The classic movie scene Martin Scorsese calls “totally disorienting”
It’s hard to dispute the fact that Martin Scorsese is one of the most celebrated and legendary living directors, having honed a successful career since the 1960s. He truly came to prominence in the following decade when he released acclaimed movies like Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. Since then, he’s garnered many prestigious accolades, including multiple Oscars, cementing himself as a Hollywood heavyweight.
Yet, before Scorsese, Hollywood was populated by various other cinematic titans, from John Ford to Alfred Hitchcock. The latter, an English filmmaker whose career began in the silent industry, came to dominate the film industry with movies like Vertigo, the proto-slasher Psycho and The Birds. As one of the most influential filmmakers of all time, Hitchcock’s influence spread across many genres, most notably horror and thrillers. He wasn’t dubbed ‘The Master of Suspense’ for nothing – he knew how to captivate an audience, what to reveal and what to keep hidden.
While Scorsese hasn’t ventured much into horror territory, he has made many thrillers, from Shutter Island to The Departed. The director has evidently been inspired by Hitchcock, whose legacy runs through Hollywood’s bloodstream. One of Scorsese’s favourites by the filmmaker – and an all-time favourite movie of his – is Vertigo, which he once called “one of the greatest films ever made”. He labelled it “perplexing at first”, although his love for it soon became clearer, “It was quite different from what people expected of Hitchcock, and the story was so odd, so purely emotional.”
He paid homage to the iconic director when making an advertisement for Spanish wine, telling DGA Quarterly, “In our little movie, we pretended we found two pages of a Hitchcock script that was never made and then we try to make the whole film—and it’s a gruelling exercise.” The scene he attempted to recreate was from another favourite of his, Rear Window. Hitchcock’s 1954 film starring James Stewart with Grace Kelly was highly acclaimed upon its release, grossing $37million against a budget of just $1m, proving the popularity of Hitchcock’s movie with theatregoers.
The film features a memorable scene where Stewart’s character falls from a window, which is captured with an almost slow-motion quality – but not quite. Due to the limited special effects technology available in the ‘50s, the way Stewart falls looks fake, too slow to be realistic. But somehow, it still works. Scorsese explained, “We use CGI, and there’s a scene in which we try to recreate the imperfection of Jimmy Stewart falling out the window in Rear Window, and you can’t quite do it.”
“If you look at that scene in Rear Window, when he’s hanging from the ledge, and the people in the apartment run out to see what’s going on, they’re all skip-framed, and they’re all moving very jerkily. And when he does fall, it looks very artificial, but it’s totally disorienting. I’m not sure Hitchcock even meant it to look good,” Scorsese continued. “We tried to do something like it, and we kept saying, ‘That’s awful, that’s wonderful.’ All put together, it’s a really disquieting effect.”
Clearly, for Scorsese, an effect doesn’t have to look completely realistic if the scene conveys enough power, which the Rear Window falling sequence certainly does.
