“Movie directors are desperate people. You’re totally desperate every second of the day when you’re involved in a film, through
pre-production, production, post-production, and certainly when you’re dealing with the press.” Martin Scorsese isn’t talking about his own career, but that of one of his heroes, the British director Michael Powell. And in particular, Scorsese is referring to the all-consuming creative passion Powell and Emeric Pressburger captured in their 1948 classic The Red Shoes. That swooning Technicolor tragedy was ostensibly set in the world of ballet, with Moira Shearer fatally torn between her personal and professional loyalties; equally, it is a portrait of artistic sacrifice and compromise in the film-makers’ own industry. “Over the years, what’s really stayed in my mind and my heart is the dedication those characters had, the nature of that power and the obsession to create,” Scorsese says, before finding the right analogy in another Powell and Pressburger title: “It made it a matter of life and death, really.”
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; now, nearly 20 years after Powell’s death, it extends to a stewardship of his legacy. Scorsese took the stage on Friday at Cannes to introduce a new restored print of The Red Shoes — a culmination, of sorts, to Scorsese’s ongoing mission to rehabilitate his hero. Scorsese was instrumental not just in initiating the physical restoration of Powell and Pressburger’s deteriorating back catalogue, but in restoring Powell’s career and reputation when they were at their lowest ebb. He even, inadvertently, found him a wife.
Scorsese considers Powell and Pressburger’s run of films through the 1930s and 1940s 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. He hadn’t worked since. 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.
“We’d been asking for years about Powell and Pressburger,” says Scorsese. “There was hardly anything written about their films at that time. We wondered how the same man who made A Matter of Life and Death, The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp could also have made Peeping Tom. We actually thought for a while Michael Powell was a pseudonym being used by other filmmakers.”
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 filmmakers — 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.”
RSS