paints a picture of a tormented person who, ultimately, has redeeming qualities. It is a simple story of a complex individual. But instead of a small canvas, Scorsese weaves his tale on a massive scale, as he did in Gangs Of New York.

It's a risky proposition, he said. "I don't know how many more times I can make a big film with a budget like this that has elements that have enough risk factors to make me feel comfortable," Scorsese said.

In fact, he said he next is returning to small-scale filmmaking with a gangster movie called The Departed that has a simple tale to tell. "The simplicity is the challenge," he said, "because simplicity is deceptive".

And in Hollywood, especially during this hard-to-figure Oscar-nomination season, simplicity is elusive, as well.


*  'The Aviator'  yesterday received a total of six Golden Globe nominations, including Best Motion Picture Drama and Best Director for Martin Scorsese.

- REUTERS