At this year’s CinemaCon, Academy Award-winning filmmaker, Martin Scorsese, attended a luncheon with Leonardo DiCaprio to talk about their latest collaboration, Killers of the Flower Moon. While onstage, the Goodfellas director took the opportunity to appeal to theater owners about the importance of truly independent films and their place on the silver screen, and Collider’s Steve Weintraub was there to capture the urgent message.
“If I'm to be a legend, I understand that the goal of the people should be to infuse excitement and enthusiasm to the next generation of artists, to inspire, and ultimately really to be a good teacher,” Scorsese, a living legend himself, said to the audience. He went on to list a number of influential directors, from Michael Powell to Emeric Pressburger, that inspired him to try his own hand at moviemaking.
Scorsese was quick to admit that “big movies bring in the big audiences,” and he was sure not to discredit the impact of innovative blockbusters like James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water, but his concern was for the cinema, and future generations. “Now how do you take stories and emotions and sensations, and translate them into a cinematic experience that's shared?” Scorsese asked, going on to explain the benefit of “really independent films, not just movies with the indie label slapped onto them” hosted in theaters across the world. He furthered the sentiment, saying:
“I would love if they could just find their way back into the multiplexes to be able to have younger people opt for seeing these films, to go to a theater to see them, to be able to enjoy the theatrical experience again because it's a comfortable place, it's a welcoming place to go to. They go with their friends on a screen that's bigger and more emotionally immersive than what they have at home, and it's going to make a difference to the films that they’re going to show in your theaters in the next years or so. It depends on how they see these films and how they experience them. The concentration is there, there's a wide screen, it's black all around it, you don't get distracted.”
Why Are Indie Films So Important?
Scorsese told the CinemaCon crowd that movies shaped him as a person from a very young age, from the notion of what was possible with technology and techniques to the worldviews it introduced him to. “It's our culture. It's who we are,” he said, recounting his first time seeing Citizen Kane on the television in Queens, New York. For someone with an ambitious and intense filmography, Scorsese drew from a wide range of inspiration: from a catalog of indie films, studying the pacing, the continuity, and more. Those elements are reflected in his own iconic pictures from Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore to The Wolf of Wall Street to Casino. Independent films are what sparked his passion to make his first ever film, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, at the age of 25. It is a testament to what he said next:
“I gotta tell you, the way it works is, one of these people who is seeing [movies], whether they're 19 or 15 or 25, become artists or novelists or musicians or filmmakers in probably 10 years or so from now. And ultimately, one or two just might create the next blockbuster, which will carry movie theaters, and by extension the entire movie industry, through the next crises and on and on. So I urge a rethinking for you to invest. By doing so, you will be investing in the future of the cinematic experience for the good of all of us.”
Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, starring DiCaprio and the director’s long-time collaborator Robert de Niro, will celebrate its world premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival before its wide theatrical release on October 6.