Scorsese’s best night of 2012 is behind him
SANTA BARBARA— Despite Hugo’s 11 Oscar nominations (more than any other film), Martin Scorsese does not seem destined to have a big night at the Kodak Theatre on Feb. 26.
All signs are that The Artist, with 10 nominations, will be the big winner in the major categories such as Best Picture and Best Director.
So for Scorsese, the loveliest night of 2012 will likely turn out to be the one he enjoyed this week at the Arlington Theatre in Santa Barbara, where he was the object of an onstage love-in that went on for nearly three hours and was capped by a glowing tribute from Sir Ben Kingsley, who presented him with the Santa Barbara Film Festival’s American Riviera Award.
“My dear Marty,” said Sir Ben, who stars in Hugo as legendary French film pioneer Georges Méliès, “we who are here tonight will never all be in the same room again, but this night will resonate with happy memories for days, weeks, months and years.”
Kingsley said what sets Scorsese apart from other directors is the level of trust he earns from actors, because of his ability to connect with the child within each of them.
“The very greatest of my peers owe some of their most indelible moments onscreen to you.”
Before the presentation, Scorsese had a marathon session of sparring and banter with Leonard Maltin, who asked questions and introduced clips.
According to Scorsese, it was seeing 1959’s Shadows, made by John Cassavetes, that made it clear you could make your own little movie for next to nothing.
Mean Streets, as every film devotee knows, depicts the people and the neighbourhood where Scor- sese grew up in a crowded and unglamorous part of Lower Manhattan. But as Scorsese explained, most of it was shot in Los Angeles, thanks to B movie king Roger Corman, the producer who hired Scorsese to do Boxcar Bertha.
The most entertaining part of the evening came when Scorsese talked about his parents and showed a scene from Italianamerican, the TV documentary he made about them, in which they bicker about who should sit where on the couch and about cooking a certain pasta sauce.
There were plenty of jokes, observations and making-of technical sagas concerning Scorsese’s best movies, including Taxi Driver, The Last Waltz, Raging Bull, Goodfellas and The Departed.
Meanwhile, Scorsese delivered insights, funny stories and gems of trivia: about shooting the Muddy Waters sequence in The Last Waltz, how he compromised with Robert De Niro on choosing which of 13 takes to use in the last scene of Taxi Driver, and the reasons for making Raging Bull in black and white, except for one colour sequence that had to be spliced in by hand.
Hilarious footnote: His great editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, went to a theatre opening week to check the print and found her colour footage on the floor. The projectionist assumed it had been added by mistake and was about to throw it out. A lot of people wondered why at this late stage of his career, Scorsese would suddenly make a kids’ movie like Hugo. His wife asked him to make a movie their 12-year-old daughter could see and enjoy, since she wasn’t allowed to see violent epics like The Gangs of New York and The Departed. “Will it be in 3-D?” the child asked her famous father. He granted her wish. In his acceptance speech, Scorsese talked about the thrill of going back to the first days of cinema by making Hugo and asked the audience never to forget the history of film. “I see this as an ongoing dialogue between past and future.” Indeed, restoration and preservation of the movie past has been as much a part of Scorsese’s legacy as the films he made. So Hugo can be seen as a summing up of his life. There is no reason to think that, at 69, Scorsese is ready to stop making films. But if he were, Hugo would be a fitting finale. mknelman@thestar.ca