The one scene every great movie has, according to Martin Scorsese
Cited by critics, actors and fellow directors alike as a remarkable cinema student who has progressed the medium to new heights, Martin Scorsese is looked to as one of film’s most influential and essential. The filmmaker has directed some sensational, gripping and insightful stories, showcased in Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and Hugo, all employing visuals or narrative to showcase cinema’s status as an art form.
Given his legendary career that involves contributing to cinema directly and preserving lost artefacts, Scorsese’s opinions on utilising a camera to create art of the highest quality are taken by his cast and crew as gospel. This was the case for one of his co-stars Margot Robbie, the Australian actor who took Hollywood by storm when she appeared in the director’s crime drama The Wolf of Wall Street in 2013. The star appeared alongside screen royalty Leonardo DiCaprio as his character, Jordan Belfort’s second wife, Naomi Lapaglia.
Looper reports a snippet of Robbie’s BAFTA interview, in which she shared the one scene the Taxi Driver loves to see. “One thing being actually when we were shooting that shot running down the stairs,” the Wolf of Wall Street star said. “Scorsese was like ‘Ah’ when we were coming up with it. He was like, ‘It’s a great stairwell,’ and he just turned to me and goes, ‘Every great movie has a stair shot.'”
The staircase show has featured in many classics in riveting scenes that can sometimes align with messaging and tones. One prominent example is the training montage in Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky, which sees the aspiring boxer run up and down a town staircase in the pivotal moment of his dedicated training.
This sequence was so impactful that the steps, located at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia, are now cited as the ‘Rocky Steps’ and were once home to a bronze Rocky statue during the shooting of Rocky III.
Another successful example of the stairs scene is in Todd Phillip’s Oscar-winning work Joker, released in 2019. This loose adaptation of the infamous DC Comics villain stars Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck, a man living with an unidentified mental illness that leads him to exert chaos in the city. To become an aspiring comedian, Fleck murders his own comedy idol, a talk show host played by Robert De Niro.
One watch of Joker will activate its connections to Scorsese’s legendary works. One primary source is Taxi Driver, which also presents a man with a nihilistic attitude and mental illness exerting detrimental views on his environment. Another is The King of Comedy, which sees an aspiring comedian stalk and kidnap his talk show idol.
Phillip’s movie, likewise to Rocky, featured a staircase to illustrate its main character’s transformation as Fleck, now donned in Joker hair and make-up, dances down a staircase he uses daily before his rugged show appearance. These stairs have since been labelled the ‘Joker Stairs’ and can be found in New York City’s Bronx.
Other famous movie staircases include Battleship Potemkin’s monumental set of stairs in Odesa, Ukraine, which saw one of the most incredible political sequences filmed by Sergei Eisenstein, where protesting workers ran from shooting armies. There are also ‘The Exorcist steps’ in Washington DC, famous for appearing in William Friedkin’s terrifying adaptation of William Blatty’s book.
Scouring through the greatest moments of cinema history, its easy to see how Scorsese may well be on to something.
