2024-03-01 21:58:54
One of the world’s most famous directors, Martin Scorsese, came to the German capital for the Lifetime Achievement Award. This happened shortly before his last year’s film Killers of the Blooming Moon will have a chance to win ten Oscars, including a statuette for directing. The 81-year-old author of the films Taxi Driver, Raging Bull or The Wolf of Wall Street is already working on another project.
New York native Scorsese was introduced at the Berlinale festival ceremony by fellow German director Wim Wenders. He called him “the king of cinema” with an indelible handwriting. The gala evening in Berlin was also attended by Scorsese’s longtime collaborators such as editor Thelma Schoonmaker and actress Sharon Stone. The American guest received a standing ovation.
Scorsese started filming at the end of the 1960s, and made a name for himself in the wider subconscious with the gangster films Mafiáni and Casino. But long before that, he considered becoming a priest. Now he mentally comes full circle when, during meetings with Pope Francis, he devises how to make a film about Jesus.
“At one point I got a call from the Pope. We met a couple of times and we were looking for some fresh way to think about the foundations of Christianity,” Scorsese announced in Berlin that he was preparing a film based on the 1973 novel The Life of Jesus by the late Japanese Catholic writer Šusaku Endó. The script probably already exists in some form. “I would like to film something unique, different, something that would make people think. But I still don’t quite know how to do it,” admits the director.
It wouldn’t be the first time he had devoted himself to religion. Already in 1988, based on the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, he created The Last Temptation of Christ, which emphasized Jesus’ human side. Not only because of the scene in which Jesus, played by Willem Dafoe, has sexual intercourse with Mary Magdalene, the film was banned in several countries, including Argentina, where the current Pope comes from. The director also received death threats at that time.
Later, Scorsese released Kundun, about the Tibetan Dalai Lama, or, last decade, Silence, about Portuguese missionaries in 17th-century Japan. It was Silence that was created based on the book by Šusaku Endó, to which Scorsese will now return through another project about Jesus.
Martin Scorsese (left) was introduced in Berlin by colleague Wim Wenders. | Photo: Reuters
According to the Guardian, this may cause the director to postpone another project in the works, an adaptation of David Grann’s book The Wager, about a mutiny on a British ship in the 18th century. It is possible that it will eventually be taken over by another creator.
Martin Scorsese received the honorary Golden Bear Lifetime Achievement Award at the Berlinale. He received it, among other things, for how much work he did with colleagues Steven Spielberg and Paul Schrader or screenwriter Jay Cocks to restore old films and preserve them for future generations, the organizers reasoned.
Scorsese has been making efforts in this regard since the 1970s. “It was very difficult to get a good copy of the film back then,” he recalls, noting that even in his youth pre-war films were often too damaged to be shown in cinemas again.
Young New Yorkers like him only had access to a limited portion of foreign cinema, mainly films from Great Britain, France and Italy. “Whereas today you have a whole century of film in the palm of your hand. You can play stuff from the 30s, you have the whole 50s, everything from all over the world,” Scorsese points out.
To this day, he himself likes to watch Japanese cinema. But he also liked the film Past Lives from Korean director Celine Song or Perfect Days, which Wim Wenders shot in Japan, from last year.
At the same time, Scorsese likes to return to the classics. “Sometimes you look at a film thirty years later and it seems completely different to how you remembered it. In reality, of course, the film is still the same and you change. It’s like listening to Beethoven’s symphonies. They’re also never the same.” compares
Last year, Scorsese released the film Killers of the Blooming Moon, which is currently nominated for ten Oscars. | Video: CinemArt
Today, Martin Scorsese looks back on the six decades during which he watched the transformations of the film industry. He is not afraid that the field would not deal with emerging technologies. “I don’t think film is dying. It’s changing, yes, but no one expected it to stay the same,” he compares.
When he was little, one could only go to the cinema where he watched the movie with others. There was no possibility to play pictures at home, on a computer or phone.
“Today, a person can express himself through TikTok, just as he can make a four-hour film or a two-hour mini-series. But this is not a reason for us to be afraid of technology or to let ourselves be controlled by it,” thinks the director, who is known to some of the younger users of the TikTok social network thanks to his playful videos he shoots with his daughter Francesca. She accompanied him in Berlin.
He himself tries to make the best use of the time he has left. “If there’s something I really regret, it’s the transience of life. Of course, we’ve all always known that it’s fleeting. But at my age, you wonder why the hell it had to be fleeting so quickly,” jokes the director.
“But while we’re here, let’s talk to each other. And let’s talk to each other through art,” appeals Martin Scorsese. At the ceremony in Berlin, he said goodbye with the words “maybe see you in a few years with the next film”, adds Variety.com.
Since his debut in 1967 with Who’s Knocking at My Door, Scorsese has made 26 feature films. In addition to religion, violence and organized crime, he addressed the problems of members of the Italian-American community in the US or the stories of remarkable individuals, from aviation pioneer and director Howard Hughes to union leader Jimmy Hoffa to stockbroker Jordan Belfort.
Despite many previous nominations, he waited years for an Oscar for directing. He won it only in 2007 for the crime film Hidden Identity. Since then, he has been nominated again several times, most recently for the fourth time for last year’s Killers of the Blossoming Moon. They show how white Americans in the 1920s systematically massacred members of the Osage Indian tribe in order to gain access to their oil wealth. The story was based on a real event.
“See you in a few years with another film,” said director Martin Scorsese in Berlin. | Photo: ČTK / AP
In addition to feature films, Martin Scorsese also made a lot of mainly musical documentaries, for example The Last Waltz about the last concert of The Band or films about Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and George Harrison from the Beatles.
Variety.com magazine wrote this week that Scorsese will also try acting after years. In the next film of the American director Julian Schnabel, he will play a wise old man who influences the Italian classic Dante when writing the Divine Comedy. Already in 1990, Scorsese got a small role in the film Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, where he portrayed the painter Vincent van Gogh.