Scorsese is enlisting Christopher Nolan and the Safdie brothers in his war to "save cinema"

"We have to then fight back stronger. And it’s got to come from the grassroots level," the Killers Of The Flower Moon director said about the content mill

By Emma Keates | September 25, 2023 | 4:06pm

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Scorsese is enlisting Christopher Nolan and the Safdie brothers in his war to

(L-R): Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, Josh and Benny Safdie Photo: Victor Boyko; Pascal Le Segretain; Dia Dipasupil

In a 2021 essay for The A.V. Club, Alex McLevy referred to Martin Scorsese’s bitter defense of Capital-C Cinema as “Martin Scorsese’s infinity war.” While the essay was largely in response to the backlash fans and even some Marvel actors themselves heaped upon the legendary director for daring to suggest that Ant-Man And The Wasp wasn’t as important as, say, Citizen Kane, McLevy’s turn of phrase has turned out to be prescient in more way than one. As in, Scorsese is using war metaphors to talk about movie-making now.

In a new profile, GQ asked the Killers Of The Flower Moon director a question that has now become perfunctory: what should Hollywood do about the glut of franchise content taking over theaters? (To the interviewer’s credit, he does “feel bad about having done this, since Scorsese’s skeptical comments about Marvel and comic book films in the past have attracted a lot of vitriol.”)

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“The danger there is what [content] is doing to our culture,” Scorsese answered. “Because there are going to be generations now that think movies are only those—that’s what movies are… They already think that.”

He went on:

Which means that we have to then fight back stronger. And it’s got to come from the grassroots level. It’s gotta come from the filmmakers themselves. And you’ll have, you know, the Safdie brothers, and you’ll have Chris Nolan, you know what I mean? And hit ’em from all sides. Hit ’em from all sides, and don’t give up. Let’s see what you got. Go out there and do it. Go reinvent. Don’t complain about it. But it’s true, because we’ve got to save cinema.

Apart from this sounding a little bit like an army recruitment ad, Scorsese also took the opportunity to rail against the choking out of emotion from the film-making process. “It’s manufactured content. It’s almost like AI making a film. And that doesn’t mean that you don’t have incredible directors and special effects people doing beautiful artwork. But what does it mean?” he asked. (For what it’s worth, he apparently loved Avatar: The Way Of Water.) “What do these films, what will it give you? Aside from a kind of consummation of something and then eliminating it from your mind, your whole body, you know? So what is it giving you?”

“What I mean is that you gotta rip it out of your skull and your guts. To find out what the hell you really… what do you really feel should be said at this point in life by you? You gotta say something with a movie,” he concluded. “Otherwise, what’s the point of making it? You’ve got to be saying something.”

We’ll find out exactly what Scorsese is saying when Killers Of The Flower Moon hits theaters on October 20.