To many people Martin Scorsese is a man who made his career making “gangster films”, but they all forget what a genius of an auteur he is, the issue is that Scorsese’s contribution to cinema is something that is constantly being challenged and being put to test. Recently the world has already lost Jean-Luc-Godard and auteur amongst auteurs, and so few of these original auteurs remain, cinema has a different connotation to different individuals.
And while this world of ours descends into total chaos of stupidity and nonsense, it is up to the wise to make sure that cinema as an artform does not lose its individuality. The Oscar-winning filmmaker called the industry’s obsession with box office grosses both “repulsive” and “really insulting.” Scorsese praised the festival for championing filmmaking at a time when “cinema is devalued, demeaned, belittled from all sides, not necessarily the business side but certainly the art.”
“Since the ’80s, there’s been a focus on numbers. It’s kind of repulsive,” Scorsese said. “The cost of a movie is one thing. Understand that a film costs a certain amount, they expect to at least get the amount back… The emphasis is now on numbers, cost, the opening weekend, how much it made in the U.S.A., how much it made in England, how much it made in Asia, how much it made in the entire world, how many viewers it got. As a filmmaker, and as a person who can’t imagine life without cinema, I always find it really insulting.”
Scorsese added, “I’ve always known that such considerations have no place at the New York Film Festival, and here’s the key also with this: There are no awards here. You don’t have to compete. You just have to love cinema here.”
Edgar Wright, an outspoken Scorsese lover, shared similar thoughts earlier this month during his BBC Maestro course. Wright recalled how his cult classic “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” bombed over its opening weekend, and yet it’s hardly considered a disappointment all these years later. Capitalism at times can be a sore disappointment especially when it devalues art to this extent.
Wright added, “You can point to hundreds of classic movies, whether it’s ‘Citizen Kane’ or ‘Blade Runner’ or ‘The Big Lebowski.’ So how a film does in its first three days is never the end of the story, and the further we get away from that discourse about box office numbers being the totality of a movie, the better.”
Scorsese is currently in post-production on his $200 million Western drama “Killers of the Flower Moon,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. The film will be released in theaters and will stream on Apple TV+ in 2023.