Martin Scorsese admitted on Sunday, at Marrakech Intl. Film Festival, that he still watches many films, but now mostly at home. He says that he does miss the audience experience: “The cinema of the past hundred years has gone,” he said. “It’s changed."
The fact that Netflix took in "The Irishman," his $140 million mob movie starring Robert De Niro, Al PacinoandJoe Pesci, when most other studios balked at the idea, was a clear sign that the times were changing for the 76-year-old director, “People such as Netflix are taking risks. ‘The Irishman’ is a risky film. No one else wanted to fund the pic for five to seven years. And of course we’re all getting older. Netflix took the risk.”
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Scorsese expressed concern about the demise of film criticism, which, he claims, has been reduced to short tweets and the star rating system. The again, Scorsese admitted, that it's a double-edged sword, since Vincent Canby’s review of Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate” in the New York Times in 1980 led to the film being pulled from theaters the next day, he said, and completely changed the auteur landscape within the studio system. He added that those dark days of studio filmmaking only ended when Steven Soderbergh’s “Sex, Lies and Videotape” won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1989, which led to American movies having another much welcome resurgence.
“Soderbergh’s film began a resurrection. These days young independent filmmakers can get their films made. But the theaters are closing. Young people have to reinvent everything.”