The three movies Martin Scorsese thinks killed directing: “It ended the power”
Throughout his career, Martin Scorsese has remained the epitome of a maverick director. His ability to work within the confines of his movies and go against the grain of what the traditional cinematic experience is supposed to be is still as relevant today as it was when he made Taxi Driver in the 1970s. While much had changed between making his first movies and today, Scorsese pointed to a moment when things started to change in real time.
From his first handful of projects, Scorsese had been working with the kind of films that were akin to the world around him. When talking about making movies like Mean Streets, he would recall missing the life he was writing about by mere inches because of how close the lives onscreen were to those he mingled with daily.
As he made his way through the end of the 1970s, though, Raging Bull was one of the moments that saw Scorsese inhabit the usual operatic films in a completely different way. Telling the story of an unsympathetic boxer who is down on his luck and is not in a stable frame of mind, the grim reality of the film is felt through the screen every time Robert De Niro speaks.
While Scorsese may have had high hopes for the film, it was also coming out of the days when boxing movies were the norm, opening up around the same time Sylvester Stallone was coming out with a sequel to Rocky.
When working on the film, Scorsese thought it would work better in black-and-white, telling GQ, “Black-and-white would make it distinctly different from the other boxing films that were being made. Also, Irving Winkle pointed out to the studio that films that were made in black-and-white up until that point in the ‘70s were Paper Moon and Lenny, and they were hits.”
Featuring breathtaking cinematography, Scorsese thought that Raging Bull came out at just the right time to tear down the concept of what a Hollywood director should be, explaining, “The week that film was released was the same week, from the same studio, that Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate opened. That, along with Raging Bull and Apocalypse Now, all from the same studio, United Artists. It ended the power of the director in American filmmaking, and that had to come back through independent cinema, through the 1980s.”
Scorsese’s direction in Raging Bull is notable for its black-and-white cinematography, which contributes to the film’s raw and gritty atmosphere. The use of dynamic camera work during the boxing sequences immerses the audience in the intensity and brutality of the sport, while the film’s slow-motion shots and evocative editing create a visceral experience.
Loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s famous 1902 novella Heart of Darkness, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 epic Apocalypse Now is arguably the most ambitious project in his extensive filmmaking career. It is a retelling of the problematic source text in the context of the Vietnam War which allegorically deconstructs the evils of American interference, colonialism and the human capacity for unabashed hatred.
Compared to the more lavish Hollywood blockbusters coming out around the same time, Scorsese’s contributions to the teardown of the director also had an artful tinge behind it. Rather than the traditional filmmaking styles, Scorsese deliberately attempted to separate the boxing scenes from everything else, making the audience feel like they were on another planet whenever they were in the ring with Jake LaMotta.
Looking back on those days, Scorsese would recall just how much freedom he was allowed to have at the studio before being told to restrict more of his typical style, saying, “Things were wide open, and we took it like barbarians at the gate. We transformed whatever we could, but they caught us.”
