Had he not been so entranced by The Red Shoes as a boy, Scorsese might never have become a movie director. Watching the film for the first time – aged nine, at the cinema with his father – was the start of a lifelong relationship with Powell’s movies, one that ultimately led to a friendship with the man himself.
Scorsese considers Powell and Pressburger’s run of films through the 1930s and 40s to be “the longest period of subversive film-making in a major studio, ever”. But when Scorsese first met Powell, in 1975, that run had come to an abrupt halt. Peeping Tom, Powell’s first effort as a solo director, had been released in 1960, and its combination of violence, voyeurism, nudity and general implication of the audience (not to mention the film industry, again) was too strong for the British censors and critics. So he must have been somewhat taken aback to discover that an eager young American director was trying to track him down, and that other young American film-makers were going back to his work.
Scorsese came to Britain for the Edinburgh film festival with Taxi Driver, and a mutual contact arranged a meeting at a London restaurant. “He was very quiet and didn’t quite know what to make of me,” Scorsese recalls. “I had to explain to him that his work was a great source of inspiration for a whole new generation of film-makers – myself, Spielberg, Paul Schrader, Coppola, De Palma. We would talk about his films in Los Angeles often. They were a lifeblood to us, at a time when the films were not necessarily immediately available. He had no idea this was all happening.”
After Scorsese found him, Powell was taken to the US by Francis Ford Coppola and feted by his new Hollywood fans. They saw him as a kindred spirit: a fiercely independent film-maker who had fought for, and justified, the need for complete creative freedom. Coppola installed him as senior director-in-residence at his Zoetrope studios; he took teaching posts; retrospectives were held of his work; and the great and good of Hollywood queued up to meet him. Scorsese even had a cossack shirt made in the same style as that of Anton Walbrook’s character in The Red Shoes, which he wore to the opening of Powell and Pressburger’s 1980 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. To that event, Scorsese brought along his editor on Raging Bull, Thelma Schoonmaker. “Marty told me I had to go and see Colonel Blimp on the big screen,” Schoonmaker later tells me. She introduced herself to Powell, they hit it off, and four years later they married.
Schoonmaker, who still edits all Scorsese’s films, experienced first-hand both Scorsese’s worship of Powell and his subsequent friendship with him. “One of the first things Marty said to me was, ‘I’ve just discovered a new Powell and Pressburger masterpiece!’ We were working at night on Raging Bull and he said, ‘You have to come into the living room and look at this right now.’ He had a videocassette of I Know Where I’m Going. For him to have taken an hour and a half out of our editing time is typical of the way he proselytises. Anyone he meets, or the actors he works with, he immediately starts bombarding with Powell and Pressburger movies.”
Powell’s influence is all over Scorsese’s work. His trademark use of the colour red is a direct homage to Powell, for example – though Powell told him he overused the colour in Mean Streets. And Powell was practically a consultant on Raging Bull, giving Scorsese script advice and even guiding him towards releasing the film in black and white. (Again, Powell observed that Robert de Niro’s boxing gloves were too red.) Meanwhile, Powell’s Tales of Hoffman informed the movements of Raging Bull’s fight scenes. “Marty was always asking Michael, ‘How did you do that shot?’ or ‘Where did you get that idea?'” Schoonmaker says. “They shared a tremendous passion for the history of film – but he didn’t always go along with Marty’s taste in modern film-makers. For example, Michael didn’t quite get Sam Fuller. Marty showed him Forty Guns, or started to show it to him, and Michael walked out halfway through. Marty was heartbroken.”
Scorsese: my friendship with Michael Powell
What. The. Fuck. Pinewood? A parte mais lucrativa de Hollywood iria mudar para a Inglaterra? MS longe de NY?
Quixotando 