Martin Scorsese tells Graham Young what inspired him to join the 3D revolution with a film set in the 1930s.
It’s one of the most famous facts in movie history that before he found films, Martin Scorsese was dreaming of becoming a priest.
Yet, suddenly, the now five-times married director from New York’s Little Italy is the one who is in confession... to me.
“I saw a few silent films as a kid, but they were always scratched up and jumping around,” says Scorsese.
“And I didn’t understand what the attraction was aside from the moving image.”
Considering Scorsese created The World Cinema Foundation in 2007 dedicated to preserving neglected movies, “not understanding the attraction” is an astonishing thing to hear from his lips.
Sadly, he clearly hasn’t been alone in that misguided thought.
“More than 90 per cent of silent films have gone and continue to go. Nobody cares about it,” he says.
“To see Rex Ingram’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) at its proper speed... it’s another language completely.”
As part of the creative process of trying to reinvent the future by honouring his filmmaking predecessors from a century ago, Scorsese has just “reinvigorated” his now 69-year-old self again.
The result is his first 3D film, Hugo (U), an extraordinarily ambitious adaptation of Brian Selznick’s bestselling 2007 book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret.
Scorsese uses a series of vignettes to illustrate how technology played such a big part in the way movies were invented and then developed by the likes of Georges Méliès and Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis.
These pioneers were keen to show audiences things they had never seen before. And if that meant using the latest technology to surprise them, then it had to be invented.
Placing himself in the shoes of the “old masters”, as he calls them, Scorsese says: “Imagine what Eisenstein (The Battleship Potempkin, 1925) could have done with 3D.”
Always armed with a natural warmth on the three occasions I’ve met him over the years, he then chuckles warmly to himself when he realises how those words could be interpreted.
“I’m not saying they should be converted, but imagine the mind of someone like that or Orson Welles creating a film like that in 3D.”
Hugo’s strengths are its cinematography from double Oscar-winning Robert Richardson (JFK/The Aviator), plus the extraordinary set and art designs from Scorsese’s legendary collaborators Francesca Lo Schiavo and Dante Ferretti respectively.
Hugo runs a little long at 126 minutes and perhaps the digital techniques strip out some of the emotion that might have been captured on traditional film.
