Getting Up Close and Personal With Scorsese

Ah, The Guardian. How I do love it for its blissful (and always oh-so-proper) Brit goodness and its consistently fantastic, interesting articles. Just a few days ago, The Guardian ran this intriguing and extraordinarily well-written interview with Martin Scorsese, whose latest effort, The Departed, is in theaters now. Jeff Wells notes that the film's previously perfect Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes scores have taken a bit of a dip with a few tepid reviews dribbling in, but it's still holding solid critically, even if it's not quite burning up the box office yet.

Writer Ed Pilkington, sitting down with Scorsese for an intimate chat, opens the piece with a rundown of Scorsese's storied career as a director: The battles with studios; the search for that elusive magical combination of box office gold and artistic integrity; the five Best Director Oscar nods -- and no wins, including a loss against Dances With Wolves in 1990, which, as Pilkington adroitly notes, "had to hurt." Yeah, I'm still smarting over that one myself. After thus preparing our palates with sampling of Scorsese's career, Pilkington dives into the meat of the piece -- Scorsese himself.Pilkington's interview really gives you a feel for Scorsese as a man, from the beginning of the interview, when the great director is nervously puffing on an inhaler and "pressed ... tightly into the corner of the sofa, both arms and legs crossed, in a textbook portrayal of Anxious Man." Seriously, how can you not love an interview that paints its subject so visually right from the start? Once he gets going, though -- especially when he talks about Leonardo DiCaprio, he gets increasingly animated, comparing DiCaprio to the muse from his earlier years as a director, Robert DeNiro. He talks at length about how DiCaprio has grown from boy to man in the past seven years the two have worked together. For Scorsese, as he notes in the interview, that pivotal moment of boyhood-to-manhood came during the filming of The Aviator. There's more, much more, but for the rest of the Scorsese deliciousness, you need to pop yourself over to The Guardian and read the whole piece. It's well worth the time spent if you're an admirer of Scorsese's work (and if you can't find something to admire in the man's entire body of work, can you truly call yourself a lover of cinema? Oh, I think not.)

For more on Scorsese and The Departed, check out Erik's write-up of the junket for The Departed, at which Scorsese talked about why he decided to remake an Asian film at this point in his career, his relationship with the violence in his films, and what his younger self might say about where his career is now. Also be sure to check out Cinematical's reviews of the film:

James Rocchi :"I'd bet that Scorsese, in his youth, saw a thousand B-movie cop-and-crook films with only one or two glimmerings of style in their entire running time -- a camera shot that stood out, a bitterly-spat line, a relationship that twists like a knife in your hand. And he's turned those crime films -- indeed, he's turned every crime film -- into a hard-boiled, fast-paced, brutish and brooding action thriller, The Departed. "

Jeffrey Anderson: "Still, even though The Departed doesn't quite reach Scorsese's peak, it could well be one of the year's best films. It lacks the gaudy grandeur of something like Casino (1995) or The Aviator (2004), but it's also not as compact as Mean Streets (1973) or Bringing Out the Dead (1999)."