The future of cin­e­ma, accord­ing to Mar­tin Scorsese

While the rest of us patient­ly await news of The Irish­man​’s release, Mar­tin Scors­ese is busy reflect­ing on the past, present and future of cin­e­ma. Speak­ing at the Mar­rakech Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val, the Amer­i­can direc­tor recalled his fond­est – and least favourite – mem­o­ries of a five-decade career, as well as his hopes and fears for what’s next for film­mak­ers, audi­ences and critics.

“At the age of three I was diag­nosed with severe asth­ma, and my par­ents didn’t quite know what to do with me, so they took me to the movies. I couldn’t play sports, I couldn’t run, I couldn’t laugh too much because of the spasms, and we were work­ing class peo­ple who didn’t have books in the house, so every­thing was visu­al. My fam­i­ly – my par­ents, my grand­par­ents, many aunts and uncles – were from the old world in Sici­ly, and we had lots of great storytellers.

“In 1949 my father was able to get a 16-inch TV. There was a local chan­nel in New York just for Ital­ians, and every Fri­day night they showed Ital­ian cin­e­ma with sub­ti­tles. And my par­ents and my grand­par­ents would come and watch this lit­tle TV. I was five years old, and the reac­tion of the fam­i­ly to the images and the con­flict and the suf­fer­ing in Paisan, was some­thing that nev­er left me. I’d go see Duel in the Sun and the great west­erns, or the film noirs – which were, by the way, not film noirs, they were just the reg­u­lar movies – that reflect­ed the dark­ness of the post-World War Two Amer­i­can cinema.

“By the time La Stra­da came out in 1952, Ital­ian cin­e­ma just seemed nat­ur­al to me. But my father also took me to see The Red Shoes in 1950, and that’s stuck with me for many years. That sense of obses­sion, and art pos­sess­ing the artist, and the idea of destroy­ing your­self through art because you love so much. I had nev­er seen silent films at that time because they hadn”t been restored and they look ter­ri­ble – I couldn’t appre­ci­ate Chap­lin at all. Then the film Jean Renoir made in India, Le Flueve, real­ly stuck with me too. The beau­ty of life, the way life ebbs and flows.

“At 14, the key Amer­i­can films that hit me were On the Water­front and East of Eden. It was real­ly Elia Kazan – we couldn’t afford to go to the the­atre and see the plays by Ten­nesse Williams or Arthur Miller, but On the Water­front and East of Eden had that New York the­atri­cal act­ing style, that didn’t feel like act­ing. When I watched On the Water­front, I felt like there were peo­ple up on the screen that I knew. Myself, my broth­er… even the movie I’m mak­ing now is about two broth­ers. It’s the same movie for the past 40 years.”

“All the peo­ple that liked my movies back in the ​’70s were from New York – even the ones in LA, they weren’t Cal­i­for­ni­ans, they were New York­ers. I went out there, and Roger Cor­man and Fran­cis Cop­po­la helped, but I was lucky to have some­body in a stu­dio posi­tion who liked my style, or who liked what the style could be. I was lucky too to have a close rela­tion­ship with De Niro, which was com­pli­cat­ed and strong.

“Dur­ing that peri­od, one of the key things a direc­tor had to look out for – and it’s still the case to a cer­tain extent – was los­ing the film com­plete­ly. Bri­an DePal­ma, George Lucas and me were all sit­ting there in LA one day, and the actor and the stu­dio had tak­en away Brian’s new film, Get to Know Your Rab­bit. It may not have been one of his best, but they did not let him con­tin­ue work­ing on it, it was tak­en away from him. George’s THX 1138 was being threat­ened, and I couldn’t get a pic­ture made, I was still work­ing as an edi­tor. What we learned right away was that the pow­er takes the film, and if the actor has the pow­er, that’s Hollywood.

“I always shied away from big names because I didn’t know if they’d go where I wan­na go, but DeNiro and I.. .he just wasn’t afraid. His pow­er at the time was pret­ty good too. I don’t mean he could have gone into Colum­bia Pic­tures and argued with them when they all hat­ed Taxi Dri­ver, which they did – they hat­ed it. That film was real­ly saved by the pro­duc­ers, Michael and Julia Phillips, who nego­ti­at­ed and made sure it got made. Taxi Dri­ver was the big battle.”

“I edit­ed Mean Streets myself, but I couldn’t take the cred­it because I wasn’t in the union. I gave the cred­it to Sid Levin, a great edi­tor – he edit­ed all of Mar­tin Ritt’s films. He took the cred­it, he was very nice. And then he got a bad review in Vari­ety – they said the edit­ing was chop­py. I’m sor­ry, Sid!

“I worked on Wood­stock for a while, but I was tak­en off the pic­ture. Back then you were con­stant­ly fight­ing the estab­lish­ment, and it got to the point where you’d steal the neg­a­tive to stop the stu­dio destroy­ing it. With Taxi Dri­ver that’s the point I was at. I felt help­less. I was furi­ous, and it was not the way to be politic. The stu­dio made us recut it, they said, ​‘Either you recut it or we will’.”

“Crit­i­cal eval­u­a­tion has been dec­i­mat­ed. There isn’t any. You can have cin­e­ma study, cin­e­ma dia­logue with peo­ple, but it’s rar­i­fied. There aren’t many more reviews. There’s no more crit­i­cism. The crit­i­cism I grew up with just isn’t there any­more. I remem­ber the time I felt the heav­i­est impact that a crit­ic had on cin­e­ma – it was 1980, I’d just made Rag­ing Bull. We opened 10 days before Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, and that film closed after one day due to a review in The New York Times by Vin­cent Can­by. That end­ed the Amer­i­can auteur. We have thought pieces now, which might be very good, but it’s not the same.”

“Could you make the movies I made then, like Mean Streets and Taxi Dri­ver, today? You could. The equip­ment is beyond the cam­era we were using back then. You have one prob­lem: you can’t see them. I don’t know what to say about dis­tri­b­u­tion. George Lucas said this five, 10 years ago – we’re in a dark age, and we don’t know what for­mats are going to exist in the future. We don’t know how we’re gonna migrate these damn films. If we’re gonna migrate them. After all this time, the only thing that real­ly pre­serves a film is celluloid.

“We’re in a sec­ond indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion, and I have no idea how the future is going to shape up in terms of visu­al sto­ry­telling to an audi­ence, in a room, with peo­ple watch­ing one screen. I know that it’s essen­tial, and we have to fight to keep the­atres open as much as pos­si­ble, because it’s a com­mu­nal expe­ri­ence, whether it’s a [Abbas] Kiarosta­mi or one of those theme park movies where peo­ple are run­ning around and bang­ing and crash­ing. I know the audi­ence is there for some­thing that could enrich your life for­ev­er, and the prob­lem is we may not know what new devel­op­ments there will be.

“I watch a lot of films at home – I don’t go out very much – but on big screens, with peo­ple with me. I miss the audi­ence expe­ri­ence. Now we’re dis­cussing the val­ue of art, and every­one talks about ​‘con­tent’. Net­flix financed my new film. They’re tak­ing a risk on this movie. No one else want­ed to, for like five, six years. You can make any­thing now. The prob­lem is, how do peo­ple see it, how will peo­ple expe­ri­ence it? I’m not sure what the answer is anymore.”