Scorsese Saw Hollywood's Ills at Screening for Departed

Martin Scorsese turns 81 in November, and he's making the rounds to plug his new film Killers of the Flower Moon with Leonardo DiCaprio. In a wide-ranging interview with GQ, Scorsese talks about feeling out of step with modern Hollywood. For instance, he rarely goes to Los Angeles anymore because "most of my friends are gone," he says. "They're all new people. I don't know them anymore. It's a new town. It's a new industry. And it's nice. It's just like, I can't hang out there. Except when I'm with Leo." But he also feels out of step in an artistic sense as he complains about the "manufactured content" so prevalent in popular movies (think comic-book films) today:

• AI is here? "It's almost like AI making a film," he says, referring to artificial intelligence. "And that doesn't mean that you don't have incredible directors and special effects people doing beautiful artwork. But what does it mean? What do these films, what will it give you? Aside from a kind of consummation of something and then eliminating it from your mind, your whole body, you know? So what is it giving you?"
• Fateful screening: Scorsese talks about going to the screening of his 2006 Oscar-winning film The Departed. (A spoiler is ahead.) The audience loved it. "And then the studio guys walked out and they were very sad, because they just didn't want that movie," he recalled. That's because the big stars were killed. "What they wanted was a franchise. It wasn't about a moral issue of a person living or dying ... Which means: I can't work here anymore."

Read the full interview. (More Martin Scorsese stories.)