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Martin Scorsese is still curious — and still awed by the possibilities of cinema

The legendary filmmaker's latest is 'Killers of the Flower Moon,' a film about the systematic killing of Osage Nation members for their oil-rich land in the 1920s, currently playing in UAE cinemas

A moment from years ago keeps replaying in Martin Scorsese ’s mind.

When Akira Kurosawa was given an honorary Academy Award in 1990, the then 80-year-old Japanese filmmaker of Seven Samurai and Ikiru, in his brief, humble speech, said he hadn’t yet grasped the full essence of cinema.

It struck Scorsese, then in post-production on Goodfellas, as a curious thing for such a master filmmaker to say. It wasn’t until Scorsese also turned 80 that he began to comprehend Kurosawa's words. Even now, Scorsese says he’s just realising the possibilities of cinema.

“I’ve lived long enough to be his age and I think I understand now,” Scorsese said in a recent interview. “Because there is no limit. The limit is in yourself. These are just tools, the lights and the camera and that stuff. How much further can you explore who you are?”

Scorsese’s lifelong exploration has seemingly only grown deeper and more self-examining with time. In recent years, his films have swelled in scale and ambition as he’s plumbed the nature of faith (Silence) and loss (The Irishman).

His latest, Killers of the Flower Moon, about the systematic killing of Osage Nation members for their oil-rich land in the 1920s, is in many ways far outside Scorsese's own experience. But as a story of trust and betrayal — the film is centred on the loving yet treacherous relationship between Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), a member of a larger Osage family, and Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a WWI veteran who comes to work for his corrupt uncle (Robert De Niro) — it’s a profoundly personal film that maps some of the themes of Scorsese’s gangster films onto American history.

More than the back-room dealings of Casino, the bloody rampages of Gangs of New York or the financial swindling of The Wolf of Wall Street, Killers of the Flower Moon is the story of a crime wave. It’s a disturbingly insidious one, where greed and violence infiltrate the most intimate relationships — a genocide in the home. All of which, to Scorsese, harkens back to the tough guys and the weak-willed go-alongs he witnessed in his childhood growing up on Elizabeth Street in New York.

“That’s been my whole life, dealing with who we are,” says Scorsese. “I found that this story lent itself to that exploration further.”

Killers of the Flower Moon, a $200-million, 206-minute epic produced by Apple that's currently playing in UAE cinemas, is an audacious big swing by Scorsese to continue his kind of ambitious, personal filmmaking on the largest scale at a time when such grand, big-screen statements are a rarity.

Killers of the Flower Moon for Scorsese grew out of a period of reflection and reevaluation during the pandemic. Covid-19, he says, was “a gamechanger." For a filmmaker whose time is so intensely scheduled, the break was in some ways a relief, and it allowed him a chance to reconsider what he wants to dedicate himself to. For him, preparing a film is a meditative process.

“I don’t use a computer because I tried a couple times and I got very distracted. I get distracted as it is,” Scorsese says. “I’ve got films, I’ve got books, I’ve got people. I’ve only begun this year to read emails. Emails, they scare me. It says ‘CC’ and there are a thousand names. Who are these people?”

Scorsese is laughing when he says this, surely aware that he’s playing up his image as a member of the old guard. (A moment later he adds that voicemail “is interesting to do at times.”) Yet he’s also keen enough with technology to digitally de-age De Niro and make cameos in his daughter Francesca's TikTok videos.

Scorsese has for years been the preeminent conscience of cinema, passionately arguing for the place of personal filmmaking in an era of moviegoing where films can be devalued as “content,” theatre screens are monopolised by Marvel and big-screen vision can be shrunk down on streaming platforms.

“I’m trying to keep alive the sense that cinema is an artform,” Scorsese says. “The next generation may not see it that way because as children and younger people, they’re exposed to films that are wonderful entertainment, beautifully made, but are purely diversionary. I think cinema can enrich your life.”

“As I’m leaving, I’m trying to say: Remember, this can really be something beautiful in your life.”

That mission includes spearheading extensive restoration work with the Film Foundation along with a regular output of documentaries in between features. Scorsese and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker are currently producing a documentary on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

Cinema, he says, may be the preeminent 20th century artform, but something else will belong to the 21st century. Now, Scorsese says, “the visual image could be done by anything by anybody anytime anywhere.”

“The possibilities are infinite on all levels. And that’s exciting,” Scorsese says. “But at the same time, the more choices, the more difficult it is.”

The pressure of time is weighing more heavily on Scorsese, too. He has, he’s said, maybe two more feature films left in him. Currently in the mix are an adaptation of Grann’s latest book, the 18th century shipwreck tale The Wager, and an adaptation of Marilynne Robinson’s Home.

Time for Scorsese may be waning but curiosity is as abundant as ever. Recent reading for him includes a new translation of Alessandro Manzoni’s “The Betrothed.” Some old favorites he can’t help but keep revisiting. “Out of the Past” — a movie he first saw as 6-year-old — he watched again a few weeks ago. (“Whenever it’s on, I have to stop and watch it.”) Vittorio De Sica’s “Golden Naples” was another recent rewatch.

“If I’m curious about something, I think I’ll find a way – if I hold out, if I hold up – to try to make something about it on film,” he says. “My curiosity is still there.”