martin scorsese // Directors

THE A-Z OF MARTIN SCORSESE

V - VEGAS (CASINO)

As a filmmaker, Scorsese is indelibly associated first and foremost with New York, but he is not averse to following interests linked to that city further afield. Hence we get Casino, Scorsese’s look at what happened when the Mob left their East Coast strongholds and stretched West to skim money from casinos in Las Vegas. Working with Nicholas Pileggi, his screenwriter on GoodFellas, Scorsese chronicled the next step in Mafia evolution with this oft-overlooked, oft-underrated epic of greed, pride, power, betrayal and, most of all, money. While De Niro’s Sam “Ace” Rothstein is Jewish rather than Italian-American, he’s a made man who conforms to the same traditions as the mobsters Scorsese had portrayed before - and despite being outside of and physically removed from the strong family structure, the Mob curses of distrust and violence still eat away at his success running a Vegas casino. His pride, too, brings about his downfall, landing him in hot water with the Gaming Commission and the Mob back home. Still, this was a rare case where the plaudits went to De Niro’s supporting cast: Joe Pesci’s hair-trigger Nicky and Sharon Stone’s damaged, dangerous Ginger.

Conversations with Scorsese, Richard Schickel (via Hollywood Reporter).

The Aviator: The movie Warren Beatty and Spielberg tried to make

“It was scary to do a picture about Howard Hughes. His obsessive-compulsive disorder is like the labyrinth that he gets stuck in – sort of like the Minotaur. He’s got wings, like the ones Daedelus makes for his son Icarus.”

THE A-Z OF MARTIN SCORSESE

M - MOVIE BRATS

Not to be confused with the ’80s Brat Pack, the Movie Brats were louder, swearier, freer and generally more hopped up on film history than the studio-friendly directors who came before them. They were also 90% more likely to experiment with beards. Martin Scorsese, along with fellow Brats like Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, William Friedkin and Michael Cimino, grew up wanting to make films like Godard or Cassavetes - smart, cine-literate movies that detonated a ton of TNT under ’70s Hollywood while at the same time lovingly referencing its past. Before this generation became the mainstream they’d knock more noses out of joint than Jake LaMotta, turning out classic flicks that pretty much defined post-Watergate America. Scorsese - the most enduring of the lot - was at the vanguard of this band of brilliant movie revolutionaries.

Scorsese talks to Associated Press about his inspiration for Hugo

THE A-Z OF MARTIN SCORSESE

K - KUROSAWA AND OTHER INFLUENCES

Martin Scorsese tells a story of sitting at home late one night when the phone rings. His Taxi Driver cinematographer Michael Chapman had been watching Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom on TV and a line in it - “All this filming, it’s not healthy” - reminded him of his old friend. “He was laughing because it reminded him of me,” Scorsese laughed, “I said, ‘That’s the beauty of it!’” It’s the director’s all-encompassing love affair with cinema in a nutshell. From the neorealist warmth of Rome, Open City or Shoeshine to the voyeurism of Peeping Tom, from Shadows’ beatnik daring to Citizen Kane’s technical mastery or the deathray-zapping space bastards of War Of The Worlds, his formative years were spent soaking up the magic of the movies. He’s also been inspired by creative characters with a streak of obsession like Marcello Mastroianni’s struggling auteur in 8 or Moira Stewart’s ballerina in The Red Shoes.

He reserves special praise, though, for Akira Kurosawa: “Kurosawa was my master”, Scorsese said in a special tribute to the Japanese maestro. “His influence on filmmakers is so profound as to be almost incomparable.” For a time there was even talk of Scorsese helming a US remake of Kurosawa’s 1963 thriller High And Low, and there’s a part of us that would love to see what he could do with Seven Samurai too.

THE A-Z OF MARTIN SCORSESE

J JAKE LA MOTTA

If Mean Streets’ Charlie (Harvey Keitel) made up for his sins on the streets, Raging Bull’s tormented boxer Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) does it in the ring, slowly pulping his handsome features and early promise in a series of punishing middleweight bouts. A film about self-loathing and self-abuse with glorious operatic peaks - the balletic first-person slo-mo elevates the brute thud of fists in black-and-white into a thing of beauty - it took all De Niro’s persistence to get Scorsese involved at all. With the help of Taxi Driver scribe Paul Schrader’s first draft, he found a story that had obvious personal resonance.

By Scorsese’s own admission, his “kamikaze” approach to the shoot was close to debilitating - the eight minutes of boxing scenes took ten weeks to film - but the result is generally hailed as one of the greatest films of all time.

THE A-Z OF MARTIN SCORSESE

H - HUGO

Scorsese’s new film is his first in 3D, and confirms our belief that only master filmmakers should be allowed to work in that format. It’s about a boy trying to rebuild his family, and also about the joy of escapism - be it through cinema or literature - and its ability to help us all. It’s no spoiler to say that silent cinema and special effects pioneer Georges Miele’s work plays a role, nor that this is pretty openly a fervent love letter to cinema itself. Says producer Graham King, “It’s like Marty Scorsese is doing a Dickens film, but it’s really about the birth of cinema.”

Every time Marty steps on set he brings with him an unmatched knowledge and respect for the art of movie making. He’s transcended his own admiration of movies to become his own unique artist, a master film-maker and a generous patient teacher. It’s hard to believe we’ve only been watching movies for the last one hundred years while other art forms have been around for thousands. As we look back in history, there are those names that truly define their own medium. Picasso, da Vinci, Shakespeare, Beethoven - to name a few, and a thousand years from now as the history of film unfolds there will surely be one name for future generations that is synonymous with master filmmaking and the word “cinema” and that name is Mr. Martin Scorsese

Leonardo DiCaprio (via explosiveconscience)

THE A-Z OF SCORSESE

C - CORMAN, ROGER

Director/producer Roger Corman provided a finishing school for a generation of ’70s fimmakers. Scorsese, alongside the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme and Peter Bogdanovich, was an early graduate. He’d been a fan of Corman’s Gothic spookfest The Fall Of The House Of Usher as a horror-loving 18 year-old, so when the director offered him his break with a small-budget gangster movie, Scorsese leapt at the chance. The result was Boxcar Bertha (1972), a Bonnie And Clyde-style exploitation flick that, thanks to its business-savvy producer, has a lot more nudie bits than, say, The Age Of Innocence.”Roger said to me, ‘Rewrite the script as much as you want’,” remembers Scorsese, “‘but Marty, you must have some nudity at least every 15 pages’.”

“Looking back 20 films on, the Scorsese/Corman combo feels like a quirky hybrid of two radically different approaches that never entirely gel. But Scorsese still credits Corman’s mentorship, and the lessons he learned shooting a $600,000 picture at face-melting pace, with his later success. “At that time there was no recognised way to get into the film business,” he says. “The best post-graduate training you could have in America at that time was to work for Roger Corman.”

- Empire Online

hmsanchez87:

“I can’t take shooting any scene for granted. I just can’t. The moment I do that, I have no idea what I’m doing. “Oh, that’ll be easy, I’ll do that in five minutes.” Believe me, that never happens.”

-Martin Scorsese

fuckyeahdirectors:

Ben Kingsley and Martin Scorsese on the set of Hugo (2011)

A recurring Martin Scorsese nightmare goes like this: He is told that he must start shooting a movie. But he isn’t informed what the movie is. He doesn’t know what it’s about or who the actors are. He only knows that the producers are pushing him to get this thing started, now. A dutiful artist, Scorsese dives in with help from frequent first assistant director Joe Reidy, only to notice that standing to the side of the set is a very famous older director. This mystery director is someone real, and great, but Scorsese, upon waking, never remembers who it is. The guy’s presence unnerves him, and he says so to the producers. “Don’t worry,” he’s told. “He’s just here to observe. It’s your thing.”

From the latest issue of The Hollywood Reporter

(Source: ifilikeityoulikeit, via filmsaremything)