Martin Scorsese calls the box office profit obsession “repulsive”
Nobody loves anything quite as much as Martin Scorsese loves cinema. He is a monomaniac when it comes to movies, thus, it is perhaps not all that surprising that he has often voiced his opinions rather loudly on how he currently views them.
In the past, he has bashed streaming giants for creating “content” instead of art despite receiving $159 million from Netflix to make The Irishman. Now, he had lambasted the industry’s obsession with making money at the box office as “repulsive”.
On the New York Film Festival stage Wednesday night, the legendary Goodfellas director lambasted the current state of the cinema industry as he introduced the New York Dolls documentary, Personality Crisis: One Night Only.
Before the screening, he took to the stage and proclaimed that “cinema is devalued, demeaned, belittled from all sides, not necessarily the business side but certainly the art. Since the ’80s, there’s been a focus on numbers. It’s kind of repulsive. The cost of a movie is one thing.”
Adding: “Understand that a film costs a certain amount, they expect to at least get the amount back, plus, again. The emphasis is now on numbers, cost, the opening weekend, how much it made in the U.S.A., how much it made in England, how much it made in Asia, how much it made in the entire world, how many viewers it got.”
This might seem like a self-explanatory motive, but Scorsese took the artist’s view and added: “As a filmmaker, and as a person who can’t imagine life without cinema, I always find it really insulting. I’ve always known that such considerations have no place at the New York Film Festival, and here’s the key also with this: There are no awards here. You don’t have to compete. You just have to love cinema here.”
Much of this box office obsession came about when Michael Cimino almost bankrupted an entire production house when he made the widely panned Heaven’s Gate in 1980. However, according to Scorsese, the steps taken to avoid this have been disproportionate and the reverberations are damaging.
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