Martin Scorsese is undeniably one of the most important filmmakers across multiple generations. He has 57 director credits from both narrative and documentary films spanning six decades of work. Four of them place in the Letterboxd Top 250 (GoodFellas currently sits at 18, The Departed at 169, Raging Bull at 222, and Taxi Driver at 227). Couple that with his immense film restoration work and his op-eds for movie literacy and pushback against movies becoming amusement park attractions only—no one embodies cinema more than Scorsese.

CinemaCon, an annual event in Las Vegas where the biggest Hollywood studios trot out movie stars to sell their upcoming slate of movies to a Colosseum-sized audience of theater exhibitors and technology providers, recently bestowed Scorsese with a fitting honor: their inaugural Legend of Cinema Award. 

The occasion included a swanky lunch for the legend, where he was interviewed on stage by none other than Leonardo DiCaprio. It was a lengthy conversation between two movie titans, with the conversation traversing their new film, Killers of the Flower Moon (which attendees got to see a peek of during the Paramount presentation—Paramount is distributing the Apple Original film during its month-long exclusive theatrical run). 

We’ll get to the Flowers of the Killer Moon conversation next week ahead of the film’s Cannes premiere, but this first installment is a tasty primi plate, covering some of Scorsese’s earliest film loves, and how these obsessions informed his own filmmaking and film preserving career.

Young Marty’s earliest film loves

DiCaprio, who has starred in six of Scorsese’s films, asked his maestro to first touch on the familial groundings of his love for cinema. I was personally heartened to hear that his love of cinema started the same way that I can track the roots of my own film journey: being a constantly sick kid (with asthma), discovering movies while missing school. 

“I was always sick,” Scorsese said. “I developed asthma at the age of three. I was kept out of sports, anything involving running. But also laughter could cause coughing fits. You know how, with kids, a little laugh can turn into compulsive laughing? Well, that would then turn into compulsive coughing for me.” 

Scorsese’s description of a laughing fit turning into a coughing fit, the shift of joy to pain and how it creates an outsider status to the central group experience — I’m playing psychiatrist, but that sure sounds like a big chunk of Scorsese’s filmography, doesn’t it? Scorsese’s parents “didn’t know what to do with me, so they took me to the movies. The first film I can remember the title of was Duel in the Sun, which was a frightening experience that I still am not sure I’ve gotten over to this day, but it’s a wonderful film.” 

This duality—the movie theater as fantasy and viewings at home—crystalized something for young Marty: “Cinema somehow became both things, the escape from illness and the escape with my family.” The way Scorsese spoke of his sickness unlocking an observant quality at a very young age reminded me of a Maurice Sendak quote. 

The Where the Wild Things Are author famously said, “I was sickly as a child and gravitated to books and drawing. During my early teen years, I spent hundreds of hours at my window, sketching neighborhood children at play. I sketched and listened, and those notebooks became the fertile field of my work later on.” Sendak, who had a conveyor belt of every childhood sickness—measles, scarlet fever, double pneumonia—credited his bed-ridden state with his eventual creative output. “There is not a book I have written or a picture I have drawn that does not, in some way, owe them its existence,” he said. 

For Scorsese, his sickness wasn’t endured in isolation but with his family. “That escape from my world had a truth to it, too, and it was touching not only the rest of the world, but it was also touching my grandparents, my mother, and my father, directly. That’s why the Italian films were so pivotal for me. Then, of course, La Strada came out and that was the end of it.” 

It was all film from there for Scorsese: “Movies introduced me to everything—dance, theater, music of all kinds. Because I came from a family that was working class, we couldn’t afford theater or travel, so I learned about the outside world through movies. I saw Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali on TV, dubbed in English in 1959, and I realized that this is a film made by the people that you usually see in a British or an American film, only in the background fanning the white guys. I was a kid and this film opened me up to humanity. The cinema opened up the world to me, to a person who otherwise would not have had that possibility.”

While he didn’t say it outright, Scorsese’s desire to be a film archivist reverberated both of these poles, too — fantasy and escape — in how he spoke of observing his family’s reactions and in how excited he was by Technicolor. “I would see anything in Technicolor as a kid,” he said—something only a young cataloguer would notice as he filed away his obsessions. From the logo of a color-processing company to countries that he’d not been to, these things would later cement his two separate film legacies.

Scorsese then put on his film historian hat (which is never actually off) and said, “People might scoff, ‘Oh, they had rules then? In 1940?’ Yeah, it was a factory. They were making films on studio lots. Movie stars had the most power and movie stars represented certain things to the public.” 

Welles, he said, “was a guy who came in and changed it all with his very first movie. It’s the foundation of modern cinema. The comma is part of the ground of literature, you need it to build. Well, in film, a pan is part of the ground, it’s the comma, it’s how you film a story. A flash-pan would then be a dash.” Scorsese’s focus on the camera being the ground floor of cinema is because linking shots together is what differentiated film from theater. 

“So Edwin S. Porter, Cecil B. DeMille and Raoul Walsh gave filmmakers the language and the grammar and Orson and Gregg redid it,” Scorsese afforded DiCaprio, “but then the French completely reinvented it with the French New Wave; suddenly, there’s no inherent need for continuity. Jean-Luc Godard very famously said, ‘Every story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It doesn’t have to be in that order.’ Break the rules. As long as you’re still communicating to the audience.” 

Among the many film movements, Scorsese was always drawn more to the gritty humanism in the Italian neorealism movement and Britain’s “angry young man” movement, but he greatly respects and sees how the French New Wave continues to influence younger filmmakers the most because “the French focused the most on technique, style, and political content.”

How three minutes of Jules and Jim influenced GoodFellas

I want to hone in on one aspect of the French New Wave discussion, because it brings up a specific film, and a specific aspect of Scorsese’s career: his vital collaboration with film editor Thelma Schoonmaker. In particular, their groundbreakingly frenetic work on GoodFellas. “One shot to the other is film choreography. It’s poetry putting words together on a page in a certain way. String them together in a film a certain way, it’s poetry,” Scorsese said of the editing process. 

“When I hear the label ‘legend’, I think of filmmakers like Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, who did The Red Shoes” (the film Scorsese probably cites the most and one of the earliest that received a “Martin Scorsese presents” restoration credit). “I think of Stanley Kubrick, Jean Renoir, Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, Jacques Rivette, Bernardo Bertolucci, and so many others come to mind.”

“For me, they’re legends. And if I’m to be a legend, I understand that the goal of being a legend should be to infuse excitement and enthusiasm to the next generation of artists, to inspire and ultimately really to be a good teacher. So I hope that my legend is to help make it possible for these new generations, who are with us now or in the future, to actually reinvent the art form every time. And they’re doing it. They’re doing it.”

Scorsese has already minted this part of his legendary status, lending his name and time to filmmakers such as Ari Aster, Joanna Hogg, Josephine Decker, the Safdie brothers and many more, in the form executive producer credits and even providing stories and feedback during the editing process. But once films are released, the filmmaker has little influence over the fate of a film, other than being able to do the odd Q&A. And so, Scorsese had a plea for those who do: the exhibitors in attendance. 

“You learn how to make a film by watching them. It’s almost like the way a musician learns a piece or a conductor learns a score. When I say watching, I do mean projected onto a big screen and sitting in the audience. Movies are really about connecting with audiences, which is really at the core of what we all do, what all the great movie-makers that I mentioned up ahead always tried to do. You connect with that audience.” Ultimately, the key to that connection, Scorsese asserted, is the common space of the cinema, in the company of strangers. 

This sentiment—that filmmakers make movies for the theatrical experience—was expressed all week long in the Colosseum of Caesars Palace, where the studio presentations were held. But in the more intimate Octavius Ballroom, over lunch, Scorsese used that sentiment to segue into a request not enough people made during the week: “Filmmakers and exhibitors, for god’s sake, we need to support each other. I know big movies bring big audiences. I remember in the ’50s, we went to see giant spectacles like Around The World in Eighty Days and Ben-Hur and it was so much fun.” 

“But,” he paused, “they weren’t the only movies on screens. I feel, because I am here, I should call on you to think about this, how I would love for you to find a way to give space to smaller independent films. Truly independent films,” he clarified, “not just movies with an indie label slapped onto them for trade purposes.”

His plea continued: “Ultimately, one of them might create a generation-defining masterwork and another 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, ad infinitum. So I urge rethinking,” Scorsese pleaded. “I urge for you to invest. By doing so, you’ll be investing in the future of the cinematic experience for the good of all of us.”

Scorsese’s Specialty

Naturally, there was rapturous applause in the ballroom, but will that sentiment be carried into action outside of this moment of recognition for a legend?

I have been going to CinemaCon for years, and while we all applaud theater owners for persevering through Covid, something that doesn’t get talked about enough is how the theatrical chains would rather give a blockbuster film more screens at quarter-filled capacity than gamble on an unsure single screen for a smaller film (and even fewer outside of daytime slots). 

With NEON sitting this year out, the only “specialty studios” who presented at CinemaCon were Searchlight and Focus Features, each with a total of fifteen minutes within the larger presentations of their corporate conglomerate overlords of Disney and Universal respectively. 

Over one week of the year, the biggest companies make their cases at CinemaCon for why their movies should be seen on the biggest screens. It is highly on-brand for Scorsese to use the majority of his acceptance speech to ask those who make the decisions about showtimes to embrace more, and more diverse films that might inspire future filmmakers. 

A legend of cinema, indeed.