Filmmakers
Many older filmmakers simply aren’t offered the opportunity. Directors like Scorsese and the 93-yearold Clint Eastwood (whose latest is due out this year) have typically been the exception in an industry that tends to push out even its most celebrated elders. Buster Keaton, Billy Wilder, Orson Welles and Elaine May all spent their later years struggling to mount projects. In the mid-1970s, Scorsese befriended the great British filmmaker Michael Powell, who likewise was frozen out of the business after 1960’s controversial “Peeping
Tom.” Since then, Scorsese and Schoonmaker — Powell’s widow — have led an effort to revive Powell’s legacy, including a just-premiered documentary.
As a generation of American filmmakers from the fabled ’70s era of moviemaking extend their careers, one of the defining directors of the ’90s (and beyond) has said he plans to stop. Quentin Tarantino, 60, has said his 10th film, “The Movie Critic,” will be his final feature. It’s a stance he has maintained for at least 15 years, arguing that he didn’t want to dilute his filmography with the “lousy” films that “most directors” peter out with.
Tarantino’s declaration has confounded some of his contemporaries.
“I could never do that,” Paul Thomas Anderson, now 53, said in 2018. “As long as I’m able to do it,
I’m going to do it.” Christopher Nolan, also 53, whose “Oppenheimer” took home best picture and best director among its seven wins at the Oscars, has called Tarantino’s attitude “a very purist point of view.”
Asked if he’s built differently than Tarantino, Scorsese said in October: “I am.”
“He’s a writer. It’s a different thing. I come up with stories. I get attracted to stories through other people. All different means, different ways. And so I think it’s a different process,” Scorsese said. “I respect writers, and I wish I could. I wish I could just be in a room and create these novels, not films, novels.”
The debate gets at the heart of an age-old quandary: Is it better to have youthful passion or the wisdom of experience?
At least for filmmakers like Scorsese, Scott and Mann, compulsion seems to never dim. Scott, who later this year will release a “Gladiator” sequel, is notorious for a pace that would exhaust most younger directors.
Mann, too, is renown for relentlessness. “Ferrari,” a film he has been trying to make for 30 years, is a prime example of the pleasures in following a master filmmaker through various stages of a career. “Ferrari,” about a platespinning Enzo Ferrari in the tumultuous lead-up to a deadly cross-country race, extends Mann’s lifelong obsession with obsession.
“I know for myself, I’m better at doing a picture that has me on the frontier,” Mann said in an earlier interview. “Where it’s something I haven’t done before.”
As for Miyazaki, his Oscar-winning “The Boy and Heron” has been celebrated as if not the absolute best by the anime master, then very nearly so.
Opening with the firebombing of Tokyo during World War II, it could be called the most personal film for Miyazaki, whose early memories are of bombed-out Japanese cities. It’s also a movie that, while full of poignancy, is as lushly and uniquely imaginative as his earlier masterworks, like “Spirited Away” or “Kiki’s Delivery Service.”
Do we judge these artists’ earlier work against today’s? Or just be grateful that they’re still working — and at such a high level?
The director Guillermo del Toro, introducing “The Boy and the Heron” at the Toronto International Film Festival, chose sheer gratitude at being alive when Miyazaki is still making movies.
“We are privileged enough,” del Toro said, “to be living in a time where Mozart is composing symphonies.”