The creative skill Martin Scorsese wishes he possessed: “I wish I could just be in a room”
Not every director has to prove themselves as a multi-hyphenate in order to go down in history as one of the all-time greats, but that doesn’t mean Martin Scorsese can’t hold his hands up and admit to his self-perceived shortcomings.
Obviously, nobody is going to argue the fact that he’s one of the finest filmmakers to ever step behind the camera, but the man himself isn’t of the mind to bow down and worship at the altar of his own mythology. As a lifelong student of cinema, he’ll be completely aware of what he’s brought to the medium over the decades, but he’ll stop well short of self-aggrandisement.
There are directors who only direct, there are directors who direct and produce, there are directors who write all of their own movies, there are directors who write some of their own movies, and there are directors who write none of their movies at all. Scorsese is far from being prolific with the pen, but he’s nonetheless been credited on some of his finest works.
As a writer, Scorsese contributed to his first two features, Who’s That Knocking at My Door and Boxcar Bertha, in addition to Mean Streets, Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence, Casino, Silence, and Killers of the Flower Moon. Hardly the filmography of a total hack, then, but he did admit to the Associated Press that it wasn’t something he could ever imagine doing on every single one of his projects.
“I come up with stories, I get attracted to stories through other people; all different means, different ways,” he said. “And so I think it’s a different process. I respect writers, and I wish I could just be in a room and create these novels. Not films; novels. Long stories.”
Having been at least partially attributed to the screenplays of some of his best-ever works, it sounds as though Scorsese is somewhat downplaying his capabilities as a writer. However, he clearly doesn’t believe it to be anywhere near one of the strongest tools in his cinematic arsenal, which has hardly been detrimental to his career when he’s built up such an incredible body of work.
Continuing to share his view on his substandard screenwriting skills, Scorsese offered that “you have to have the level of creativity and also knowledge to put something like that together,” which he evidently doesn’t believe himself to have for whatever reason.
If the filmmaker had “knowledge of the human experience, psychology, emotions, and history” to a greater degree, then he might have been a much more prolific writer, although it’s an opinion that won’t have cinephiles nodding in agreement with the world over when there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary displaying just how talented he is when he scripts.
