Martin Scorsese says making movies at 80 is “hard work”
Martin Scorsese has been making films for half a century now, after making his feature debut with Who’s That Knocking at My Door in 1967. Over five decades later, at 80 years old, he’s still just as passionate about filmmaking, though he admits that it’s hard work.
Speaking with Sky News on the red carpet for Killers of the Flower Moon, the celebrated director stated, “It’s very hard work. You have to really want to do it, I think.”
“To be on a movie set or in a location, to be dealing with all the issues that are involved in production,” he continued, “I think it’s something that you have to really feel strongly about and that you want to say, that you’re sort of burning to say.”
Scorsese certainly still has things he’s “burning to say” via the medium of film. His upcoming film, Killers of the Flower Moon, focuses on a series of murders in the Osage Nation in the 1920s.
In an interview with Empire, star Lily Gladstone rejected the classification of the film as a western, instead dubbing it “a great American tragedy.” “With natives and westerns, we are so dehumanized that it just kind of feels like we’re part of the landscape – instead of humans that are telling a story,” she explained.
Gladstone stars opposite Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro in their sixth and tenth Scorsese feature projects, respectively.
Though he accepts that filmmaking has become “hard work”, Scorsese also noted his optimism for a new generation of filmmakers: “My hopes are such that, with the new technology and the new generations and younger people seeing the world in a different way, that cinema will evolve itself into a new form, and that’s up to the younger people.”
Killers of the Flower Moon is out on Friday, October 20th.
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