Martin Scorsese claims Robbie Robertson got “mad” at him for liking punk
Killers of the Flower Moon director Martin Scorsese has reflected on his friendship with the late musician Robbie Robertson and revealed the guitarist was furious when he started liking punk.
Scorsese and Robertson shared a 50-year-long friendship. Most notably, the director chronicled The Band’s final concert in San Francisco in 1976 for The Last Waltz. Since that moment, the pairing continued to collaborate on soundtracks for films such as The Irishman, Casino, Raging Bull, The Wolf of Wall Street and many more.
Their music taste tended to align. However, they didn’t see eye-to-eye when it came to punk. Although Scorsese tried his best to convert Robertson to bands such as The Clash, his efforts largely fell flat on their feet.
In a new interview with Apple Music 1’s Zane Lowe, Scorsese revealed: “He just got mad at me when I liked the punk movement. We were living together in my house, a small house up in Mulholland Drive, and he would just come in sometimes, ‘Just lower it, lower it. It’s too loud.’ I said, ‘No, but it’s The Clash.’ He goes, ‘I don’t care.’ He said, ‘I don’t care. They have no musicianship, none. They can’t play the guitar. They can’t play the drums.’ I said, ‘Doesn’t matter.'”
The director continued: “He did concede with Elvis Costello, though. He conceded. When I showed the album, we went into the old Tower Records, myself and Jay Cox, who was a movie critic but he was beginning to write rock criticism with Time Magazine. We looked, and we saw all this English punk music, and we looked around, and he said, ‘Grab that one, The Jam. Grab that one, The Clash. That’s got to be something,’ and then we saw this Elvis Costello. He said, ‘Take this one because with that name, he better be good.'”
Following Robertson’s death in August, Scorsese paid tribute to his late friend, stating: “Robbie Robertson was one of my closest friends, a constant in my life and my work. I could always go to him as a confidante. A collaborator. An advisory. I tried to be the same for him.”
Scorsese’s new movie Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone and Robert De Niro, is out now. In a four-and-a-half-star review, Far Out wrote: “As expected of Scorsese, every shot is perfectly crafted and brings the nature of the true-crime narrative to new cinematic heights. At three and a half hours long, Killers of the Flower Moon is utterly captivating, sensitive in its approach and an essential work in chronicling the power that the United States would eventually retirement.”
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