The movie Martin Scorsese made as a nihilistic form of therapy: “He saw the humour in it”
Martin Scorsese has made some of the greatest films of all time. Taxi Driver and Raging Bull heralded a new wave of American cinema, and his influence on future filmmakers cannot be overstated. Now in his eighties, he’s still going strong, churning out Oscar-nominated epics every few years.
While he’s made a handful of timeless classics that are part of the must-watch film canon, he has also made some movies that have slipped through the cracks, at least as far as mainstream audiences are concerned. A movie like New York, New York flopped at the box office and is largely forgotten. A film like King of Comedy, on the other hand, was a flop when it came out but has since been acknowledged as a classic.
1985’s After Hours quickly fizzled upon its release, though it didn’t come close to the catastrophic financial failure of The King of Comedy. And although it deserves to have a similar afterlife, it remains unfairly obscure compared to the director’s other work. In terms of Scorsese’s life and career, however, After Hours was one of the most pivotal projects he’s ever signed on to.
It stars Griffin Dunne as Paul Hackett, an office drone who spends an entire night trying to get home from Soho in Manhattan after skipping out on a date. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong. Far from being a comedy of errors, however, the film is dark and deeply weird. There is no other Scorsese movie this bizarre, and it should come as no surprise that Tim Burton was originally set to direct it.
The reason Scorsese was so happy to make it was both personal and professional. He was in a dark place. After being hailed as the voice of his generation with Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, he had fallen spectacularly from grace when The King of Comedy bombed. He had also been trying to make The Last Temptation of Christ since the ‘70s, but it had been a punishing process. In 1983, after the budget had spiralled out of control and religious groups were expressing outrage, Paramount pulled the plug, leaving Scorsese devastated.
When Dunne’s producing partner Amy Robinson approached the director about After Hours, he was in a uniquely receptive frame of mind about the dark, oddball script. “Amy knew Marty quite well, and his sensibility of finding humour in disaster,” Dunne told Little White Lies in 2024. “You know, he had his own After Hours experience – when Last Temptation of Christ was falling through, that was his Paul Hackett moment! He saw the humour in it.”
One of the reasons the project appealed to him, aside from the relatability of it, was that it was a tiny production. It had less than a quarter of the budget of The King of Comedy and was made independently of a major studio. It liberated him after his scarring experience with Paramount, and the oddness of the final product is proof.
According to Dunne, Scorsese credits After Hours with reinvigorating his career. “He’s often said that this movie put him back in touch with the urgency and passion he had when he became a director and made Mean Streets and Taxi Driver,” the actor said. “It got him back on the path he was originally set up to be on.”
Although Scorsese has never made anything close to After Hours again, the film was a crux moment that influenced the direction he went afterwards. It may even have been the reason he was willing to persist with The Last Temptation of Christ and eventually make it for less than half the budget he had originally asked for.
