Martin Scorsese explained why watching movies at home is not as good as going to the cinema on the heels of signing a deal with Netflix to distribute his new film “The Irishman.”
“The problem now is that it is everything around the frame that is distracting,” Scorsese told the audience at a BFI London event on Wednesday, per Screen Daily.
“Now you can see a film on an iPad,” he continued. “You might be able to push it closer to your [face] in your bedroom, just lock the door and look at it if you can but I do find just glimpsing stuff here or there, even watching a film at home on a big-screen TV, there is still stuff around the room. There’s a phone that rings. People go by. It is not the best way.”
Scorsese has long been an advocate for traditional film viewing, so the comments are not altogether surprising. But the timing is ironic, given that earlier on Wednesday news broke that Netflix had acquired the worldwide rights to his latest gangster picture.
Starring Scorsese favorite Robert De Niro, the crime drama is based on Charles Brandt’s 2004 book, “I Heard You Paint Houses.”
Brandt’s book follows revelations from Frank “the Irishman” Sheeran about the 1975 disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, the killing of Joey Gallo, and J.F.K’s assassination.
A professional mobster and hit man, Sheeran claims to have killed and dismembered Hoffa, with the title of the book referring to Hoffa’s quote to him: “I heard you paint houses ” — mob talk meaning to kill a man, as a house’s walls are then covered with blood.
Production is expected to start later this year and will mark Scorsese and De Niro’s ninth collaboration together, which has included “Casino,” “Mean Streets,” “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull” and “Goodfellas.”