“I had to get myself back in shape”: the movies Martin Scorsese compared to a workout
During the 1960s, everything changed. Every artistic medium enjoyed a drastic revolution of some sort, and film was no exception. Many movements allowed Hollywood cinema to transform into something bigger and better than before, with American filmmakers taking inspiration from avant-garde and foreign filmmakers. Martin Scorsese emerged at the perfect time, releasing his first feature, Who’s That Knocking At My Door, in 1967.
Scorsese was surrounded by budding directors and actors, from Francis Ford Coppola to Robert De Niro, all of whom rose to prominence at the same time as him, becoming known as members of the New Hollywood era. It wasn’t until he released Mean Streets in 1973 that he rose to further prominence, and with Taxi Driver, released three years later, Scorsese received worldwide fame. It remains one of cinema’s most lauded films, and Scorsese is undoubtedly one of the most beloved directors in Hollywood.
While the filmmaker has made many big-budget productions, like Goodfellas, The Wolf of Wall Street and, more recently, Killers of the Flower Moon, he has also been challenged to work on smaller funding, not always finding the same amounts of funding for each movie. Scorsese has always been caught between his independent roots and Hollywood success, never knowing which area of cinema he feels more comfortable in.
In some instances, he has been required to get more creative, recalling his earlier days of working on limited budgets. This was the case for After Hours and The Last Temptation of Christ. In 1980, Scorsese completed Raging Bull, which was made on a budget of $18m, which was followed by The King of Comedy, costing $19m. Yet, his next project wasn’t going as swimmingly as he had hoped.
His plans to make The Last Temptation of Christ were initially squashed when religious groups protested against it, and the production company became less willing to fund the project. Thus, the movie was cancelled, and Scorsese had to put the religious film to the back of his mind. This is why his next film, After Hours, was made on a smaller budget with a smaller company—Scorsese felt compelled to step away from big-budget films after the disastrous pre-production of The Last Temptation of Christ.
Scorsese then made The Color of Money, which used a larger budget. He seemed unsure of his identity as a filmmaker. “Then the question was: Are you going to survive as a Hollywood filmmaker?” he explained to Film Comment. “Then again, even when I try to make a Hollywood film, there’s something in me that says, ‘Go the other way.’ With The Color of Money, working with two big stars, we tried to make a Hollywood movie.”
He eventually made his film about Jesus’ life in 1988, and despite it being an epic tale lasting over two and a half hours in length, it was made for just $7m. Scorsese explained, “After The Last Temptation was cancelled in ’83, I had to get myself back in shape. Work out. And this was working out. First After Hours, on a small scale. The idea was that I should be able, if Last Temptation ever came along again, to make it like After Hours, because that’s all the money I’m gonna get for it.”
The movie might have been made on a small scale, but Critics praised the Last Temptation of Christ. Unfortunately, many religious groups were outraged by the film, which included sexual depictions of Jesus, and a Parisian cinema was even set ablaze while showing the film due to an angry Integralist Catholic group.
