John Phillips/Getty Images for BFI.
Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall exploded to a wave of cheers this afternoon as director Martin Scorsese strolled onto the stage to take part in a professional Q&A at the London Film Festival.
Keynote session hosted Child driver Director Edgar Wright was the hottest ticket here this week in London. With a full crowd of loyal film fans and UK-based filmmakers like Dexter Fletcher and Asif Kapadia, the session took place almost like a university lecture, with Scorsese speaking for long periods about his films, his career and the influence of both. On his life.
“I’ve always considered myself more of a teacher than a filmmaker,” Scorsese began when asked about his insatiable appetite for world cinema and why he likes to stay in dialogue with others about the films he loves.
“I felt a sense of pride that I had touched some people, not necessarily through my work but through recommending films,” Scorsese said. “Then by their films, I was inspired. It opens up a whole new world.”
Wright had been working his way through Scorsese’s films – often chronologically – and he reminded the director that his achievement had been a huge success, I mean the streetsHe turns 50 years old this year. While delving into the making of the film, Scorsese said he simply wanted to “make a film about my life and my friends on the Lower East Side.”
“It was a sensitive issue because it wasn’t a place where you could bring cameras. You couldn’t mention specific names,” Scorsese said of his neighborhood, which he described as tough working class.
“I had to be very careful, so it became a very personal film, and it took three years.”
Scorsese said I mean the streets It was filmed in 1972 and first introduced to the public in 1973. At that point, he said, “the only way we saw movies was on the big screen.”
“You don’t see movies like this on TV because if you do— I mean the streets It was shown on CBS Late Night Movies — and edited to the point where it was avant-garde. “You’ll say, ‘What’s going on with this thing,’” he said. “taxi driver And it was worse. It was shortened to 45 minutes. I’m not joking.”
Wright immediately moved forward taxi driver, Scorsese’s first collaboration with writer Paul Schrader. Scorsese described the time he spent making this film as “a major battle.”
despite of Taxi drivers The film was a huge success—the film won the Palme d’Or in 1976—and Scorsese said he could never figure out how to be accepted as a director in Hollywood no matter how much he tried to “be a Hollywood guy.”
“They asked me to leave around 1978/79,” he said of Hollywood’s reaction to him, and not just because of the film industry. “We were younger, and I was experiencing teenage rebellion when I was 27.”
Hollywood and the idea of a Hollywood-based film system took up surprisingly little time during the keynote. However, at the end of the session, Wright highlighted a series of recent interviews by Scorsese in which he was questioned about the future of cinema and asked the director how he felt about its status as what he described as “the last line of cinema”. Defending cinema against the rise of content.
“I didn’t want to be the last line of defense,” Scorsese said. “I don’t know where cinema will go. Why should it be the same as it was for the last 90-100 years? No. Do we prefer what has been happening for the last 90 years? I do but I’m old. Young people will see the world in a different way.” “
Scorsese continued, saying that we currently live in “exceptional times,” thanks in large part to the technological progress we experience day after day.
“If I had digital video or even good video, I would have filmed it I mean the streets On top of that, I wouldn’t have had to pay for the cameras. It would have given us a feeling of freedom.” “Now there’s so much freedom that you really have to rethink what you’re saying and how you’re going to say it.”
He added: “I hope that it will still be possible to make serious films using this new technology and this new world that we are a part of.”
Scorsese’s latest films Moonflower killer Screening tonight at the London Film Festival. Adapted from David Grann’s best-selling book by Scorsese and Eric Roth and based on a true story, the film is set in 1920s Oklahoma, when oil brought wealth to the Osage Nation, which became one of the richest people in the world overnight. The wealth immediately attracted white interlopers, who manipulated, blackmailed, and stole as much of the Osage’s money as they could before resorting to murder.
Starring regular cast mates, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, alongside newcomer Lily Gladstone. Scorsese said he had been working on the pic for many years but reworked most of the script with co-writer Eric Roth during the coronavirus crisis.
Scorsese said the big change was driven by DiCaprio, who told the director that he believed the “heart of the film” was the relationship with his character, Ernest Burkhart, an FBI agent, and Molly Burkhart, who played Gladstone.
“We had to take the script and tear it apart from the inside out. We did that until the last day of filming,” he said.
Moonflower Killers It opens its doors wide on October 20th. The London Film Festival continues until October 15.
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