EFilm director Martin Scorsese today gave a film lesson at the 60th Cannes Film Festival to a packed auditorium whose "students" included some as distinguished as his colleagues Quentin Tarantino and Claude Lanzmann of France.
Received with a thunderous applause by the audience that filled the room, even sitting on the access stairs, the New York teacher recounted for an hour and a half his cinematographic experiences from his beginnings to the movie The Departed, which won him his first Oscar last February as director. He also evoked his film studies in New York, although with a very clear message: "You can only learn to make films by doing it, essentially directing, but also doing other jobs", such as editing, which he learned in the beginning.
Sitting on the stage of the Debussy room, one of the largest in the Palais des Festivals de Cannes, Scorsese's talk with the French journalist Michel Simon was interrupted at times to screen short fragments of his works, such as Bad Streets and Wild Bull. About the protagonist of both films and undoubtedly one of his fetish actors along with Joe Pesci, Robert de Niro, recalled that they were presented by the filmmaker Brian de Palma during a Christmas dinner.
He also revealed that the violence that characterizes many of his films comes from growing up "in a very tough part of New York." It should be remembered that Scorsese is one of the guests of honor this year at the Cannes anniversary, where this week he presented his World Film Foundation project to safeguard the film heritage threatened by lack of funds to preserve it.
