Status Updates From Martin Scorsese: A Retrospe...

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"Look, let's face it, the cinema—the classical cinema—is gone. It's over. The cinema as we know it, up to now, is disappearing."

"I learned the hard way, but there is no doubt that the family unit is the key thing..."

Scorsese seemed unwilling to give himself a moment's rest. "I was exhausted, but it was as though I couldn't stop filming," he said. "I was so wound up I had to carry on." Upon being retained to shoot The Last Waltz, his cinematographer Michael Chapman exclaimed, "Marty, you're a monster! The most dangerous person I ever met! I'm begging you, I can't go on. Let me die in peace!"

The average studio film tends, at the least, to start well. Hollywood is all about beginnings—anticipation, possibility, promise—and the studio system has grown awfully adept at getting an audience to take their seats. What it is bad at is follow—through, finish—what the business quaintly calls "third-act problems." In modern Hollywood, all's well that ends badly.

"Marty, you can't have an actress who worked practically for free, stayed four-and-a-half months straight, six months overall, and then about to come into a $15 million pay day and not release her."

Scorsese offered to talk to Columbia himself.

"Do whatever the fuck you want," replied Weinstein, who recalled, "He called Columbia and they said 'fuck you.' He got mad at me, overturned what he thought was my desk.."

Scorsese met a Tibetan monk, who saw him and took his hand.

"I thank you so much for making that film. Thank you so much,"
the monk said. "I saw your other movie, New York Gangs. Violent, violent. "
Scorsese frowned apologetically.
"But it's alright," continued the monk. "It's in your nature."

Scorsese, with tears in his eyes, was blown away by "the acceptance of it,"

Casino did good business at the box office—$116 million worldwide—but still didn't make enough money to satisfy Universal. "It was clear that it no longer pays for studios that are owned by major corporations to make a $50-$60 million profit on a movie. They want to make more. So that was the end of that kind of picture for me."

"When I was making Casino I was angry at the extraordinary place that Vegas was. All that greed seemed like a reflection of Hollywood at the time, a reflection of American culture."

Casino 1995

"This is the oldest story in the world. It's people doing themselves in by their own pride and losing paradise. If they handled it right they would still be there."

"There were filmmakers and critics who felt that I was morally irresponsible to make a film like Goodfellas. Well, I'll make more of them if I can."

"I realized you can't let the system crush your spirit. I'm a director, I'm going to be a pro and start over again. I'll make a low-budget picture, After Hours."

"There was an article in the New York Times saying, 'Who the hell cares about these people?' And I just thought: 'Well, I do'"

"Mostly I attempted to show the characters as people acting like children, playing with violence until they start getting killed."

"Religion and the whole concept of the actual practice of Christian ethics in modern society is a theme that I'm always attracted to and is something that goes through my mind and my heart every day. It's constant part of my life. But you know it's also a way of simplifying things because one does not always want to talk about your personal life to journalists[ ]That's all it is, kid, movies and religion, thank you!"

"Someone from the Academy once told me they would love to give me an award if I made more humanistic films... I realized that from Taxi Driver onwards I wasn't going to win. It freed me up to make the pictures that I really wanted to make. That's the real award for me and throughout my career I have made what I like without hindrance and unscathed by anyone."

"Frank Capra said, 'Film is disease.' I caught the disease early"