In their golden era
OSCAR-NOMINATED FILMMAKERS PROVE WHEN IT COMES TO ART, AGE CAN BE A THING OF BEAUTY
• One’s prime for artists is hard to pin down. Stanley Kubrick was 70 when he completed Eyes Wide Shut. Akira Kurosawa made Ran when he was 75. Agnes Varda was 89 when Faces Places hit theatres.
But the lion’s share of the greatest works by most filmmakers tend to be made earlier in life. It’s not historically been the providence of octogenarians.
We may be living in the golden age of the aged filmmaker, though.
Hayao Miyazaki, who made The Boy and the Heron, is the oldest director ever nominated for an Oscar for best animated film. If he wins on March 10, he’ll be the oldest winner by more than two decades. Napoleon, nominated for visual effects and production design, is the latest from 86-year-old workaholic Ridley Scott. Michael Mann, 81, also recently released Ferrari. Wim Wenders, 78, put out one of his very best films in Perfect Days (nominated for best international film).
And, Martin Scorsese, 81, had the Osage epic Killers of the Flower Moon, up for 10 Oscars. Scorsese is the oldest filmmaker ever nominated for best director. Is Killers of the Flower Moon as good as Taxi Driver or Goodfellas? That’s a hard question to answer and maybe not the right one to ask. Is it essential? Unquestionably.
Marrying the crime film with the Western, Killers of the Flower Moon is engaged — as much or more than any nominated film this year — in remaking American tropes and clichés. The daring darkness and the nimbleness of the editing (by Thelma Schoonmaker, 84, nominated for her ninth Oscar), suggest filmmakers half their age.
“I’m curious about everything, still,” Scorsese said in an earlier interview. “If I’m curious about something I think I’ll find a way. If I hold out and hold up, I’ll find a way to try to make something of it on film. But I have to be curious about the subject. My curiosity is still there.”
We have never had an older filmmaker quite like Scorsese, just as we hadn’t had one like the younger Scorsese. He’s spoken repeatedly about urgency, knowing that his time is short. By capitalizing on the desire of streamers to make their cinematic mark, Scorsese’s films have only grown in scale and budget as he’s gotten older, just as they have in their willingness to pry into the darkest corners of American history.
Many older filmmakers simply aren’t offered the opportunity. Directors such as 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 with a justpremièred documentary.
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’s maintained for at least 15 years.
“I’m an entertainer, I want to leave you wanting more. I don’t want to work to diminishing returns,” Tarantino told CNN in 2022. “I don’t want to become this old man who’s out of touch, I’m already feeling a bit like an old man out of touch when it comes to the current movies that are out right now, and that’s exactly what happens.”
Tarantino’s declaration has cofounded 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 is expected to win best picture at the Oscars, has called Tarantino’s attitude “a very purist point of view.”
Asked if he’s simply built differently than Tarantino, Scorsese told The Associated Press 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. “Every department,” Scott told Deadline last year, “has to keep up with the speed that I work.”
“Ridley Scott is the single biggest argument for a second term for Joe Biden,” Sony chief Tom Rothman told The New Yorker.
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. “We are privileged enough,” Del Toro said, “to be living in a time where Mozart is composing symphonies.”
We take breaking pop culture news and piece it back together at nationalpost. com/arts I’m curious about everything, still. - Martin Scorsese