Why Martin Scorsese decided to become a director for hire: “I had a lot of reservations”
The 1980s were a strange decade for Martin Scorsese. These days, he’s seen as the kindly grandfather of cinema, somehow still at the top of his game after 50 years of moviemaking. But in the ’80s, he genuinely believed his Hollywood career hung by a thread, and he had to make some uncomfortable decisions on how to fight his way through several very sticky patches.
Scorsese’s first long, dark night of the soul in that difficult decade came on New Year’s Eve, 1983. For much of that year, he’d been working on his dream project, The Last Temptation of Christ, only to see it cancelled by the studio. This was partly in response to the commercial flop of The King of Comedy, his eighth picture, which came and went from cinemas alarmingly quickly in February. Despite some good reviews, the $19million film was a genuine disaster, returning a paltry $2.5m at the box office.
However, as Scorsese prepared to head out for a night of New Year’s revelry designed to take his mind off his horrible year, he made the mistake of switching on the TV. “I was putting on my shirt and tie,” Scorsese remembered, “and Entertainment Tonight said, ‘Now, for the flop of the year: The King of Comedy.’ I just go, ‘Oh. OK.'”
A scared and unsure Scorsese eventually came up with a plan for his next move. He felt he needed to go back to basics by making a low-budget movie with the same vigour and energy he had in his 30s, as he needed to rediscover who he was as a filmmaker. This picture was After Hours, a black comedy about one New Yorker’s surreal misadventures as he tries to get home in the middle of the night. The movie was a minor hit at the box office, but more importantly, it showed that Scorsese still had the juice he was worried he’d lost. In fact, he admitted, “I really felt, ‘If I don’t pull this one off, it’s completely over.’ I’d never be able to make another film.”
Scorsese’s next big decision arrived soon after he shot After Hours, when he received a phone call from another cinema icon. It was Paul Newman who wanted to know if Scorsese was interested in directing a sequel to his 1961 pool hall classic, The Hustler. “When I first spoke to Newman on the phone, he said, ‘Eddie Felson,'” Scorsese told American Film. “I said, ‘I love that character.’ He said, ‘Eddie Felson reminds me of the characters that you’ve dealt with in your pictures. And I thought more ought to be heard from him.'”
The next day, Newman sent Scorsese a script for the sequel entitled The Colour of Money, but when the Goodfellas helmer read it, he had mixed feelings. While he wanted to work with Newman and loved The Hustler, Scorsese had never been a studio director-for-hire, and had never dreamed of making a sequel to someone else’s project. He developed his own pictures from the ground up and wasn’t sure if he wanted to become a hired gun. After all, there were plenty of other directors in Hollywood who excelled in that “safe pair of hands” role.
“I had a lot of reservations about it,” Scorsese admitted. “I felt that it was a literal sequel: There were even a few minutes of film inserted in it from the first picture. It had its own merits, but it certainly wasn’t the kind of thing I wanted to do.”
Over time, though, Scorsese realised that The Colour of Money could be a good strategic move for his career. He couldn’t ignore the fact that Hollywood is a business, and if he wanted to keep making pictures, he’d better have a hit every now and again. So, he signed up to make the movie, even agreeing to slash his salary along with Newman to keep the budget at a sensible $13m.
Even this rankled the director, who lamented the state of the movie industry with a quote that sounds depressingly familiar to his diatribes in recent years about the superhero industrial complex. “It is a crime what’s happening in the American industry,” he raged. “If the situation is not totally bleak, it’s news to me. There’s no guarantee of anything in this business any more unless it’s a big epic.”
In the end, despite Scorsese’s reservations and fears about the future of film, his sole attempt at being a director-for-hire worked out well for him. The Colour of Money was his biggest financial hit to date, and it netted Newman his first ‘Best Actor’ Oscar. Best of all, though, it enabled him to end the ’80s in a much better position than he had started it: he finally made his passion project, The Last Temptation of Christ, in 1988.
