By JAKE COYLE
AP Film Writer
NEW YORK
(AP) -- Martin Scorsese's Manhattan office, in a midtown building a
few blocks northwest of the cordoned-off Trump Tower, may be the most
concentrated bastion of reverence for cinema on the face of the earth.
There's
a small screening room where Scorsese screens early cuts of his films
and classic movies for his daughter and his friends. There's his
personal library of thousands of films, some he taped himself decades
ago. Film posters line the walls. Bookshelves are stuffed with film
histories. And there are editing suites, including the one where
Scorsese and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker regularly toil with a
monitor dedicated to the continuous, muted playing of Turner Classic
Movies.
"It's a temple of worship, really," says Schoonmaker.
Scorsese's
latest, "Silence," may be the film that most purely fuses the twin
passions of his life: God and cinema. Scorsese, who briefly pursued
becoming a priest before fervently dedicating himself to moviemaking,
has sometimes seemed to conflate the two.
"Silence"
is a solemn, religious epic about Jesuit priests (Andrew Garfield, Adam
Driver) in a violently anti-Catholic 17th century Japan. Scorsese has
wanted to make it for nearly 30 years. He was given the book it's based
on, Shusaku Endo's 1966 novel, by a bishop after a screening of his
famously controversial "The Last Temptation of Christ" in 1988.
"Silence" is an examination of belief and doubt and mysterious acts of faith. But making the film was such an act in itself.
"Acting
it out, maybe that's what existence is all about," Scorsese says of his
faith. "The documentary on George Harrison I made, 'Living in the
Material World,' that says it better. He said if you want an old man in
the sky with a beard, fine. I don't mean to be relativist about it. I
happen to feel more comfortable with Christianity. But what is
Christianity? That's the issue and that's why I made this film."
It
wasn't easy. Scorsese, 74, may be among the most revered directors in
Hollywood, but "Silence" is almost the antithesis of today's studio
film. To make it Scorsese had to drum up foreign money in Cannes and
ultimately made the film for about $46 million. Everyone, including
himself, worked for scale.
Few today are
making movies with the scope and ambition of "Silence" - a fact, he
grants, that makes him feel like one of the last of a dying breed in
today's film industry.
"Cinema is gone," Scorsese says. "The cinema I grew up with and that I'm making, it's gone."
"The
theater will always be there for that communal experience, there's no
doubt. But what kind of experience is it going to be?" he continues. "Is
it always going to be a theme-park movie? I sound like an old man,
which I am. The big screen for us in the '50s, you go from Westerns to
'Lawrence of Arabia' to the special experience of '2001' in 1968. The
experience of seeing 'Vertigo' and 'The Searchers' in VistaVision."
Scorsese
points to the proliferation of images and the overreliance on
superficial techniques as trends that have diminished the power of
cinema to younger audiences. "It should matter to your life," he says.
"Unfortunately the latest generations don't know that it mattered so
much."
Scorsese's comments echo a tender letter he wrote his daughter two years ago . The future of movies, he believes, is in the freedom that technology has yielded for anyone to make a movie.
"TV,
I don't think has taken that place. Not yet," adds Scorsese, whose
"Boardwalk Empire" was lauded but whose high-priced "Vinyl" was canceled
after one season. "I tried it. I had success to a certain extent.
'Vinyl' we tried but we found that the atmosphere for the type of
picture we wanted to make - the nature of the language, the drugs, the
sex, depicting the rock 'n' roll world of the '70s - we got a lot of
resistance. So I don't know about that freedom."
Since the election of Donald Trump, some have expressed hope for a return to the kind of '70s filmmaking Scorsese is synonymous with.
"If
the younger people have something to say and they find a way to say
through visual means as well as literary, there's the new cinema," says
Scorsese. But the current climate reminds him more of the '50s of his
youth. "I'm worried about double-think or triple-think, which is make
you believe you have the freedom, but they can make it very difficult to
get the picture shown, to get it made, ruin reputations. It's happened
before."
"Silence," which Scorsese screened for Jesuits at the Vatican before meeting with the pope, remains a powerful exception in a changing Hollywood.
"He
wanted to make this film extremely differently from anything out
there," says Schoonmaker, Scorsese's editor since "Raging Bull." ''He's
just tired of slam-bam-crash. Telling the audience what to think is what
he really hates. Trying to do a meditative movie at this point, in this
insane world we're in now, was incredibly brave. He wanted to stamp the
film with that throughout: the pace, the very subtle use of music.
"How
many movies start without music at the very beginning under the logos?"
she adds. "He said,
'Take out all that big Hollywood.'"
Scorsese, apostle of cinema, continues the fight. His Film Foundation has helped restore more than 750 films. And he regularly pens supportive letters to young directors whose films he admires.
Imagine that in your mailbox. Almost like getting a letter from your god.
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Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP
