Before his reinvention as a blockbuster director, Jon Favreau hosted a half-hour show for IFC called “Dinner For Five” that found the multi-hyphenate engaged in conversation with four other guests from the film industry over dinner. Though borne of a simple premise, the show was often illuminating, funny and, most of all, humanizing, especially when larger stars or industry legends were involved. The sole digression from the title-and-premise was a one-on-one conversation with Favreau’s future “The Wolf Of Wall Street” director Martin Scorsese that’s been making the rounds online.
Airing during the third season in 2004, the episode with Scorsese is, in terms of the actual staging of the director and host, more in-line with other television interviews but Favreau’s cool approach – and obvious admiration for Scorsese – meshes exceptionally well with the legendary director who, as always, is a game interview subject. One of the better exchanges in the episode concerns Scorsese’s thoughts on story vs plot where he plants himself firmly in the pro-story – that is to say, character and atmosphere-driven – camp as opposed to the plot-heavy camp.
Of course, Scorsese presents his argument using the films of Alfred Hitchcock, he’s not as fond of the plot-driven “Rebecca” as he is of the paranoid mood of the Henry Fonda-starring “The Wrong Man”, which he screened for Paul Schrader while the two were prepping “Taxi Driver” and credits it as his influence to hire Bernard Hermann for the film. Watch a clip of the exchange, along with the entire episode (via Thompson On Hollywood), below.