You wake up this morning and have this great GQ interview with Martin Scorsese that is absolutely worth a read. It’s lengthy, wonderful and deep dive into the mindset of the filmmaker’s last stretch as an artist.
He, as always, takes the time to criticize Marvel movies as nothing more than “marketing”:
“It’s almost like AI making a film. That doesn’t mean you don’t have incredible directors & special effects people doing beautiful art. But what does it mean? What will these films give you?
Scorsese says audiences have to “fight back” against Comic Book movie culture by supporting directors like Christopher Nolan and The Safdies: “we’ve got to save cinema.”
However, there are far more interesting things being said in this interview, which gets very deep into the psyche of Scorsese. At 81, he knows that he doesn’t have much time left.
Scorsese seems to be hinting at regrets in making “Shutter Island,” which he calls “the last studio film I made.” He believes he should have skipped that one and gone straight to “Silence”:
Still, winning an Oscar, Scorsese said, “encouraged me to make another picture with Shutter Island. It turned out I should have gone on probably to do Silence.”
“Shutter Island” has plenty of fans, and I don’t think there should be any regrets in making that highly entertaining genre film. But Scorsese seems to be of the mindset that, as he gets older, he shouldn’t be wasting his time on projects that are not that essential.
In fact, Scorsese believes that he might have one, or two, more films left in him. Given that he takes around 3-4 years, between pre and post production, to complete a film, that does make sense.
And if I could just muster up the energy, God willing, to make a couple more, one more maybe, and that’s it, OK? That’s as far as I got. You keep going until you can’t.
The filmmaker also admits that he began working on “Home,” an adaptation of Marilynne Robinson’s novel, with “TAR” filmmaker Todd Field, and then Kent Jones, prior to the WGA strike. But, he, again, asks: “How much longer can it be me? I’m gonna be 81.”