The actor Martin Scorsese called the European James Dean: “I was overwhelmed”
Even before he began directing, Martin Scorsese was a cinema expert. As a kid, he was in awe of filmmakers like Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles. When he started directing, he was able to incorporate everything he’d learned from observing some of the great masters of the medium into his own work, creating a style full of reverence that never feels directly referential.
His encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema history has also come in handy when he’s helping actors develop their roles. He doesn’t necessarily tell them to copy the movements or tones of voice of other performers but to watch how they inhabit a role so that they might take away a greater sense of the character they are about to play.
One such example was when he was prepping Leonardo DiCaprio for his role in The Departed, in which he plays an undercover cop who struggles to find a moral high ground while stuck between a corrupt police force and a charismatic mob boss. Scorsese wanted him to watch the 1958 film Ashes and Diamonds by Polish director Andrzej Wajda. At the centre of the film is an electrifying performance by Zbigniew Cybulski, a movie star whose delicate features, magnetic persona, and perpetual air of coolness drew easy parallels to one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.
During a conversation with DiCaprio for Letterboxd earlier this year, the director recalled showing him the film so that he could watch Cybulski’s performance as a young patriot fighting the communist regime in the aftermath of World War II.
“He was considered like the European James Dean,” he said, revealing that he had first seen Ashes and Diamonds when he was about 20 years old and was struck by Cybulki’s performance as a man trapped in a moral wasteland. He finally finds solace in his love for a woman but meets a tragic fate soon thereafter.
Speaking to the Independent about Ashes and Diamonds, the director was even more effusive. “I was overwhelmed by the film,” he said. “The masterful direction, the powerful story, the striking visual imagery, and the shocking performance by Zbigniew Cybulski. I was so struck by the film, it affected me so deeply.”
In his conversation with DiCaprio, Scorsese offered an explanation for why Cybulski never became as internationally well-known as Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni or French actor Alain Delon. In 1967, at just 39, Cybulski was killed jumping onto a moving train after a day of shooting a film.
Cybulski may never have become a household name in the US the way James Dean did, but Scorsese has paid visual homage to him throughout his career. In Ashes and Diamonds and in real life, Cybulski wore tinted glasses. “I’ve always used those glasses myself in homage,” Scorsese explained, revealing that not only did he put them on Harvey Keitel for his performance in Mean Streets, but he also wears them himself whenever he’s on set.
Unlike Dean, Cybulski left behind a sizable body of work when he died. Ashes and Diamonds is still considered his greatest film, but his talent and charisma are on full display in movies like Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s 1959 film Night Train and Andrzej Wajda’s psychological drama Innocent Sorcerers from 1960. Scorsese named both films as masterpieces of Polish cinema, thanks in no small part to Cybulski’s magnetic performances.
