The “highly unpleasant” movie Martin Scorsese hated making: “It’ll kill me”
After making Shutter Island in 2010 and enjoying his biggest-ever commercial success, Martin Scorsese spent the next 15 years doing projects that seemed to increase in ambition each and every time. In that period, he gave the world Hugo, The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence, The Irishman, and Killers of the Flower Moon, and landed some of the best reviews of his career in the process. Interestingly, though, the making of these pictures was a reaction to the bad taste left in his mouth after he forced himself through the production of a “highly unpleasant” movie that he was glad to see the back of.
In recent years, many column inches have been devoted to the ballooning budgets of Scorsese’s movies in the streaming era. For instance, it’s been reported that The Irishman may have cost as much as $250 million, and Killers of the Flower Moon’s price tag was at least $200million. These budgets are usually reserved for superhero blockbusters, not elegiac gangster movies and harrowing tales of man’s greed. Interestingly, though, despite their eye-watering costs, both of these pictures were technically independent movies – and so were the other three films Scorsese made post-2010.
You see, Hugo was produced by Infinitum Nihil and GK Films before being distributed by Paramount Pictures. Similarly, The Wolf of Wall Street was produced by the now-defunct Red Granite Pictures before again being picked up by Paramount for distribution. Silence was a co-production of 10 different companies, then distributed by Paramount in the US and StudioCanal in the UK.
The Irishman saw Tribeca Productions, Sikelia Productions, and Winkler Films get the project going before Netflix swooped in to fund the ballooning budget. Finally, Killers of the Flower Moon was produced by Scorsese’s Sikelia Productions and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way Productions before AppleTV+ came on board to co-finance and co-distribute.
All this is to say, even though it seems like Scorsese has still been working with the major studios and streamers, he has actually made all of his post-Shutter Island films independently, without executives breathing down his neck. This was instigated by the rough time he had making The Departed for Warner Bros Pictures, the torturous production of which forced him to say, “I don’t care how much I’m being paid, it’ll kill me. I’ll die.”
In 2016, Scorsese told The Sunday Times Culture magazine, “I hardly did any press for that film. I was tired of it. I felt it was maddening. I mean, I like the picture, but the process of making it, particularly in the post-production, was highly unpleasant.”
Despite The Departed being the movie that finally landed Scorsese ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ honours at the Oscars, it’s never been a film he speaks too fondly about. In fact, when he does talk about the Boston crime thriller, he mostly complains about studio execs pushing him to make a sequel he had no interest in, and giving him a hard time about killing all the main characters at the end.
“Winning the award was…a total surprise to me,” Scorsese told The New Yorker in 2023. “For me, that award was inadvertent. I had made The Departed as a sign-off. I was leaving and just going to make some small films…and it just happened that The Departed clicked.”
He described the production as something akin to a war of attrition – a test of mettle that he had to fight his way through. “When I finally threw it up on the screen, people liked it,” he noted with slight bafflement. “I don’t mean I didn’t think that it was good or bad. I just felt we had accomplished something.”
