Martin Scorsese is set to have a memorable year. Fresh off Paramount (in partnership with Apple Studios) showing off first look footage of his upcoming 2023 movie release Killers of the Flower Moon, the director was awarded the Legend of Cinema award at CinemaCon 2023 in Las Vegas. He then sat down with lead Leonardo DiCaprio for a thoughtful (and sometimes rambling) conversation that touched on the movie theater experience as well as their many years of work together.
The first question DiCaprio asked Scorsese made sense for the CinemaCon crowd, as it touched on why the theatrical experience is important – something near and dear to the many theater owners, employees and executives who frequent the event. But it also served to clarify some comments he has made in the past about Marvel movies not being “cinema.”
There is a big difference when you go to a theater that’s somewhat comfortable and the screen is big enough and the projection is great, when you go to that theater you have to pay attention to that film because that’s what’s up there on the wall. Everything that’s around you is dark. They’ll be a lot of people, whereas at home you could control it. You could stop the film, you could get up, walk around, the theater you can’t. It’s there, it’s happening in that moment for everybody at once and you know if you go see Avatar, some of the big blockbusters, the audience experience is amazing.
Though he noted the theater is fun for stuff like Avatar and still very much a shared communal experience, he recalled how fundamental experiences like seeing North By Northwest and other auteur films were when he was growing up and first falling in love with the business of making movies. He spoke about how giving independent films moments in the theater is how generations in the future will connect in the same way and will hopefully go on to become the Scorsese’s or the Fellini’s of their own day.
To deep dive further into how memorable some moviegoing moments in the theater can be, Martin Scorsese also spoke with Leonardo DiCaprio about seeing Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho during opening week in New York.
Psycho, I was there the fourth night, midnight showing at the DeMille Theater in New York, you never heard an audience like that. Screaming. Wild. And so to experience that, as I say, it’s communal, and it can translate differently to the audience.
Psycho premiered in 1960. Scorsese would have been just 18 at the time, seven years before his directorial debut with Who’s That Knocking At My Door. More than two dozen films later, we know he’ll be back on the big screen for Killers of the Flower Moon, a movie which Apple Studios produced for streaming, but which will get a robust and lengthy theatrical release thanks to a partnership with Paramount. The studio brought first look footage to CinemaCon featuring DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons, members of the Osage Nation and a slew of other names.
While Scorsese has had one movie notably appear on streaming (with a limited theatrical release), The Irishman, even at the time he spoke about the sanctity of the theatrical experience, citing Netflix being the only company to give him the budget he needed as the reason it went to streaming. But it’s clear from everything he said today (and really has been saying for years) that he has an almost bibliographic love and deep-seated passion for cinema. And as he put it today, “Film combines all the other art forms… it’s poetry.”
