Martin Scorsese hasn't actually seen Barbie or Oppenheimer yet
Martin Scorsese thinks Barbie and Oppenheimer were good for cinema, even though he hasn't seen them
Breaking news: Martin Scorsese, patron saint of The Cinema, hasn’t actually seen this year’s cinema’s biggest offerings. We have to cut Marty some slack: he’s been busy finishing his film Killers Of The Flower Moon and single-handedly promoting it while the actors are on strike (not to mention filming absolutely darling TikToks with his daughter). Still, given what a cultural phenomenon it was, it’s something of a surprise that Scorsese managed to avoid both Barbie and Oppenheimer so far.
“I do think that the combination of Oppenheimer and Barbie was something special. It seemed to be, I hate that word, but the perfect storm. It came about at the right time. And the most important thing is that people went to watch these in a theater. And I think that’s wonderful,” the legendary filmmaker said in an interview with the Hindustan Times. However, he admitted, “I haven’t seen the films yet. I love Chris Nolan’s work. Margot Robbie, I must say, started with me from The Wolf Of Wall Street. [Cinematographer] Rodrigo Prieto, after finishing Killers Of The Flower Moon, went on to shoot Barbie. So it’s all in the family.”
The admission that Scorsese hasn’t actually seen Christopher Nolan’s latest picture comes after the Taxi Driver director heralded Nolan as a potential savior of the medium. Speaking with GQ last month, Scorsese pointed out the need to “fight back stronger” against comic book movies. “It’s gotta come from the filmmakers themselves. And you’ll have, you know, the Safdie brothers, and you’ll have Chris Nolan, you know what I mean?” (Nolan, of course, also made three Batman movies.) Scorsese added, “And hit ’em from all sides. Hit ’em from all sides, and don’t give up. Let’s see what you got. Go out there and do it. Go reinvent. Don’t complain about it. But it’s true, because we’ve got to save cinema.”
Scorsese, however, does see how the Barbenheimer phenomenon did its part to champion movies as a whole. “The way it fit perfectly—a film with such entertainment value, purely with the bright colors—and a film with such severity and strength, and pretty much about the danger of the end to our civilization—you couldn’t have more opposite films to work together,” he said to the Hindustan Times. “It does offer some hope for a different cinema to emerge, different from what’s been happening in the last 20 years, aside from the great work being done in independent cinema. I always get upset by that, the independent films being relegated to ‘indies.’ Films that only a certain kind of people would like. Just show them on a tiny screen somewhere.”
As for Killers Of The Flower Moon, its director encourages audiences to see it on a big screen. “Killers could play on a small screen, but in order to truly immerse yourself, you should take out the time,” he said. “People say it’s three hours, but come on, you can sit in front of the TV and watch something for five hours. Also, there are many people who watch theater for 3.5 hours. There are real actors on stage, you can’t get up and walk around. You give it that respect, give cinema some respect.”