The movie Martin Scorsese regrets most: “The last studio film I made”
It’s always lamentable when a person admits regrets over their career, especially when those missteps come from someone who has given the world as much as Martin Scorsese has. With a career spanning decades and a filmography heralding him as one of the greatest directors in history, Scorsese’s contributions to film are immeasurable. But recently, the director has shared some regrets about one of his pictures.
The director behind classic movies including Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street, to name only a few, Scorsese’s filmography is vast. Since the 1960s, he’s swept awards in every decade. However, his 2010 film Shutter Island became his first release in over two decades not to receive a single Academy Award nomination.
This could be the reason why Scorsese carries regrets about the project. In a recent interview with GQ, the 81-year-old talks candidly about his misgivings related to the film. Shutter Island is a dark and twisted thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio, which revolves around a psychiatric facility with a missing patient. Despite scoring Scorsese his biggest box office opening weekend to date, the director has publicly expressed his dissatisfaction with the film and has even admitted that he shouldn’t have agreed to make the movie in the first place.
After winning ‘Best Director’ in 2006 for The Departed, it seemed like Scorsese was riding high on the commercial and critical success. Then, he felt “encouraged” to take on Shutter Island, which would be his most commercial and classically ‘Hollywood’ film yet with significant studio involvement, a star-studded cast, and pressures to deliver on certain factors. But his experience making the film made it become “the last studio film I made”.
There are plenty of reasons as to why Scorsese regrets Shutter Island, some of which point to Harvey Weinstein’s involvement. Not only does this add layers of new and distressing context to Scorsese’s feelings in the years since Weinstein’s trial, but at the time, the involvement of his studio contributed to demands over the film’s budget and runtime. The experience, on the whole, made Scorsese “realise that I couldn’t work if I had to make films that way ever again”.
But overwhelmingly, it simply seems like Scorsese’s heart was in a different place. When discussing the decision to make Shutter Island and his resulting regrets, the director told GQ, “It turned out I should have gone on probably to do Silence“.
Silence was Scorsese’s passion project. Based on Shūsaku Endō’s novel of the same name, the film is a historical epic about two Jesuit priests who travel to Japan on a mission to locate their mentor. Eventually, Scorsese would make the film in 2016, starring Liam Neeson, Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver. But it’s clear that the director wishes he’d got on with it sooner.
