When Martin Scorsese’s latest picture, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” premieres at the Cannes Picture Festival on May 20th, he will return to a festival with a long history.
“Taxi Driver,” Scorsese’s masterwork of urban alienation, premiered at Cannes in 1976. Its premiere was raucous in Cannes history, with boos and some walkouts due to the brutality in Scorsese’s drama about disillusioned New York cab driver Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro). Tennessee Williams, the jury president at the time, denounced the film.
“Films should not take a voluptuous pleasure in spilling blood and lingering on terrible cruelties as though one were at a Roman circus,” Williams stated.
Nonetheless, “Taxi Driver” received Cannes’ highest honor, the Palme d’Or. Scorsese and crew had already returned home after learning of Williams’ rejection, and their aspirations for a major award shattered.
“I got a call around five o’clock in the morning from (publicist) Marion Billings saying, ‘You’ve won the Palme d’Or,'” Scorsese later told The Hollywood Reporter. “We thought we might get best screenplay or best actor for De Niro, so it was very surprising.”
Scorsese’s appearance in Cannes for “Taxi Driver” was not his first. Two years prior, he premiered his breakthrough movie, “Mean Streets,” in Directors Fortnight, a selection of films from emerging directors that play outside Cannes’ main stage, the Palais des Festivals.
“Cannes was the international platform for ‘Mean Streets,’ a film I didn’t think would even get distributed,” Scorsese stated at a Cannes lecture celebrating the film’s debut in 2018.
“Taxi Driver,” Scorsese’s masterwork of urban alienation.
“My visit was almost perfect in terms of anonymity.” And he’s working hard to alter that!” he stated. “On the Croisette, I could go from table to table and meet actors, directors, and many others.” It was still a period of discovery, not only for new filmmakers, but also for older, underappreciated directors.”
Between “Mean Streets” and “Taxi Driver,” Cannes was instrumental in establishing Scorsese as a prominent filmmaking artist. Scorsese has maintained a close relationship with the festival ever since, though launching a film there has grown increasingly rare.
“Killers of the Flower Moon,” his eagerly anticipated adaptation of David Grann’s best-selling novel, is his first new film to screen in the official selection at Cannes since “After Hours” in 1986. Scorsese won best director for that film, a darkly comedic midnight New York adventure.
His next film, which will be released in theatres on October 6th by Apple in collaboration with Paramount Pictures, will not compete in Cannes. In announcing this year’s roster, Festival Director Thierry Frémaux said he pushed Scorsese to enter it for the Palme d’Or but was turned down.
Scorsese has frequently attended Cannes in other capacities in the interim.
“Killers of the Flower Moon,” which has a running time of 206 minutes, is about a series of Native American murders in 1920s Oklahoma and the FBI investigation that followed. Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, Jillian Dion, and Tantoo Cardinal star in the film.
Scorsese has frequently attended Cannes in other capacities in the interim. He presided over the jury that awarded the Palme d’Or to Theo Angelopoulos’ “Eternity and a Day” in 1998. In 2002, he also presided over the Cinéfondation jury.
And Scorsese has frequently been associated with other films in Cannes, either as an executive producer (for Joanna Hogg’s two-part “The Souvenir”) or to unveil freshly restored classics by the Film Foundation, the organization he created. This year, the Film Foundation, in collaboration with the Walt Disney Company, will screen a previously unseen “Spellbound,” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 thriller.
Before a 2009 Cannes screening of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 masterwork “The Red Shoes,” Scorsese stated that restoration is only important if people see the work.
“The more audiences see these films, the more they want to see other films like them, and then what happens is the audience changes, which means the films that are being made change,” Scorsese explained. “There is an audience for special and good films, for a different way of looking at the world — not just blockbusters.”
SOURCE – (AP)
