Martin Scorsese on the Oscars: “I don’t really belong there”
Killers of the Flowers Moon director Martin Scorsese has opened up about his distant relationship with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
“I always liked being nominated at the Academy, even though knowing – especially the fact that they didn’t nominate us for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, when I didn’t get the Oscar, I understood that that wasn’t my lot in life,” Scorsese claims in a new interview. “But I always said this: just be quiet and make the movies. You can’t make a movie for an award. Sure, I would’ve liked it, but like, so what? I mean, I had to go on and make pictures.”
“I don’t really belong there anyway,“ Scorsese added to GQ. “I don’t live – you have to live in a community that is really an industry. You have to be part of the industry in such a way… I don’t know if I think like them. I just mind my own business here.”
Scorsese won his first Oscar for the 2006 film The Departed. It remains his only win out of 14 nominations. Still, the recognition that he received for The Departed did encourage him to make more films, including his final project with a major film studio to date.
“It encouraged me to make another picture with Shutter Island. It turned out I should have gone on probably to do Silence,” Scorsese says, with the director claiming that Shutter Island “was, I think, the last studio film I made.”
“Well, the industry is over,” Scorsese says. “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?’”
Scorsese opinioned that major film 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.”
“I think there will always be theatrical, because people want to experience this thing together,” he said. “But at the same time, the theatres have to step up to make them places where people will want to go and enjoy themselves or want to go and see something that moves them.”
Watch the trailer for The Departed below.
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