The Scorsese Interview

Flexing his giant, prickly black eyebrows furiously as he talks, Martin Scorsese remembers where it started. He was a sickly eight-year-old boy in a cinema on 14th Street in New York. He was watching The Red Shoes, a movie about obsession, of living for your art, dying for it if you had to. He got it, all right, and he’s never looked back. After 67 years, Scorsese still loves movies like life itself; loves making them, loves thinking about them, loves talking about them. He’s a walking encyclopedia of cinema: more than a century of titles, years, quotes, stars and stories all there on instant recall.
While fellow movie-brats Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma have faded since they dazzled in the ‘New Hollywood’ of the Seventies, Scorsese just kept burning brighter. But, after nominations for Raging Bull, The Last Temptation Of Christ, GoodFellas, Gangs Of New York and The Aviator, he finally captured that elusive Best Director Oscar for gangster thriller The Departed. That was three years ago. Mystery-thriller Shutter Island is his first movie since. There’s a lot to talk about. Scorsese stands up, stretches to his full 5’4”, then sits down again. Those eyebrows waggle again.“Go right ahead...” he says.

Did you feel you were owed a Best Director Oscar?
I don’t think... they felt like I deserved it... which is something that... what can you say? It’s good to have people recognise your work. Because foR a lot of older filmmakers, that never happened. So I’m very thankful for that.

Not counting Shine A Light, it’s been four years since your last movie. Why have we had to wait so long?
There were two projects I was working on – The Wolf Of Wall Street and Silence – and both fell through. And then Shutter Island slipped in my way, but I lost about nine to 10 months.

Has winning the Oscar changed you?
No, it’s hasn’t. It hasn’t at all. You just do the best you can. Make a
picture you feel you’re connected to. Which means you can work on it for two
years, every day, and then open it, discuss it, stand by it, take the
criticism, or not. And go on to another one, if you can.