Oscar-winning filmmaker Martin Scorsese made a recent appearance at the New York Film Festival and offered a several-minute speech about the state of modern cinema.
The “Silence” and “The Departed” filmmaker praised the festival for championing filmmaking at a time when “cinema is devalued, demeaned, belittled from all sides, not necessarily the business side but certainly the art.”
He goes on to say a big part of the issue has been the industry’s focus on a film’s financial success:
“Since the ’80s, there’s been a focus on numbers. It’s kind of repulsive. The cost of a movie is one thing. Understand that a film costs a certain amount, they expect to at least get the amount back.
The emphasis is now on numbers, cost, the opening weekend, how much it made in the U.S.A., how much it made in England, how much it made in Asia, how much it made in the entire world, how many viewers it got. As a filmmaker, and as a person who can’t imagine life without cinema, I always find it really insulting.”
That’s one reason he adores the festival itself because it’s not about competition, it’s about embracing cinema as an art form:
“I’ve always known that such considerations have no place at the New York Film Festival, and here’s the key also with this: There are no awards here. You don’t have to compete. You just have to love cinema here.”
The comments follow on from similar comments by Edgar Wright a while back saying the “three-day weekend is not the end of the story for any movie” – citing how “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” bombed at the box-office on its opening weekend, and now years later is considered a cult classic.
Scorsese is currently in post-production on his $200 million western drama “Killers of the Flower Moon” coming to cinemas and Apple TV+ next year.
Powerful words on the state of cinema by Martin Scorsese at his and @thenyff’s 60th! #nyff60 @FilmLinc pic.twitter.com/T37HcNMQDl
— Ellen Houlihan (@elliehoulie) October 13, 2022
