Martin Scorsese names the one movie that inspired ‘The King of Comedy’
An acerbic satirical classic that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with his very best work, it’s remarkable that Martin Scorsese wasn’t even all that interested in directing The King of Comedy to begin with.
The filmmaker found himself so burned out after the exhausting Raging Bull that he was considering abandoning narrative features altogether to focus his energies on documentaries, and even though he’d purchased the rights to the screenplay by Paul D. Zimmerman with the prospect of making it with regular muse Robert De Niro, Michael Cimino was originally announced as the film’s director.
When the Heaven’s Gate debacle ruled him out of the running, Scorsese took over and steered it to the status of being one of the greatest box office bombs ever made. A substantial flop that didn’t come anywhere close to recouping its $19million budget from cinemas, the director remains equal parts bemused and frustrated to this day that it didn’t catch on with audiences.
It didn’t make a splash during awards season, either, but De Niro’s searing performance as Rupert Pupkin is widely heralded as one of his best, and the same can be said of the film at large among the Scorsese back catalogue. A searing indictment of obsession, unfulfilled ambitions, and the cult of celebrity, it required a tricky tonal balancing act for the movie to turn out as Scorsese had always envisioned.
To strike that tone, he looked towards the past, and one of his own favourites, which was itself a remake of a German drama adapted from a play. 1963’s Station Six-Sahara finds five lonely men residing on an oil rig in the Sahara desert before a beautiful American stranger arrives on the scene out of nowhere with a literal bang, creating even more tensions among a group where things were already in danger of boiling over.
It doesn’t appear to have a great deal in common with The King of Comedy at first glance, but as Scorsese explained on Letterboxd when anointing it as a companion piece, it was exactly what he was aiming for. “I love comedy and comedians, the very fine line between humour and absolute bitterness,” he shared, before outlining how films that aren’t comedies can often be the most side-splitting.
“Station Six-Sahara is not a comedy, but it is bitterly funny,” Scorsese continued. “Every laugh is on the knife-edge of desperation and despair. It’s the tone we were going for. Every laugh had to be excruciatingly uncomfortable. It’s a study in psychological intimidation.” With that in mind, the comparisons instantly become apt, because those sentiments apply directly to De Niro’s Pupkin.
Todd Phillips lifted liberally from The King of Comedy when he was crafting Joker, but for Scorsese’s forebear, he opted to be a lot more subtle and less blatant when paying tribute to his influences.
