John Phillips/Getty Images for BFI.
Cheers erupted at the Royal Festival Hall at the Southbank Center this afternoon as filmmaker Martin Scorsese took to the stage to take part in a question and answer session about careers at the London Film Festival.
The keynote session, hosted by Baby Driver filmmaker Edgar Wright, was the hottest ticket here in London this week. With a completely sold-out audience of enthusiastic film fans and UK-based filmmakers such as Dexter Fletcher and Asif Kapadia, the session was almost like a university lecture, with Scorsese talking at length about his films, his career and the impact they both had on his life.
“I’ve always considered myself more of a teacher than a filmmaker,” Scorsese began, when asked about his voracious appetite for world cinema and why he likes to stay in dialogue with other people about the films he loves.
“I was proud that I influenced some people not necessarily through my work but through recommending films,” Scorsese said. “And then I get inspired by their films. It opens up a whole new world.”
Wright worked his way through Scorsese’s filmography, mostly chronologically, reminding the filmmaker that his breakthrough hit “Mean Streets” turns 50 this year. Scorsese elaborated on the making of the film, saying he simply wanted to “make a film about my life and my friends on the Lower East Side.”
“It was a delicate matter because it was not a place where you could take cameras. And you weren’t allowed to say certain names,” Scorsese said of his neighborhood, which he described as rough and working class.
“I had to be very careful, so it became a very personal film, and that took three years.”
Scorsese said “Mean Streets” was filmed in 1972 and first shown to audiences in 1973. At that point, he said, “The only way to see movies was on the big screen.”
“You didn’t see films like that on television because if you did – ‘Mean Streets’ was shown on CBS late night films – it was edited to be avant-garde. You would ask yourself, ‘What’s going on in this thing?'” he said. “Taxi driver was worse. The duration was shortened to 45 minutes. I am not joking.”
Wright immediately moved on to “Taxi Driver,” Scorsese’s first collaboration with writer Paul Schrader. Scorsese described his time producing the feature as a “big struggle.”
Despite the critical success of “Taxi Driver” – the film won the Palme d’Or in 1976 – Scorsese said he could never really figure out how to be accepted as a director in Hollywood, no matter how hard he tried to be “a Hollywood guy.” be”.
“Around 1978/79 they asked me to leave. And not just because of filmmaking,” he said of Hollywood’s reaction to him. “We were younger and I experienced a teenage rebellion at the age of 27.”
Hollywood and the idea of a Hollywood-based film system took up surprisingly little time during the keynote. At the end of the session, however, Wright highlighted a series of recent interviews in which Scorsese was asked about the future of cinema and asked the filmmaker what he thought about being positioned as what he called the “last line of.” “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 the cinema will go. Why does it have to be the same as it has been for the last 90-100 years? That’s not the case. Do we prefer what has happened in the last 90 years? I do, but I’m old. Younger people will see the world differently.”
Scorsese went on to say that we are currently living in an “extraordinary time,” largely thanks to the technological advances we live with every day.
“If I had digital or even good video, I would have shot Mean Streets with it and I wouldn’t have had to pay for cameras. It would have given us a sense of freedom,” he said. “Now there is so much freedom that you really have to rethink what you say and how you say it.”
He added: “I hope that with this new technology and this new world that we are a part of, serious films can still be made.”
Scorsese’s latest film, Killer Of The Flower Moon, screens at the London Film Festival this evening. The film, adapted by Scorsese and Eric Roth from David Grann’s bestselling novel and based on a true story, is set in 1920s Oklahoma, when oil made the Osage Nation a fortune and they became overnight one of the richest people in the world. The wealth immediately attracted white invaders, who manipulated, extorted, and stole as much Osage money as they could before resorting to murder.
The film stars his frequent collaborators Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, as well as newcomer Lily Gladstone. Scorsese said he had been working on the picture for many years, but reworked most of the script with his co-writer Eric Roth during the coronavirus crisis.
The biggest change, Scorsese said, was brought about by DiCaprio, who told the filmmaker that he thought the “heart of the film” was the relationship with his character, Ernest Burkhart, a federal agent, and Gladstone’s Mollie Burkhart.
“We had to take the script and turn it on its head. And we did that until the last day of filming,” he said.
“Killers of the Flower Moon” opens in its entirety on October 20th. The London Film Festival runs until October 15th.