Martin Scorsese Recalls Seeing Psycho Opening Weekend And Why We Need Movie Theaters During Convo With Leonardo DiCaprio
They spoke of Killers of the Flower moon too.
Martin Scorsese is set to have a memorable year. Fresh off Paramount (in partnership with Apple Studios) showing off first look footage of his upcoming 2023 movie release Killers of the Flower Moon, the director was awarded the Legend of Cinema award at CinemaCon 2023 in Las Vegas. He then sat down with lead Leonardo DiCaprio for a thoughtful (and sometimes rambling) conversation that touched on the movie theater experience as well as their many years of work together.
The first question DiCaprio asked Scorsese made sense for the CinemaCon crowd, as it touched on why the theatrical experience is important – something near and dear to the many theater owners, employees and executives who frequent the event. But it also served to clarify some comments he has made in the past about Marvel movies not being “cinema.”
Though he noted the theater is fun for stuff like Avatar and still very much a shared communal experience, he recalled how fundamental experiences like seeing North By Northwest and other auteur films were when he was growing up and first falling in love with the business of making movies. He spoke about how giving independent films moments in the theater is how generations in the future will connect in the same way and will hopefully go on to become the Scorsese’s or the Fellini’s of their own day.
To deep dive further into how memorable some moviegoing moments in the theater can be, Martin Scorsese also spoke with Leonardo DiCaprio about seeing Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho during opening week in New York.
Psycho premiered in 1960. Scorsese would have been just 18 at the time, seven years before his directorial debut with Who’s That Knocking At My Door. More than two dozen films later, we know he’ll be back on the big screen for Killers of the Flower Moon, a movie which Apple Studios produced for streaming, but which will get a robust and lengthy theatrical release thanks to a partnership with Paramount. The studio brought first look footage to CinemaCon featuring DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons, members of the Osage Nation and a slew of other names.
While Scorsese has had one movie notably appear on streaming (with a limited theatrical release), The Irishman, even at the time he spoke about the sanctity of the theatrical experience, citing Netflix being the only company to give him the budget he needed as the reason it went to streaming. But it’s clear from everything he said today (and really has been saying for years) that he has an almost bibliographic love and deep-seated passion for cinema. And as he put it today, “Film combines all the other art forms… it’s poetry.”
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Jessica Rawden is Managing Editor at CinemaBlend. She’s been kicking out news stories since 2007 and joined the full-time staff in 2014. She oversees news content, hiring and training for the site, and her areas of expertise include theme parks, rom-coms, Hallmark (particularly Christmas movie season), reality TV, celebrity interviews and primetime. She loves a good animated movie. Jessica has a Masters in Library Science degree from Indiana University, and used to be found behind a reference desk most definitely not shushing people. She now uses those skills in researching and tracking down information in very different ways.