Director Martin Scorsese feels that he has no choice but to go back to being an independent filmmaker. The good people over at slashfilm.com give us this:
“The question is how close to a personal film can I make in the Hollywood system today – and this [The Departed] is as close as I can get,” admits Scorsese in a EW interview. “I don’t know if there’s room for me and the kind of picture I’d like to make anymore.”
Scorsese’s solution may be to return to independent low budget filmmaking, where he got his start.
“I may have to do them independently because I like to take risks, and how can you do that when a picture costs $200 million?” asks Scorsese. “There’s a lot of money involved and you have a responsibility to the studio.”
I like reading this, it’s nice to see artists today saying there are more important things than money, like doing the art the way it was intended. True as an established and well respected director Scorsese can afford to do this without a lot of pain, and I’m sure his “independent” films won’t be as cheap as say…a low budget zombie movie. But it’s still a bold move to go back to lower budget.
For some reason I can’t seem to get M. Night Shyamalan out of my brain with this post, he also has complained that studios hold the reigns too firmly with his pictures (you may remember earlier on in the year he fought heavily with Disney for his artistic rights in the movie The lady of the Water). What Shyamalan ended up doing was going to a different production company and blaring to the media about his woes.
It takes a classy guy like Martin Scorsese to move back into less expensive territory with filmmaking rather than fight with studios every time he makes a movie.
