Martin Scorsese, the director of countless classics whose career spans more than six decades, has come a long way in the four years since he compared Marvel movies to theme parks, saying they’re “not cinema.”
Scorsese, in comments published by Time magazine on Tuesday, preached unity for the film industry, while sharing thoughts unrelated to Hollywood’s strikes.
“It should be one cinematic culture, you know?” Scorsese told the outlet as part of its Time100 Leadership Series. “But right now everything is being fragmented and broken up in a way.”
Scorsese harkened back to his youth, when moviegoers took to the theater by hook or by crook — no matter the genre.
“Not everybody liked musicals,” Scorsese said. “Not everybody liked Westerns. Not everybody liked gangster films or noirs. But at the time, we just went to the movies, and that’s what was playing.”
Scorsese’s latest film, “Killers of the Flower Moon, hits theaters next month, nearly four years to the day since the Oscar-winning director called out superhero Marvel movies, saying they weren’t “the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”
Scorsese, who was then doing media ahead of the release of “The Irishman,” was asked by Empire magazine if had watched all the Marvel movies.
“I tried, you know?” Scorsese said. “But that’s not cinema.”
“Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks,” he added.
Speaking to Time, Scorsese cautioned that young screenwriters and directors will continue to face an increasingly tough landscape for making films that speak to their vision as opposed to a profit margin.
“Young people expressing themselves with moving images, they’re going to find a way to be seen,” he said. “But they have to fight, they have to really, really fight and not be co-opted.”
And take it from Scorsese, who in the ring with studios, wields as much power and experience as anyone.
“Ultimately, they say, ‘Well, who wants personal filmmaking? Look what happened in the ’70s,” he joked, in the interview with Time. “By the end of it, you all went mad! And you went over budget and schedule, and you made these three movies, ‘Apocalypse Now,’ ‘Raging Bull’ and ‘Heaven’s Gate!’”
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