Martin Scorsese reveals he nearly left Hollywood after ‘Gangs of New York’
The legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese has reflected on his time making Gangs of New York, the divisive 2002 movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Daniel Day-Lewis.
Speaking to GQ ahead of his upcoming feature, Killers of the Flower Moon, the 80-year-old director recalled his frustration making Gangs of New York at the meddling hands of the disgraced former producer Harvey Weinstein and his company Miramax.
“I realised that I couldn’t work if I had to make films that way ever again,” Scorsese curtly explained. He also recalled how Weinstein tried to strangle the movie’s budget and runtime, thus putting him in an uncomfortable position.
“If that was the only way that I was able to be allowed to make films, then I’d have to stop,” Scorsese said to the magazine. “Because the results weren’t satisfying. It was, at times, extremely difficult, and I wouldn’t survive it. I’d be dead. And so I decided it was over, really.”
Scorsese persevered in Hollywood but ran into similar issues when creating his next movie, 2004’s The Aviator, which was co-distributed by Miramax and Warner Bros.
“And I was against that; there was a meeting, and I was forced into that position,” Scorsese added regarding his reluctance to work with Weinstein again. “I’d already been, uh, made pregnant, as they said. And there’s no way you’re getting out of it.”
“But the shoot went well, the editing went well until the last couple of weeks of editing. And they came in and did some things that I felt were extremely mean,” he added. Allegedly, the two production giants pulled funding on the project near its completion, forcing Scorsese to use $500,000 of his own money to conclude production.
In the same interview, Scorsese discussed the current state of the movie business and claimed “the industry is over” as he once knew it.
Explaining how Hollywood has changed, Scorsese said in a new interview: “Well, the industry is over. In other words, the industry that I was part of, we’re talking almost, what, 50 years ago? It’s like saying to somebody in 1970 who made silent films, ‘What do you think’s happened?’”
According to Scorsese, studios are not “interested any longer in supporting individual voices that express their personal feelings or their personal thoughts and personal ideas on a big budget. And what’s happened now is that they’ve pigeonholed it to what they call indies”.
Watch the trailer for Gangs of New York below.
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