Martin Scorsese is urging filmmakers to save cinema, by doubling down on his call to fight comic book movie culture.
The storied filmmaker is revisiting the topic of comic book movies in a new profile for GQ. Despite facing intense blowback from filmmakers, actors and the public for the 2019 comments he made slamming the Marvel Cinematic Universe films â he called them theme parks rather than actual cinema â Scorsese isnât shying away from the topic.
âThe danger there is what itâs doing to our culture,â he told GQ. âBecause there are going to be generations now that think ⊠thatâs what movies are.â
GQâs Zach Baron posited that what Scorsese was saying might already be true, and the âKillers of the Flower Moonâ filmmaker agreed.
âThey already think that. Which means that we have to then fight back stronger. And itâs got to come from the grassroots level. Itâs gotta come from the filmmakers themselves,â Scorsese continued to the outlet. âAnd youâll have, you know, the Safdie brothers, and youâll have Chris Nolan, you know what I mean? And hit âem from all sides. Hit âem from all sides, and donât give up. ⊠Go reinvent. Donât complain about it. But itâs true, because weâve got to save cinema.â
Scorsese referred to movies inspired by comic books as âmanufactured contentâ rather than cinema.
âItâs almost like AI making a film,â he said. âAnd that doesnât mean that you donât have incredible directors and special effects people doing beautiful artwork. But what does it mean? What do these films, what will it give you?â
His forthcoming film, âKillers of the Flower Moon,â had been on Scorseseâs wish list for several years; itâs based on David Grannâs 2017 nonfiction book of the same name. He called the story âa sober look at who we are as a culture.â
The film tells the true story of the murders of Osage Nation members by white settlers in the 1920s. DiCaprio originally was attached to play FBI investigator Tom White, who was sent to the Osage Nation within Oklahoma to probe the killings. The script, however, underwent a significant rewrite.
âAfter a certain point,â the filmmaker told Time, âI realized I was making a movie about all the white guys.â
The dramatic focus shifted from Whiteâs investigation to the Osage and the circumstances that led to them being systematically killed with no consequences.
The character of White now is played by Jesse Plemons in a supporting role. DiCaprio stars as the husband of a Native American woman, Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), an oil-rich Osage woman, and member of a conspiracy to kill her loved ones in an effort to steal her family fortune.
Scorsese worked closely with Osage Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear and his office from the beginning of production, consulting producer Chad Renfro told Time. On the first day of shooting, the Oscar-winning filmmaker had an elder of the nation come to set to say a prayer for the cast and crew.
My take on it is eventually viewers will tire of the genre, and it will fade out into the background like most other genres. Dramas were all the rage in the 40s, Westerns were very popular in the 50s, in the 70s and 80s you have disaster films and pure action type stuff that was incredibly popular, the 90s had the start of some very popular independent films, and the late 90s and early aughts had a lot of popular fantasy/epics and animation films.
None of those genres completely went away, and some have had resurgence from time to time. Comic based movies wonât be dominating forever. There was and still are a lot of complaints about the movies made in the previous couple decades, and I think it says something that people are finding these comic stories so compelling. I think âHollywoodâ needs to look in a mirror to remind themselves why these types of movies have became so popular⊠is it just everyone attached to beautiful art and special effects? Or is it perhaps that maybe their storytelling wasnât as great, or original as they thought, and they are losing out to stories written decades ago because they are just simply more interesting?
Yeah, people remember a handful of classic war movies or westerns and think that era was magical but for every great film there was a hundred terrible cookie cutter cash grabs.
I would love to see some more directors focus on making great art but the reality is thatâs incredibly hard.
Iâm already tired⊠Spiderman gets recycled ever so often because of the license they have, then the multi verse was fine the few first movies but gets annoying after, then you get super heroes that only hard fans know and no one else.
I actually think the multiverse concept is a super annoying and obvious cash grab. At no point did I think âoh cool these movies connectâ. From the first moment to me it read as âoh theyâre planning to make 100 movies and tying them together is just a tactic to con people into seeing all 100 the same way people have watched plenty of sequels they know will suck, but they just want to finish the trilogyâ. Then the first time I heard it referred to as the âMarvel Cinematic Universeâ I threw up in my mouth. Iâll never understand how people didnât get bored and jaded after⊠10 years max. Weâre now sailing past 20 years from where I see this as all starting and itâs still some of the most popular shit of all time.
I feel like technology has changed things a lot. In the past when there was tube TVs with crappy resolution and poor quality sound you had to go to a theater for good quality picture and sound. Now TVs are good enough that if youâre going to watch a 3 1/2 hour long movie about some gangsters in their 70s reminiscing about a hit they did many decades before, youâre better off watching it at home. Why would someone want to go to the theater for that?
Now people go to the theater for the spectacle. Big event movies that people get dressed in costumes for. Movies with big effects that their home TV and sound system just wonât give as good an experience.
Serious dramas? Iâm not getting anything more from watching it at the theater than Iâm going to get at home on my TV.
And why is that a bad thing? A modern 4K TV with even just a speaker bar probably gives a better viewing experience than people had when they watched Taxi Driver in the theaters in 1976.
Itâs definitely an issue, but itâs not an unworkable one. Villeneuve films for exemple, while a bit hit-or-miss on the characters, definitely use the format in a way where you loose something if you watch it on TV instead of in a theater.
I saw BR 2049 in the cinema, and even now, several years later, I wish I could see it again that way. The sound over that enormous system was absolutely incredible, in a way that I could never recreate in my terraced house with neighbours. Thatâs the draw of cinema for me these days.
Those are big special effects movies. Youâre certainly not going to Villeneuve movies because theyâre well written. Well the writing in Dune is good, but only because heâs sticking close to the novel. But even with Dune, Iâm obviously not going to the theater for the story (because I already know the story) Iâm going for the visuals and sound.