The iconic movie Martin Scorsese was forced to make: “I owed Warner Bros”
Martin Scorsese has had his fair number of creative struggles over the years, directing over 50 films and becoming known for his unbridled passion and relentless love for the medium, manifesting in his visual style and the way he constructs every single frame. However, the journey to create any movie is never easy, and Scorsese has famously come up against many power struggles and creative conflicts in making his film, whether it be in the edit room for Taxi Driver or the obliterating criticism he received for New York, New York.
But while it hasn’t always been easy, the director has always found a way to bring his vision to life, something that was recently highlighted in Seth Rogan’s satirical series The Studio, in which Scorsese has a guest appearance in a disastrous meeting in which he agrees to director a movie under one strange condition, desperate to bring his passion project to life.
But the director has been at the top of his game for a long time and is still one of the most powerful filmmakers in the business, extending his reach to help nurture other filmmakers and working as a producer on many emerging projects. Despite having an undeniable sway in the industry now, there was a time in which he had to direct a film as a favour to a studio, inadvertently leading to one of his most critically acclaimed projects.
Scorsese has gained a reputation for his work within the gangster genre, creating brutal classics such as Gangs of New York and The Departed that showcase the grit of the people that the director grew up with. Through high-stakes action sequences and tense showdowns, the director is now infamous for this particular genre of cinema, something that he particularly established through his 1990 film, Goodfellas.
Starring Ray Liotta, Robert de Niro and Joe Pesci, the film follows the true story of Henry Hill, a half-Irish and Sicilian Brooklyn kid who is taken in by neighbourhood gangsters from a young age and climbs his way through the mafia family. While it is one of the ultimate Scorsese classics, the film wasn’t originally a passion project like the others, with the director describing the process of agreeing to make the film.
When discussing this, Scorsese said, “Goodfellas was made 18 years after Mean Streets. I didn’t really want to go to do another genre, gangster genre. After doing The Last Temptation of Christ, I got back, I owed Warner Brothers Goodfellas (or it became Goodfellas, it was called Wise Guys at the time). I didn’t really, I almost didn’t want to make it. It was Michael Powell, the director of The Red Shoes, the co-director I should say, who read the script and insisted I make it”.
Scorsese has always spoken incredibly highly of Powell and his influence on his work, often citing The Red Shoes as his favourite film of all time. But while the director convinced him to take on the project, it was ultimately the hold that Warner Brothers had over him that forced him to direct the film, and perhaps if it hadn’t been for this arrangement, then his career would not quite be what it is today.
