While he will return to acting with a role for the film In Dante’s handby director Julian Schnabel, Martin Scorsese, one of the most influential filmmakers in the world, advocated at the Berlinale, which awarded him its honorary Golden Bear this year, for losing the fear of technology and putting it at the service of “the individual voice ” at the cinema..
According to a report from VarietyMartin Scorsese, winner of the Oscar for best director with his crime thriller film The infiltrators In 2007, he will play “a wise old man who influences the historic writer and poet Dante Alighieri” while he writes his most memorable work: The Divine Comedy.
“Martin Scorsese is extraordinary in the film. He has a brilliant and important role, you can’t take your eyes off him,” Julian Schnabel told the film magazine while filming one of the scenes of the feature film in Italy, describing the anonymous character played by Scorsese.
In the film In Dante’s hand The protagonist who will play Dante Alighieri will be Oscar Isaac, remembered for his role in Dune and in the Marvel series, Moon Knight. There will also be Gal Gadot, the popular Wonder Woman. The cast is completed by Jason Momoa, Gerard Butler, Al Pacino, John Malkovich and Louis Cancelmi, among others.
This is not the first time that Martin Scorsese acts in cinema. He had previously been involved in many of his own films with small and occasional roles. Likewise, he made an appearance in the film Dreamsby director Akira Kurosawa in 1990, and gave his voice to a puffer fish in the remembered animated film The shark scares in 2004.
“Technology changes so quickly that the only thing you can hold on to is the individual voice and that voice can be expressed in the same way on TikTok, in a four-hour movie or in a miniseries,” the director of titles like Taxi Driver (1975), Wild bull (1980) o The Moon Killersfor which he is competing for the Oscar for best director.
“I don’t think cinema is dying, cinema is transforming,” he continued. “Let’s not be afraid of technology, let’s not be slaves to it, let’s control it and put it in the right direction, at the service of the individual voice,” she asked to applause in a full conference room.
Scorsese received the Golden Bear of honor in a ceremony after which he screened The infiltrators (2006), a film with Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jack Nicholson, for which he received the Oscar for best film after nine nominations.
This year he has received ten nominations for the Oscars, which will be awarded on March 10, for The Moon Killersincluding best film and best direction.
In a press conference in which each journalist took advantage of their intervention to express their deep admiration for the filmmaker and one even asked permission to represent a scene from The infiltrators (and he did), Scorsese made it clear what, in his opinion, the role of film festivals is.
“Pay attention to these new individual and artistic voices,” he insisted. “You can watch a movie once and remember it your entire life, and I’m not saying remember in a nostalgic sense, but it has an effect on your way of seeing life, others, and your behavior,” he said.
He spoke about the work of preserving cinema that he carries out from The Film Foundation and recalled that it is a passion that dates back to his beginnings, when together with Brian de Palma, Steven Spielberg and Paul Schrader, the group he grew up with, they recommended films. each other and it was often difficult to find copies.
And although on this occasion the honoree was him and it was about talking about his cinema and what has influenced others, he assured that he never thinks about it.
“Maybe when you are younger, with more ego and ambition, you don’t lose your ambition, but your ego… maybe not either, even if you try,” he stated with his characteristic speed and sense of humor when speaking.
“The more people say those things to me, the more I reject it,” he said, because it’s about trying to start from scratch on each film. “Freeing yourself from the constraints of how something is supposed to be is great, because your biggest problem is yourself.”
Regarding the role of criticism, he considered that it can still be relevant to guide young people in times when all the cinema in the world is within reach. “What is fashionable dies in a day, stronger values must be instilled,” she said.
And regarding his recent meeting with the Pope in the Vatican, he revealed that they established a relationship after Silence (2016), his film about two Jesuit priests in Japan in the 17th century, which Pope Francis saw in the Vatican.
“We talked about fresh ways of approaching Christianity, which is a topic that interests me,” said Scorsese, who did not want to give many details about his next feature film project based on the life of Jesus Christ.
“It’s an idea that’s always been there, I’m interested in Catholicism,” he said, “but I’m still looking at what kind of film I want to make, it will be something unique and different and thought provoking and also entertaining.”
The 74th Berlinale also hosts the world premiere of ‘Made in England: the films of Powell and Pressburger’, a documentary directed by David Hinton and produced and narrated by Scorsese for the BBC, in the style of his legendary series on American cinema of the ’90.
Scorsese reviews title by title, stopping at the most significant scenes, the films by Michael Powell (1905-1990) and Emeric Pressburger (1902-1988) that he discovered as a child and that marked his way of seeing and making films, from The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp a black daffodil y The red sneakers.