Martin Scorsese turns 80: Celebrating the director who changed Hollywood

A gangster who must choose between his brother or the mafia; a taxi driver with sociability problems who becomes a hero; a saxophonist and a singer trying to get ahead in show business; a talented boxer who is also a ticking time bomb due to his wayward character; a legendary billiards player finds his ideal pupil; Jesus experiences terror and desolation in the form of temptation; the rise and fall of a New York mob gangster; clan fighting in founding New York; relations between police corruption and mafias; the story of an Irishman who starts out as a truck driver and becomes an influential man in organized crime, with not a few deaths on his way. “Mean Streets” (1973), “Taxi Driver” (1976), “New York, New York” (1977), “Raging Bull” (1980), “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988), “Good Boys” (1990), “Pandillas de Nueva York” (2002), “Los infiltrators” (2006) or “The Irishman” (2019) are just a few examples of the cinema of Martin Scorsese, a virtuoso watercolorist of American history who also dedicated a large part of his audiovisual work to rescuing his cultural memory. The Band, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Elia Kazan or George Harrison have been the stars of some of the documentaries that have also elevated his filmography, which now spans more than 55 years.

“My definition of ‘director’ –Scorsese himself said- He’s someone who could have flourished in the old studio system, someone who could do a really good professional job out of any script he was given. I prefer to be a filmmaker, since being a director is very hard work; you have to find the necessary energy to feel like yours a material that has not left you”.

Today, to celebrate him is to celebrate the best of an American cinema that underwent an intense renovation in the 1970s, giving rise to what Peter Biskind described in his book “Quiet Bikers, Raging Bulls, the Generation that Changed Hollywood,” which Later, it also became a documentary that describes the genesis of the films that marked those years and the struggle of directors like Scorsese against the establishment and the conventional.

the wolf of hollywood

In the middle of a countryside, a man holds a notebook, on which he draws. He wears blue pants with suspenders, a straw hat, a white shirt with some colored spots and a striking cloth, also white, that wraps around his head and covers his left ear. He has red hair. “Are you Mr. Vincent Van Gogh?” asks a man who rushes to meet him, carrying an easel and work materials. The one in the hat affirms, but, seconds later, he questions him: “Why aren’t you painting? For me, this scene is incredible. A scene that looks like a painting is not a painting. If you take the time to look carefully, you will see that all of nature has its own beauty. And when there’s that natural beauty, I just get lost in it.”. He has said that he is Van Gogh, but he was actually Martin Scorsese. In 1990, at the request of Akira Kurosawa, who wrote the character to be played by him, the New York director got under the skin of the Dutch painter and said words that could well have referred to his own cinema. The most famous director in the history of Japan, the one who turned the epic of his films into an enduring testimony of medieval times, gave a role to whom he considered one of the greatest American directors of his time. Kurosawa was 80 years old. Scorsese, 48. As a boy, he had wanted to be a painter. “What amazed me the most was the size of the images on the screen, and when I returned from the cinema I would draw what I had seen”, recounted years later the boy who became a filmmaker for wanting to draw better.

It was Francis Ford Coppola who told Kurosawa that Scorsese could play the role. Other friends of his, such as Steven Spielberg or George Lucas helped obtain financing for Kurosawa to be able to finalize the project that would integrate the segment that portrays the painter. The film would be called “Dreams” and, although it would not be his last film, it would in many ways be the corollary of a brilliant career. He changed Japanese cinema since he directed his first film in 1943. So Scorsese only had a year to live. Impossible to intuit that, in the 70s, he, Coppola, Spielberg or Lucas would be in charge of transforming American cinema with works that today, seen from a distance, are also complementary to each other, testimonies of our time, although some narrate worlds of science. fiction or societies with apparently different codes.

Impossible to understand the so-called “New Hollywood” without “The Godfather”, “Apocalypse Now”, “Jaws”, “ET” or “Star Wars”, as well as without the films of the man whose bushy eyebrows seemed to act as prismatic lenses towards the future . Although he has sometimes been labeled as a specialist in gangster films, thanks to titles such as “Mean Streets”, “Good Boys”, “Casino” or “The Irishman”, the good Scorsese has also directed musicals (“New York, New York”), concert specials (“The Last Waltz”), biopics (“The Aviator”), period dramas (“The Age of Innocence”), fantasy films (“Hugo”), thrillers (“Cape Fear ”), video clips (“Bad”, by Michael Jackson) or religious dramas (“The Last Temptation of Christ”), configuring a personal universe with defined elements.

“He has this great and generous gift of creating a situation for the audience and sharing it with them. He is the ventriloquist and the dummy, the singer and the song (…) it is the painter and the palette, it is the student and the teacher, it is the cunning of the fox and the innocence of the child, it is the voice of the tape recorder that shouts ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’”, Said about him his colleague and friend Michael Powell, director of films such as Peeping Tom and ex-husband of editor Thelma Schoonmaker, one of Scorsese’s most prominent collaborators since they worked together on the filming and editing of the Woodstock Festival documentary, between 1969 and 1970.

“Seventy years ago there were men like DW Griffith and 70 years later now there aren’t many men like Martin Scorsese. But as long as there is one, there will be others, and the art of cinema will survive.”, Powell added on another occasion about the director who turns 80 today.

The Age of Innocence

“Frequently, Scorsese is about people in deep crisis, men and women trapped by their ambition, and his portrayals of human relationships only occasionally suggest that contentment also brings happiness.. More often, their characters end up, as they say, sadder, but wiser. an everyday redemption”, is pointed out in the introduction to “Martin Scorsese by Martin Scorsese”, the book edited by David Thompson and Ian Christie that lists some presentations given by the director, not only about his own career, but about the reasons that motivated it and the cinema that decisively influenced the type of director he would become.

His cinema is also, of course, a reflection of a hectic personal life. A sick child, he spent his childhood watching movies. Thus he discovered directors who changed his life, such as Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman, Truffaut, Resnais or Rosellini, with whose daughter, Isabella, he was married between 1979 and 1982. In his youth he was about to become a priest. Already made a director, he could only maintain his intense work rhythm supported by huge amounts of alcohol, quaaludes and cocaine.. “I could no longer concentrate on my work. I got to a point where, out of every seven days, I would spend four days in bed, sick, because of my asthma, coke, pills. Four out of seven days!”, the director later confessed.

Encouraged by who would become his fetish actor, Robert de Niro, and by an experience that left him close to death, the director overcame his addictions. Not only did he strengthen his career, but over time he became a promoter of the conservation and restoration of old films through The Film Foundation, a non-profit association especially dedicated to this matter that he created together with his friends Spielberg, Lucas or Coppola and in which other legendary names such as Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Clint Eatswood, Robert Redford, Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, Peter Jackson or Christopher Nolan also participated.

Your new project looks like celebrating a birthday for which you want to bring together the most special people in your life. In this case, “Killers of the Flower Moon”, the investigation undertaken by the FBI led by J. Edgar Hoover into the murders of the Osage tribe in the 1920s. The film will star the two faces that have stood out the most as protagonists in Scorsesian filmography: Robert de Niro and Leonardo Di Caprio, Italian-Americans like him. The film, which also stars John Lithgow, Jesse Plemons, or the resurgent Brendan Fraser in its cast, is slated for a January next year release and will no doubt be considered in the upcoming awards season. Another project with Di Caprio as the protagonist has also been confirmed for next year: “Roosevelt”, a biopic of the 26th president of the United States, between 1901 and 1909, Theodore Roosevelt. As if that were not enough, he will produce a series based on Gangs of New York.

Despite being considered a totem, his figure has not been without controversy in recent times, especially after the statements in which he criticized superhero movies: “I do not see them. I’ve tried, you know? But that’s not cinema. To be honest, The closest thing to them that I can think of, despite how well done they are, with the actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, are amusement parks. This is not cinema of human beings trying to express emotional and physical experiences to another human being.”, were his exact words, at the end of 2019.

Later, he clarified in the New York Times: “Many of the defining elements of cinema as I know it are in superhero movies. What there isn’t is revelation, mystery, or genuine emotional danger. nothing is at risk”.

And, elsewhere, he confessed: “For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, and for friends who started making movies at the same time I did, cinema was a revelation.”.

That is probably the same revelation experienced by those of us who watch the films of the man who today celebrates 80 years of age and who once said: “I adore cinema… it’s all my life and that’s it” and who, that same 1975, sentenced in advance : “I will die behind a camera”.