Martin Scorsese Reveals Why He Came Close to Quitting Hollywood After Gangs of New York

Martin Scorsese struggled to complete two of his most acclaimed films.

As the legendary director (80) spoke with GQ recently for the cover story ahead of the release of his latest epic Killers of the flower moonthe director recalled feeling frustrated by the restrictions placed on him by former producer Harvey Weinstein when in 2002 Gangs of New York with Weinstein’s former company Miramax.

“I realized that if I ever had to make movies like that again, I couldn’t work,” Scorsese said. The director recalled how Weinstein, 71, tried to have more control over the film’s budget and duration than Scorsese was comfortable with.

“If that was the only way I would be allowed to make movies, then I would have to stop,” he said. “Because the results were not satisfactory. Sometimes it was very difficult and I wouldn’t have survived it. I would be dead. And so I decided it was over, really.”

Scorsese also said that his next film would be in 2004 Aviatorfaced the same problems as Weinstein’s Miramax co-distributed the film with Warner Bros. Pictures.

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Leonardo DiCaprio (center) in Gangs of New York.

Photo by Moviestore/Shutterstock

“And I was against it; there was a meeting, and I was forced into that position,” Scorsese recalled of working with Weinstein again. “I already, uh, got pregnant, as they said. And there’s no way you can get out of it.”

“But the shoot went well, the editing went well until the last few weeks of editing. And they came in and did some things that I thought were extremely wicked,” he added. According to GQand Miramax and Warner Bros. they stopped financing the film near the end of its production, prompting Scorsese to use $500,000 of his own money to complete the film.

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Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie ‘Gangs of New York’.

Mario Tursi/Miramax/Dimension/Kobal/Shutterstock

IN Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese reunites with DiCaprio for their sixth project together and marks his 11th film with DiCaprio’s co-star Robert De Niro. DiCaprio plays a man named Ernest Burkhart, who moves to Oklahoma in the 1920s and marries a local Osage woman Molly Kyle (Lily Gladstone) amid a series of murders of the area’s indigenous population.

The film is based on David Grann’s 2017 bestseller Killers of Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.

Killers of the Flower Moon opens in theaters on October 20 and will later be streamed on Apple TV+.

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Source: HIS Education