Martin Scorsese has said he “didn’t want to be the last line of defence” for auteur-led filmmaking against franchise films, while renewing his criticism of the obsession with “content” over cinema.
Speaking at a Screen Talk at the BFI London Film Festival (LFF) hosted by director Edgar Wright, Scorsese said, “Content is something you eat and throw away. Content is candy. It’s madness.”
The director was asked by Wright about his comments in recent years on the state of the film industry, and whether he feels manipulated into a position of giving “state-of-the-union” addresses.
“I didn’t want to be the last line of defence,” said Scorsese, who has previously criticised what he sees as “theme park films” dominating the film landscape, including at a Bafta talk in the UK in 2019.
“I don’t know where cinema is going to go,” continued Scorsese, who also expressed a willingness to embrace change. “Why does it have to be the same?” He noted that had video or digital technologies been available to him at the time, he would not have made Mean Streets, his breakthrough film in 1973, in the way he did.
He also criticised the way his films have been cut for television, saying that a CBS cut of Mean Streets altered the film so much it became “avant-garde”, while a television edit of Taxi Driver reduced the 114-minute film to a mere 45 minutes.
Anecdotes
The talk was one of the highlights of this year’s LFF programme, and ran to 90 minutes – longer than the hour Wright said was allocated at the beginning.
Scorsese kept the audience enraptured and amused with a succession of anecdotes from his near-60-year career. Some were lengthy stories, with Wright asking only a handful of questions across the session and wisely allowing Scorsese to lead the flow of conversation. Wright introduced clips from four films throughout the session - Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The King Of Comedy and The Wolf Of Wall Street.
On the last of those, Wright questioned Scorsese on whether it celebrated bad behaviour in a different way from the director’s 1970s films, which depicted “down-and-outs.” Without naming him, Scorsese related The Wolf Of Wall Street to Donald Trump, the former US president who is running for the Republican nomination for the 2024 election, while also the subject of several charges including a criminal indictment.
“They elected him!” said Scorsese of the sensibilities depicted in The Wolf Of Wall Street. “It’s about kill, go get the money, do anything to win.”
The director dedicated significant time to detailing how Mean Streets came about, including how significant portions of the New York-set crime drama came to be shot in Los Angeles. He also related how he adjusted the amount of colour in the blood in Taxi Driver, in order to get a version of the film past the Motion Picture Association.
Held at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, a packed audience included leading lights of the UK industry such as James Bond producer Barbara Broccoli and directors Gurinder Chadha and Asif Kapadia; plus rising UK talents such as filmmakers Dionne Edwards (Pretty Red Dress) and Naqqash Khalid (In Camera).
Scorsese’s latest film Killers Of The Flower Moon will have its UK premiere this afternoon (Saturday, October 7) at LFF. The Screen Talk programme will continue tomorrow with Barbie director Greta Gerwig.
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