“This is not what I do”: Martin Scorsese’s shame when the director becomes the directed
Quite rightly renowned as one of the finest movie directors of all time, Martin Scorsese has actually spent much more time in front of the camera over the last sixty years or so than people might think; in fact, he has over 30 credited acting roles up to now.
Now some of those are admittedly Hitchcock-style cameos in his own movies, as a passenger in Taxi Driver, for example, a stagehand in Raging Bull or a wealthy homeowner in Gangs of New York, but elsewhere Scorsese has also made genuine appearances in other people’s projects too, often as himself, as recently as last year in Seth Rogen’s The Studio.
Of course, the issue with casting Scorsese in anything is that the director then has to tell him what they’d like him to do, to essentially direct the director, or rather the director, given that the man is a bona fide living legend, in the top ten to ever do it. That naturally brings some issues, but it is probably helped somewhat if, as in the 2004 animated kids effort Shark Tale, it’s just his voice you need, and he can be in a booth rather than moving around on camera.
Nevertheless, it was still a very daunting prospect for one of the movie’s three co-directors, Vicky Jenson, as she told Collider, recalling: “I couldn’t sleep the night before because I thought, ‘How can I direct a director?’… But it turned out to be really fun because, apparently, he was just as nervous. He was sort of like, ‘I don’t know what you want from me. This is not what I do’.”
Luckily, Jenson got much of what she needed from Scorsese, who was playing the role of a loanshark pufferfish called Sykes, thanks to his natural demeanour, which tends towards a kind of always-on-his-toes insecurity. The film itself, meanwhile, which also featured regular Scorsese conspirator Robert De Niro plus Will Smith and Renee Zellweger, was a big hit on release, although it picked up some controversy for apparently perpetuating negative stereotypes, despite the fact that it was a cartoon about talking fish.
Also, and if you can make sense of this then fair play to you, there was some outcry about the fact Jack Black’s character, a shark called Lenny, tries to be a vegetarian, with a Christian conservative group called the American Family Association deciding this was something the filmmakers wrote in an attempt to brainwash children into supporting gay rights, which is, in some ways, amazing.
Regardless, Shark Tale was nominated for an Oscar for ‘Best Animated Feature’, and Scorsese reprised his voiceover in a short the following year. In the 20 years or so since, the director has popped up on and off camera quite regularly in a variety of projects, most recently showing up for Jonah Hill in his Keanu Reeves comedy Outcome as a character called Richie ‘Red’ Rodriguez.
Of course he is most at home behind the camera, and that’s where the 83 year-old will be spending the majority of the near future, working on a new Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence movie called What Happens at Night, plus The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder which is adapted from a novel about a captain and crew struggling against the sea in the 1700s.
