Elia Kazan: The legendary director who rejected Martin Scorsese
There are good directors, great directors and then directors who change the course of cinema itself. To be considered any one of those is to sit back at the end of one’s professional life and deem it a success. However, whenever he decides to finally sit on a chair that doesn’t have “director” scrawled along the back, Martin Scorsese will do so safely in the knowledge that he has achieved perhaps all there is to achieve in the world of filmmaking.
Scorsese generated enough artistic momentum through his early masterpieces, such as Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, to set the ball rolling for the new wave in American filmmaking. He has maintained that same creative drive in the 21st century, following up The Irishman with his most recent project, The Killers of the Flower Moon, proving that the director still has vital visions to provide his audience with.
The truth is, like most fantastic filmmakers, Scorsese isn’t just a cinematic creator but a true lover of the medium. Scorsese had been drawn to cinema from a very early age, often citing the cinematic magic of pioneers such as Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, as well as Satyajit Ray and Federico Fellini as chief sources of inspiration.
When he was young, New York wasn’t really a filmmaking hub, and achieving any kind of success in the business meant travelling across the country and heading to Hollywood. But he couldn’t ignore his attraction to the cinematic medium and decided to pursue a formal education in film history. It would set the foundations for his eventual domination of the opposite coast.
Just a year after New York University’s School of the Arts was founded, Scorsese enrolled in an MFA program. There, he was inspired by the passion of professors such as Haig Manoogian and exposed to the wider world of global cinema. During his time at NYU, he made iconic short films like The Big Shave, which kicked off his career and even resulted in his making his first feature film. With this in mind, he has always reserved a spot in his heart for the educational institution.
Even after all these years, Scorsese often takes time out of his busy schedule to speak to students at the university and is an active member of the alumni network. In fact, NYU recently established the Martin Scorsese Institute of Global Cinematic Art which offers funding as well as highly improved production facilities for film students who want to achieve the cinematic accomplishments of professional film studios.
One particularly bittersweet memory from Scorsese’s NYU years was when he was shown the door by one of his filmmaking icons. In 1965, NYU invited Elia Kazan to speak at the school while he was directing a production of Arthur Miller’s After the Fall. Scorsese was especially excited about this because the university mostly called pioneers from the experimental and independent scene, while Scorsese wanted to be a part of the studio tradition.
The director, it is safe to say, was perhaps Scorsese’s ultimate hero. He even described Kazan’s On the Waterfront as a “turning point in [his] life”, so he was naturally eager to attend Kazan’s lecture. After the talk, Scorsese managed to get the address of the master auteur and even set up a five-minute appointment during which he hoped to bag the chance of working with Kazan on one of his upcoming projects and hopefully make inroads into the studio industry.
Kazan was well-respected by students as well as contemporaries such as Stanley Kubrick, who once said of him: “Without question, the best director we have in America, [and] capable of performing miracles with the actors he uses.” Scorsese was already tense about the meeting, and even though he knew New York really well, he got lost on his way to Kazan’s office and was only there ten minutes late. Now, for some, this would have been a negligible state of affairs. For others, it would have been perfect timing as their meetings would overrun. But it would seem that the affront was enough to upset Kazan.
After apologising and letting Kazan know of how much he liked his work, Scorsese asked him whether it was possible to join as an on-set assistant to which Kazan immediately replied: “We don’t do that”. Scorsese asked him whether he would give him feedback on a script that he was working on which Kazan declined as well, claiming that he didn’t read other people’s work while he was writing his own.
“I was so crushed,” Scorsese later confessed, but he later saw “not only how tough the meeting was but that it had been toughening too”. He claimed that the immense disappointment renewed him and gave him adequate inspiration to continue on his filmmaking journey. Fortunately, he never gave up and is still contributing invaluable gems to the world of cinema.
