The director Martin Scorsese deems “a model to all filmmakers”
Since his major directional debut, Mean Streets, Martin Scorsese has been broadly associated with gritty urban crime dramas, often set in and around his hometown of New York. However, with period dramas, seminal biopics, comedies, documentaries and psychological thrillers under his belt, Scorsese is much more than a one-trick pony.
One genre, besides comic book adaptations, that Scorsese hasn’t ventured into is horror. Of course, movies like Goodfellas carry plenty of shock and gore but generally err on the side of thriller realism. Although Scorsese has dodged the horror genre, that’s not to say some of its leading proponents haven’t inspired him profoundly.
In a past interview feature, Scorsese praised the talent and technique of sci-fi horror “master” John Carpenter. “John Carpenter is a filmmaker who is unashamed to stay within the genres he loves and who practices his trade like a master craftsman. His pictures always have a handmade quality – every cut, every move, every choice of framing and camera movement, not to mention every note of music [he composes his own scores] feels like it has been composed or placed by the filmmaker himself.”
Like Carpenter, Scorsese strives to maintain a thread of DNA across his entire filmography. This is achieved through nuanced cinematography, tension and character development. Also present throughout much of Scorsese’s material is a haunting air of anticipation. Even his 2013 comedy biopic The Wolf of Wall Street sustained a weight of impending disaster as Jordan Belfort’s life whirled out of control.
Scorsese’s passion for tangible horror in realistic plots has been inspired and influenced by countless movies, but none, it would seem, so memorably as Andrzej Wajda’s 1958 war drama Ashes and Diamonds.
Picking the chilling classic out as one of his top ten movies of all time in a 2016 feature for the Criterion Collection, Scorsese recalled discovering it in his late teens. “I saw Ashes and Diamonds for the first time in 1961,” he remembered. “And even back then, during that period when we expected to be astonished at the movies when things were happening all over the world, it shocked me.”
Continuing, Scorsese described Wajda’s unique knack for horror. “It had to do with the look, both immediate and haunted, like a nightmare that won’t stop unfolding; the sense of maddening insanity and absurdity, the tragedy of political infighting on the brink of peace and coming of age during wartime; and the beauty of the lead actor, Zbigniew Cybulski.”
“The film has the power of a hallucination: I can close my eyes, and certain images will flash back to me with the force they had when I saw them for the first time over fifty years ago,” Scorsese added, noting how the movie stuck with him through the years. “I’ve crossed paths with Andrzej Wajda a few times over the years, and I’ve always been in awe of his energy and his unflinching vision. I saw him again a couple of years ago, a little frailer but still as burning with energy as he’d been back in the ’90s, and he was preparing to make another film, now just completed, about Lech Walesa [Walesa: Man of Hope]. He’s a model to all filmmakers.”
The revered Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda passed away in 2016, aged 90. He was best known for an early trilogy of war movies, A Generation, Kanał and Ashes and Diamonds, but boasted a broad and impressively varied catalogue, which concluded with 2016’s Afterimage. In 1981, he was awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and received an honorary Academy Award in 2000 for his contribution to world cinema.
Watch the trailer for Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds below.
