Here’s a little shocker. When filmmakers meet up at film festivals, like perhaps the Berlin Film Festival currently winding down in Germany (it ends on Sunday), sometimes they just talk, exchange pleasantries, perhaps engage in a little mutual admiration society and or ask about family members if they’re familiar with one another.
However, sometimes those conversations get turned into things like Lars Von Trier challenging (or remaking, depending on the report) Martin Scorsese to re-do “Taxi Driver” ala the Danish film director’s “The Five Obstructions” documentary, which was rumored, but then quickly denied.
But apparently the filmmakers did meet and according to an interview in Berlin with Vulture, Scorsese says the two, “have met,” and “were talking, but not about ‘Taxi Driver.’ “
So were the rumors based in some reality, the filmmakers were discussing some kind of project or were they just talking? The above is far too vague to speculate on, but we leave it here for posterity in case something does come up of it.
As of the rumors that Leonardo DiCaprio could play Frank Sinatra in the planned Ol’ Blue Eyes biopic? Scorsese says, “there are no plans to do that as of yet,” and as we’ve already noted the picture sounds like it could be up to four films away for the 67-year-old filmmaker.
Btw, in discussing Leonardo DiCaprio’s role in “Shutter Island” Scorsese keeps bring up the two excellent film noir’s, Otto Preminger’s “Laura” with Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney (1944) , and Jacques Tourneur’s 1947’s “Out of the Past” starring Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas and one of the ultimate femme fatale roles for Jane Greer. If you haven’t seen these films, they’ll make excellent companion pieces to Scorsese’s film, but of course in a much less, crazy and era-appropriate way (the correlation is more the male leads in Andrews and Mitchum). Either way, if you haven’t seen them, we highly recommend.
“Shutter Island” hits theaters this weekend. One of our reviewers said, “go with it” and you’ll pretty love it, but it seems to be engaging cinephiles and genre-film enthusiasts maybe not so much regular-joe reviewers. It’s evidently very reference-heavy and some other films that Scorsese screened for his actors include, Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” estimable documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s “Titicut Follies” (a 1967 look at patients in a Massachusetts hospital for the criminally insane) and John Huston’s documentary on shell-shocked World War II soldiers, “Let There Be Light.”