Entrevista a Leonardo DiCaprio (Clarín)

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Crítica de "La isla siniestra/Shutter Island", de Martin Scorsese (Clarín)

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"Shutter Island/La isla siniestra": Entrevista a Martin Scorsese (Clarín)

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Critic's notebook: 'Shutter Island' as a new-music haven (Los Angeles Times)

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The trailers at the cineplex the other day included the usual summer blockbuster suspects showing off their special effects -- one cartoonish morph after another after another. Every soundtrack was loaded down with the same super-deep, but sonically shallow, electronic bass. I wasn’t sure what felt more depressingly manufactured: a deserted and alienating L.A. Live, where I happened to be, or the expensive nonsense in the nearly empty new Regal Cinema, which boasts very big subwoofers.

Then “Shutter Island” began, and yet more bass. But this time it was the sound of a foghorn, and it had the rich, compelling texture of music. It was music. It was also a real, old-fashioned foghorn. Out of this sonic relic grew French horns, as if they had been there all along struggling to get out. The misty Boston harbor was on the screen, compelling and mysterious as a painting by Turner. I was transported. Music, sound effects and cinematography joined to evoke a sense of place and mood as only they can in great cinema and only, these days, when Hollywood looks the other way.

That opening music turned out to be Ingram Marshall’s haunting “Fog Tropes.” The 1981 new-music classic found its way onto the screen thanks to the famed singer, songwriter and guitarist Robbie Robertson, who was music supervisor for “Shutter Island.” And Marshall’s wonderful piece, which was a hit of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s recent West Coast, Left Coast festival, is only the beginning of a remarkable and gratifying collection of classic avant-garde scores Robertson has assembled for Martin Scorsese’s new, and I think mostly misunderstood, film.

You certainly wouldn’t know it from the awful album cover – which looks like your typical schlock horror film soundtrack recording – but Robertson’s two-CD set of music from “Shutter Island,” released by Rhino, proves to be an excellent compilation of short pieces by John Cage, John Adams, Morton Feldman, György Ligeti, Lou Harrison, Alfred Schnittke, Max Richter, Nam June Paik and that otherworldly Italian, Giacinto Scelsi. Brian Eno, Mahler and Dinah Washington also find their welcome way into the mix.

How did this happen?

After seeing the film, I reached Robertson on the phone. He explained that he has been a fan of these composers for decades. In fact, he said that sometime around 1969, in his years as a member of the Band, he was so moved when he first heard Penderecki’s disturbing “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” that he began a correspondence with the Polish composer, and they became musical friends.

As for “Shutter Island,” Robertson said, “the opportunity to show off these brilliant composers really makes me feel good.” It has been something he’s wanted to do for a long time. “I’d always thought Cage’s ‘Root of an Unfocus’ ” – which is for prepared piano – “would be great in a movie. And when Marty sent me the script, this is just where it went.”

That script is, on the surface, a psychological thriller, and it is being obnoxiously marketed as a scare-athon. The reviews have been, as they say, mixed, with the music thought of as melodramatic. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Robertson says he wanted something that didn’t sound like typical film music and it is the boldness of these composers that appealed to him. “In the back of my mind was the thought, why don’t we have some geniuses who could really amplify the emotional ideas?”

At first, Roberston says, this notion threw even Scorsese -- whose relationship with Robertson began with the 1978 documentary of the Band, “The Last Waltz.” “ ‘Shutter Island’ is the eighth movie I’d worked on with Marty, and it was the first time his response was, ‘Oh, man, I don’t know what to do with that.’ ”

But Scorsese is a musical director and he clearly did know what to do with it. Although he didn’t ignore the throbbing possibilities of the Passacaglia movement of Penderecki’s Third Symphony, most of the music is used so subtly that even the geekiest new-music geek will have trouble identifying everything. I think I got maybe 60%.

Robertson went through a lot of trouble to make things work as well. He pointed out that while everyone agrees the Berlin Philharmonic’s recording of Ligeti’s “Lontano” is the best, he chose the Vienna Philharmonic recording under Claudio Abbado because he thought the warmth of the Vienna sound suited the film better.

But the real brilliance of this score is that the music doesn’t cue the action or explain anything. It adds emotional texture, serving as an alternate universe for a film that has at its essence an alternate universe. Still, I do think it's one alternate universe too many to present this excellent introduction to late 20th century music on CD as horror film music.

-- Mark Swed

"Shutter Island", de Martin Scorsese (críticas)

LOS ANGELES TIMES By Betsy Sharkey

February 19, 2010

In "Shutter Island," director Martin Scorsese has created a divinely dark and devious brain tease of a movie in the best noir tradition with its smarter than you'd think cops, their tougher than you'd imagine cases to crack and enough nods to the classic genre for an all-night parlor game.

It's 1954, the heart of the Cold War, with a conspiracy theory around every corner, when Leonardo DiCaprio's U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new partner, played by Mark Ruffalo, are dispatched to an asylum for the criminally insane to investigate a dicey disappearance. One of the facility's most notorious patients, a young mother who drowned her three children, has somehow vanished from a room monitored 24 hours a day, its door bolted from the outside.

But there are deeper mysteries here, and Scorsese has a lot more on his mind than one crazy inmate on the loose. The A-bomb threat is ever present, memories of Nazi death camps linger and rumors of questionable scientific experiments by the asylum's doctors are circulating. Though the more central question, gathering force like the coming hurricane, is the very nature of sanity and insanity.

Bit by bit, the filmmakers begin to shift all that trouble onto Teddy's shoulders, already weighed down, we've been told, by the death of his wife and the knowledge that her killer is an inmate at the asylum.

But Teddy's problems are never too much for Scorsese and DiCaprio, who in their fourth collaboration have developed an ease evident in every scene. Here the actor slips so deeply inside Teddy's skin that it allows his anxiety to creep under ours, while the director makes the most of that naked vulnerability, moving the camera in so close we can see the look in his eye, and that is unsettling indeed.

All the action takes place on a remote island off the Eastern Seaboard where Ashecliffe Hospital sits, with the sinister look of things serving to ratchet up the sense of jeopardy. Dante Ferretti, in his seventh film with Scorsese, sets the stage with his production design, the asylum itself a looming Gothic architectural throwback that never looks less than intimidating. There is a carefully orchestrated soundtrack from another of the director's pals, singer-songwriter Robbie Robertson, literally coming in with a crescendo every time you feel the urge to whisper, "Cue ominous music."

Between the psychopaths, the psychiatrists and the skeletons in Teddy's closet, the line between reality and delusion, sanity and insanity, soon begins to blur. It is here that the film really begins playing around with the psyche, both Teddy's and ours, though the agenda is laid out from director of photography Robert Richardson's first images of Teddy reeling from seasickness in the claustrophobic latrine of the prison ferry on the ride over -- tortured eyes looking back at us from the mirror as he splashes water onto his face.

Water is an image Scorsese returns to again and again -- the ocean that isolates the island, the relentless hurricane that rages down, the drowned children of the missing inmate. Peril, rather than life-sustaining, seems to be the relevant allegory here, so you soon start worrying when anyone turns up wet.

Using noir's narrative style, often to brilliant effect, it is pure pleasure to watch as Teddy parries with his partner, the hospital staff led by Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), the inmates or the security detail, with John Carroll Lynch particularly good as the brick wall of Deputy Warden McPherson. It's probably never better than in a confrontation with the shadow king of Ashecliffe Hospital, Max von Sydow's Dr. Naehring, Teddy throwing down hypotheses suggesting his guilt like a gauntlet, Dr. Naehring deflecting each one with bemused irony.

In its own way, Laeta Kalogridis' screenplay, which is based on the Dennis Lehane bestselling novel, turns into Teddy's most formidable adversary -- never letting him rest as obstacles are thrown in his path and paranoia rises with every step he takes.

We're pulled deep into a maze so complex it threatens to cloud the story, beginning with Teddy's tortured memories of his wife, Delores (Michelle Williams), and the migraines that plague him, to say nothing of his World War II soldiering days, including the liberation of Dachau and the horrors that implies. When the missing patient (Emily Mortimer as the younger Rachel, Patricia Clarkson the elder) mysteriously turns up, Teddy's gut tells him a lot of questions remain. As if by design, the hurricane finally blows in, cutting off access to the mainland and creating a dark and stormy night filled with scary sounds, ideal conditions for sleuthing around all those off-limits areas that any decent insane asylum has. While it's clear Scorsese is having great fun tightening the screws at every turn, some of the psychological tension that should have the crackle and shock of electricity in a thriller like this is lost in the crowd.

There is always a sense that Teddy's running out of time, and for a while we don't know exactly why. Once we do, Scorsese sets about tidying things up a bit too fast, like a college professor who knows he's got to let the class out, so let's just get through this, shall we.

Whether it's a rushed dénouement or a tendency to overindulge in delusions, the flaws are never enough to do permanent damage to the film. Ultimately, Scorsese has given us a new noir classic, though watching Di- Caprio's Teddy twist in the wind while his mind unravels would be satisfying enough.

betsy.sharkey@latimes.com

THE NEW YORK TIMES By A. O. SCOTT

“Shutter Island” takes place off the coast of Massachusetts in 1954. I’m sorry, that should be OFF THE COAST OF MASSACHUSETTS! IN 1954! since every detail and incident in the movie, however minor, is subjected to frantic, almost demented (and not always unenjoyable) amplification. The wail of strangled cellos accompanies shots of the titular island, a sinister, rain-lashed outcropping that is home to a mental hospital for the CRIMINALLY INSANE! The color scheme is lurid, and the camera movements telegraph anxiety. Nothing is as it seems. Something TERRIBLE is afoot.

Sadly, that something turns out to be the movie itself, directed by Martin Scorsese and adapted by Laeta Kalogridis from a peculiar contraption of a thriller by Dennis Lehane. Like Shutter Island in the opening scenes, the full dimensions of the catastrophe come into view only gradually. At first everything is fine, or at least not quite right in a way that seems agreeably intriguing. Mr. Scorsese uses his considerable formal dexterity — his intimate, comprehensive understanding of how sound and image work together to create meanings and moods — to conjure a tingly atmosphere of uncertainty and dread.

The vessel of these anxieties is Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays Teddy Daniels, a United States marshal taking a ferry ride out to the island to investigate the disappearance of a patient. Mr. DiCaprio, having grown perhaps overly fond of his accent from “The Departed,” brings it along for the ride, and it spreads through the movie like a contagious disease. Teddy’s partner (pahtnah), Chuck Aule, played by Mark (Mahk) Ruffalo, is supposed to be from the Pacific Northwest but he seems to have left all his R’s back in Seattle. Michelle Williams pops up in smudgy, color-drenched memories and hallucinations as Teddy’s dead wife, Dolores, her intonations as thick and clammy as chowder.

Those dialect-coached Boston inflections predominate in “Shutter Island,” but are not the only voices heard on the grounds of the asylum, where the patients perambulate like zombies and the orderlies lurk like vengeful specters. Ben Kingsley is Dr. Cawley, the psychiatrist in charge, with silky upper-crust menace in his voice and a diabolical little beard on his chin. Max von Sydow spouts Freudianisms in insinuating Germanic tones that remind Teddy — and of course not only Teddy — of Nazis, an association that helps to induce gratuitous flashbacks of corpses stacked outside death-camp barracks.

Those images emanate from Teddy’s troubled mind, the status of which is one of the movie’s chief mysteries. There are many others besides. Intimations of conspiracy, supernaturalism, cold war shenanigans and a whole lot more float around in the atmosphere, which is convulsed by operatically bad weather and the energetic furrowing of Mr. DiCaprio’s brow. As he interviews patients and staff members, trying to figure out how a woman named Rachel Solando could have vanished, barefoot, from her cell, Teddy is plagued by headaches, bad dreams and paranoia. Everyone he talks to seems to be harboring a secret, but what can it be?

Is there some kind of espionage-related psychological experimentation going on? Is it connected in some way to grisly medical research undertaken during the Third Reich? Are Dr. Cawley’s methods, which he claims are a humane advance over the cruelty and superstition of the past, really a form of madness in their own right? And what about the strange coincidence that Shutter Island apparently houses the firebug who caused Dolores’s death?

All of these riddles send out tendrils of implication that end up strangling the movie, the plot of which does not so much thicken as clog and coagulate. Mr. Scorsese, ever resourceful, draws on the influence of Alfred Hitchcock, the master of carefully orchestrated psychological confusion, and also nods in the direction of Mario Bava, the Italian horror maestro whose gothic fantasias routinely assert the triumph of sensation over sense. Mr. Scorsese’s camera sense effectively fills every scene with creepiness, but sustained, gripping suspense seems beyond his grasp.

And the movie’s central dramatic problem — the unstable boundary between the reality of Shutter Island and Teddy’s perception of it — becomes less interesting as the story lurches along. You begin to suspect almost immediately that a lot of narrative misdirection is at work here, as MacGuffins and red herrings spawn and swarm. But just when the puzzle should accelerate, the picture slows down, pushing poor Teddy into a series of encounters with excellent actors (Emily Mortimer, Jackie Earle Haley, Patricia Clarkson) who provide painstaking exposition of matters that the audience already suspects are completely irrelevant.

Mr. Scorsese in effect forces you to study the threads on the rug he is preparing, with lugubrious deliberateness, to pull out from under you. As the final revelations approach, the stakes diminish precipitously, and the sense that the whole movie has been a strained and pointless contrivance starts to take hold.

There are, of course, those who will resist this conclusion, in part out of loyalty to Mr. Scorsese, a director to whom otherwise hard-headed critics are inclined to extend the benefit of the doubt. But in this case the equivocation, the uncertainty, seems to come from the filmmaker himself, who seems to have been unable to locate what it is in this movie he cares about, beyond any particular, local formal concern. He has, in the past, used characters whose grasp of reality was shaky — or who stubbornly lived in realities of their own making — as vehicles for psychological exploration and even social criticism. But both Teddy’s mind and the world of Shutter Island are closed, airless systems, illuminated with flashes of virtuosity but with no particular heat, conviction or purpose.

“Shutter Island” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Blood, swearing, cigarettes.

SHUTTER ISLAND

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Martin Scorsese; written by Laeta Kalogridis, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane; director of photography, Robert Richardson; edited by Thelma Schoonmaker; production designer, Dante Ferretti; produced by Mr. Scorsese, Mike Medavoy, Arnold W. Messer and Bradley J. Fischer; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes.

WITH: Leonardo DiCaprio (Teddy Daniels), Mark Ruffalo (Chuck Aule), Ben Kingsley (Dr. Cawley), Michelle Williams (Dolores), Emily Mortimer (Rachel Solando), Patricia Clarkson (Rachel Solando), Jackie Earle Haley (George Noyce) and Max von Sydow (Dr. Naehring).

VILLAGE VOICE
By Nick Pinkerton

Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, a florid art shocker that Paramount welcomed into the world with the strained enthusiasm of a mutant baby's parents, begins with U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leo DiCaprio) seasick, head in the toilet. The film is his prolonged purging, with Daniels coughing up chunks of his backstory in flashback and dream. Now topside, he joins his new partner, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), and their destination looms into view: an ominous hunk of rock in Boston Harbor that houses Ashecliffe Asylum, where they've been assigned to find a missing inmate.

Pounded eighth notes by Krzysztof Penderecki score a gathering-storm approach that anticlimaxes at a tidy, ecclesiastical-looking brick campus. They're shown the grounds by progressive chief physician Dr. Cawley (Sir Ben Kingsley), who manages to seem both a natty, patrician liberal, circa 1954, and a bit of a satyr, with his Anton LaVey bald head/goatee combo and ironic twinkle—an ambiguous balance Kingsley keeps seesawing throughout. They also meet Cawley's colleague, Herr Doktor Naehring (Max von Sydow)—and Daniels, an ex-GI who witnessed the liberation of Dachau, takes an immediate dislike to the German.

As Daniels and Aule begin to investigate, there's a sense that their presence is an inside joke with the staff, that they're being given rehearsed misinformation. Daniels reveals that he'd heard sinister rumors about Ashecliffe long before this assignment, and not even a pretense of cooperation and normalcy can outlast their first hurricane-force dark-and-stormy-night on the island, when they trade their soaked civvies for orderly uniforms. (The film is elemental, whipped with fire, ash, snow, paper, bracken, and torrents of rain.)

As the outline of a conspiracy comes into view, Daniels's digging brings on strobing headaches, hallucinations, and a shrinking list of trustworthies that ultimately includes only his dead wife, dolorous Dolores, visiting him as a beyond-the-grave Technicolor prophet (Michelle Williams, not quite right for "ethereal"; it doesn't help that she's upstaged by Emily Mortimer's psychopath, who takes only one scene opposite DiCaprio to establish an immediate and spellbinding intimacy). As for DiCaprio, well, he'll never step onscreen and immediately suggest a liver-and-onions Greatest Generation Ralph Meeker he-man—Ted Levine's warden almost eats him at one point—but he has made suffering a specialty, and does so with an abandon that is frightening.

Production design maestro Dante Ferretti's island is a rugged symbolist mythscape, pocketed with hidden places: soothsayers' sea caves, Ward C, a squat Civil War–era fort where the most violent offenders are kept in a Goya madhouse, and, beyond it, the ultimate locked door—to the lighthouse! Scorsese's return to his Roger Corman AIP roots is an object lesson in the proximity of high and low culture—Shutter Island is lousy with modernist references, soundtracked by avant-garde 20th-century composers, pretentious in the best Pulp-y tradition.

138 minutes is dangerously epic for a talky thriller, but you forget the time and even whether the plot makes sense—and if you don't notice, it doesn't matter. Since more attention has gone into filigreeing details into each scene than worrying about the way they'll fit together, the rattletrap engages you moment-to-moment, even as the overall pacing stops and lurches alarmingly.

Though the film takes place entirely out-to-sea, the mainland isn't left behind—it's concentrated here into a midcentury chamber of manmade horrors. Loonies praise their island as a safe haven from news "about atolls, about A-bombs." There are rumors suggesting the House Committee on Un-American Activities (!) is dabbling in brainwashing experiments. Daniels flashes back repeatedly to Dachau: a camp Kapo choking in his own blood; a firing line tracking shot popping with squibs like a string of firecrackers; piled corpses frozen into a horrible sculpture. No violence is unsuitable for aestheticization; at one point in the film's web of visions, the perpetrator of a triple filicide points proudly to her handiwork and says, "See, aren't they beautiful?"—and DP Robert Richardson's image concurs.

Scorsese is as famous a movie lover as a moviemaker. This is manifest in his too-much-discussed homages, but also in his understanding of how his characters have themselves been shaped by entertainment, how they model themselves as actors in the American drama—Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, or Bill the Butcher addressing his public with Edwin Forrest brio at a performance of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Gangs of New York. (The announced Scorsese project, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, dealing with our nation's premier self-publicist ham, has enormous potential.) Without revealing too much of an ending that everyone will soon insist on telling you their opinion of, Shutter Island, deep in its camp gothic trappings, seems to me a flea-pit occult history, with Daniels's headspace a confusion of "Hideous Secrets of the Nazi Horror Cult" schlock, hard-ass Mickey Spillane machismo, Cold War psychic confusion, and the post-traumatic bad dreams of ex-servicemen.

In his documentary Personal Journey, Scorsese spoke of the '50s as a time "when the subtext became as important as the apparent subject matter, or even more important"—and in Shutter Island, his most distinctly '50s movie, he replays the trash culture of the era as the manifestation of an anguished subconscious.

Berlinale 2010 - Shutter Island, Submarino, If I Want To Whistle, I Whistle (Clarín)

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Cue the Director’s Adrenaline (The New York Times)

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February 7, 2010

Film

By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

MARTIN SCORSESE’S dark, twisty detective thriller “Shutter Island” is set in 1954, in the full flowering of what W. H. Auden had, just a few years earlier, called the Age of Anxiety. “I don’t know, maybe I’m stuck in that time,” Mr. Scorsese said recently, sounding a little weary as he talked about a film that “started out as an entertainment, though I guess I don’t really know how to do that,” he said. “It always seems to become something else.”

“ ‘The Departed’ was that way too,” he added, and almost sighed, though he’s not a man who pauses much to catch his breath. If he seemed a bit tired on this bright cold afternoon in New York City, it’s perhaps because he had been up late in the editing room, cutting the pilot he directed for an HBO gangster series called “Boardwalk Empire.” He is 67 now, firmly in lifetime-achievement-award territory — he was in fact just back from a trip to Los Angeles to receive one of those not-dead-yet honors at the Golden Globes — and wears his years and stature comfortably. His dress is age appropriate: dignified (neutral-color sport coat, good shoes) but casual (no tie). His rapid-fire, unmistakably New York conversational style is slightly less manic than it once was, a tad more patient; his characteristic manner now is one of affable enthusiasm, like a hip priest. And he has had, by any measure, as satisfying a decade as a middle-age American filmmaker can reasonably expect: the work has been bold and exciting, and the acclaim has been steady, never less than respectful, often perilously close to reverent.

Three years ago “The Departed” won him his first Oscar, after more than four decades of moviemaking (and a longer lifetime of crazed, inveterate moviegoing); he can afford to rest. But he is still, it appears, determined to continue making the kind of film that will, like “Shutter Island,” become “something else” for him.

Based on an exceptionally tricky 2003 mystery novel by Dennis Lehane, “Shutter Island” wears its something-elseness proudly, even defiantly. It’s a true oddity, an outlier, as isolated and enigmatic as the gloomy, rain-whipped island on which the action takes place. The hero, a federal marshal named Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), is a tormented soul, the type of man to whom Mr. Scorsese has never been a stranger, from his first movie, “Who’s That Knocking at My Door?” (1968), through “Mean Streets” (1973) and “Taxi Driver” (1976) and “Raging Bull” (1980) and “The Aviator” (2004), in which Mr. DiCaprio played a Howard Hughes beset by hallucinations, bizarre phobias and creeping paranoia. Teddy’s emotional troubles manifest themselves, for most of the film, as very bad dreams — many of them about his dead wife — and the most spectacular movie migraines since James Cagney in “White Heat.”

“When I read the script,” Mr. Scorsese said, “I was just taken by the character, felt very empathetic with him.”

Teddy, accompanied by his curiously passive partner, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), is on Shutter Island to investigate a disappearance. This island, an unprepossessing chunk of rock out in Boston Harbor, houses an asylum for the criminally insane, one of whom — a woman who murdered her children — has somehow managed to vanish from her cell. We learn fairly early on that Teddy might have other agendas: the man he believes killed his wife may be an inmate there, and he’s suspicious of the motives of the asylum’s psychiatric staff, represented here by the reliably ambiguous Ben Kingsley and the great, gaunt Max von Sydow (who, thanks to Ingmar Bergman, has done time on more than a few bleak, chilly, madness-inducing islands himself).

What makes “Shutter Island” feel so peculiar for this director to have made isn’t the troubled protagonist, or the detective-movie plot mechanics. It’s the claustrophobia, the tight, hermetic, locked-down structure that’s so unusual for Mr. Scorsese, whose films are generally a lot more expansive. As Mr. DiCaprio, who has starred in all four of the nondocumentary features Mr. Scorsese has directed since 2002, explained, “With scripts like ‘Gangs of New York’ and ‘The Aviator’ there’s a little more flexibility, certain things that can be done to reshape the character, but in scripts like ‘Shutter Island’ there are too many interlocking segments. If you take one piece out, the story starts to fall apart.”

Mr. Scorsese makes the structure sound more delicate yet: “With the editing we found that just putting in one reaction shot could throw the scene off completely.” The movie’s balance is, like its hero’s, fragile.

Most of the film was shot at an abandoned mental institution in Medfield, Mass., which had, Mr. Scorsese said, “the feeling of a trap, a labyrinth — a labyrinth of the mind, which is what I wanted.”

It’s hard not to suspect, as you listen to him discoursing with a certain relish about the technical problems of the film and the rigors of shooting in a mental hospital — “It’s not a good feeling, being there every day” — that he has come to a point in his career where he actually thrives on difficulty, almost can’t do without it. Mr. DiCaprio described the process of working out the nuances of Teddy’s character as “pretty intense, because I didn’t really understand how emotionally complex this character is until Marty and I started breaking down this cathartic journey he goes on.” He paused and added: “When you’re working with someone like Martin Scorsese, you know you’re going to have to go places emotionally that you didn’t ever foresee.”

For Mr. Scorsese that’s entertainment. Some filmmakers as they grow older begin to pare down their styles, to produce mellow, autumnal works that attempt to express with serene simplicity the accrued wisdom of their lives. Does that sound like Martin Scorsese? His movies have always been fueled by nervous energy and huge uprushes of adrenaline, and it’s nearly impossible to imagine him doing without some kind of emotional turbulence, even if he has to induce it by sheer force of will.

Or stimulants may sometimes be required. With Mr. Scorsese’s filmmaking, the drugs of choice are primarily the memory of old movies, and the selection of music for his collagelike soundtracks. Robbie Robertson, formerly of the Band, met Mr. Scorsese during the filming of the concert documentary “The Last Waltz” (1978) and has collaborated with him on several movies since. Mr. Robertson, credited as music supervisor on “Shutter Island,” said: “Marty just has this unique gift with regard to music in film. It’s one of those mysteries. You could tell right from the opening scene of ‘Mean Streets,’ with the Ronettes doing ‘Be My Baby.’ It isn’t about the song, or the lyrics, it only has to do with the Wall of Sound, and that’s why it’s so beautiful.”

On “Shutter Island,” Mr. Robertson said, “This was the first time in all these years that he’s ever said to me, ‘God, I don’t know what to do with this material music-wise.’ ” The solution they came up with, weirdly appropriate to the anxious era in which the movie is set, was to use modern classical music in the way that, in previous films, they would deploy brief, timed charges of rock or pop or blues: here the sonic blasts come from composers like Krzysztof Penderecki, John Adams, John Cage, Gyorgy Ligeti and Morton Feldman. And this music, much of it dissonant, stark, hauntingly repetitious or plain spooky, certainly amps up the film’s thick atmosphere of dread. “With something like Penderecki’s ‘Passacaglia,’ ” Mr. Scorsese said, “it’s definitely bold and to me it reflects what’s going on inside Teddy. If you’re with the film, with the character on this strange journey he’s on, that’s the kind of music you hear in your head.”

The funny thing is, a fair amount of the fierce, moody modern music in “Shutter Island” sounds a bit like ’50s movie music too, something from an angst-drenched psychological drama by Elia Kazan, say, or Nicholas Ray. It’s inward-turning music, lonely music. Pop songs are used extremely sparingly, because popular music implies a larger world, millions listening, maybe dancing — the world outside this island and this tormented hero’s mind.

The old-movie memories have a part to play in this insular universe too. “I love memory,” Mr. Scorsese said, “I mean, I’m a preservationist.” (Twenty years ago he was the prime mover in the creation of the Film Foundation, which restores and protects endangered movies, and still serves on its board.)

He always shows classic films to his cast and crew. “We saw ‘Laura,’ ‘Out of the Past’ and of course ‘Vertigo,’ ” Mr. DiCaprio said, “all these movies about obsessed detectives coming to terms with themselves through their investigations.” He added: “He wanted a genre feel to the film, and wanted it to be specific to this particular era. It’s almost like he’s accessing his dreams or something, the dreams being all those movies. They’re like memories coming back to him.”

So when Mr. Scorsese talks about “Shutter Island,” he also inevitably needs to speak of remembered films like those of Jacques Tourneur, who made the doomy, complex noir “Out of the Past” (1947). “I like watching ‘Out of the Past’ repeatedly,” he said, “because I never know quite where I am in it, I don’t know what’s the beginning, the middle or the end. I screened it for Leo and the other actors just to show that sense of a character not knowing where he is at a given point in time and trying to figure it out from scene to scene.” (He confided, “I didn’t think it was going over at all, but at the end Leo applauded and said to me, ‘That’s the coolest movie I ever saw.’ ”)

That nervous sense of not knowing exactly where you are, beginning, middle or end, seems somehow vitally important to Mr. Scorsese, who, although closer to the end of his career, has for the past decade been making movies with the jittery vigor of a beginner, trying on different genres, different sounds, different actors (with Mr. DiCaprio as a constant) in a valiant attempt to keep himself sufficiently disoriented to create his kind of something else.

The run of Scorsese movies between “Gangs of New York” (2002) and “Shutter Island” (which also includes his 2008 Rolling Stones concert documentary “Shine a Light”) is perhaps his liveliest, most varied, and most consistently inventive stretch since the 1970s. He finds a way to remain charged up, by any means necessary, even if it involves making a film as relentlessly and baroquely interior as “Shutter Island,” which has the nightmare architecture of a Piranesi prison. Whatever works. And what works for Mr. Scorsese, usually, is some form of unease. He may or may not be stuck in the ’50s, but for him it’s always, one way or another, an age of anxiety.

"Shutter Island": Entrevistas y Detrás de Escena

Tal vez aparezca antes también, pero al menos yo alcanzo a reconocer a Celina Murga justo al final de este último clip.

Radio Micropsia - Episodio 11

Por Radio Nacional (FM 93.7), domingo de 20 a 22hs.
O por internet, entrando por aquí.

Tras dos domingos de vacaciones --los que se cubrieron con una buena selección musical--, regresa el programa en vivo, otra vez con invitados. Celina Murga y Juan Villegas (no, el de la foto no es Juan, ya saben...), directores, productores, guionistas, marido, mujer y padres, estarán en el piso para contarnos, bueno, varias cosas. Desde la experiencia de Celina con Scorsese en el rodaje de "La isla siniestra" (película que ambos vimos y de la que vamos a hablar) hasta su nuevo proyecto, pasando obviamente por "Una semana solos", para mí la mejor película argentina estrenada en 2009 y nominada al premio Fipresci. Juan terminó de rodar "Ocio", junto al colega Alejandro Lingenti, filme basado en un texto de Fabián Casas. Y hablaremos de eso, claro. Además de analizar el cine argentino del año que pasó y del que se viene, y del fenómeno de las mujeres directoras en la Argentina. ¿Será por CFK?

Además, música, claro. Desde el nuevo disco de David Bowie en vivo y el de covers de Peter Gabriel, hasta una selección musical femenina --haciendo honor a uno de los "ejes" de la noche-- que va de Ingrid Chavez a Rose Melberg, pasando por Emma Pollock, Scout Niblett y... Sade. Sí, Sade, que a los 51 años (por Dios, cómo pasa el tiempo!) tiene disco nuevo y está buenísimo.

Además, se regalarán entradas para curioso documental argentino con nombre brasileño y tema boliviano.

Preguntas a Scorsese y DiCaprio...

DreamWorks has lauched a pretty cool campiagn on Twitter, where fans have a chance to ask both director Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio questions about Shutter Island. In the film Leonardo DiCaprio plays one of two U.S marshals who are investigating the disappearance of a patient from a hospital for the criminally insane on an island in Massachusetts. Trouble arises when they are deceived by the hospital’s chief administrator. Then there is a hurricane which traps them on the island and then to top if off the inmates start rioting.

If you are interested in asking a question use the hashtags #AskLeo and #AskScorsese. For example, you could ask them both why they work with each other so much, and whether they are trying to beat Johnny Depp and Tim Burton in the collaboration department.

Their questions and answers will be weeked on Friday.

"Shutter Island", de Martin Scorsese (crítica)

By John Gholson/Cinematical

We've come to expect Martin Scorsese to swing for the fences every single time he's at bat, so when a movie comes along like Shutter Island, a pulpy, by-the-numbers thriller, it's easy to feel a slight twinge of disappointment. Here, we're dealing with a lesser work by a modern master, which is to say that Shutter Island is still a crackerjack mystery, executed with great artistic care, but it's also Scorsese working about as close as he ever has to popcorn-munching cineplex fare. It's a hard-boiled and unpretentious outing, but the individual parts of Shutter Island are greater than the whole -- particularly the cinematography by Robert Richardson and outstanding work from a dream team ensemble cast.

Leading that dream team is Leonardo DiCaprio as U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels, called in to a state-run mental institution on a storm-battered, rocky island on the East Coast, along with his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo). The delusional murderess Rachel Solando has gone missing from her cell, leaving behind no evident clues, and with those in charge of the facility (Ben Kingsley, who needs to work with Scorsese more often, and Max Von Sydow) only forthcoming with information to the officers as it seems to suit them.

Daniels immerses himself in the investigation with unhealthy abandon, perhaps as a way to force back the memories of the recent death of his wife (Michelle Williams) at the hands of an arsonist, or, more troubling, to quiet the voices that constantly remind him of his own violent past, time spent serving out gruesome wartime justice to anonymous Nazi soldiers. Trapped on Shutter Island during a nasty storm, Daniels begins to let on to Chuck that he knows more about the hospital than anything they've learned while investigating Solando. There's a connection with Daniel's wife's killer and the institution -- a connection that Daniels is convinced leads to secret House Un-American Activities Committee-funded neurological experiments taking place in Shutter Island's nigh-impenetrable lighthouse.


The handling of this information is indicative of greater problems at work in the screenplay of Laeta Kalogridis (Pathfinder), adapting Dennis Lehane's 2003 novel. Daniels unloads soggy exposition about his wife's murderer, the island, and HUAC, in big, sudden chunks that seem to come from nowhere other than the plot demands these twists and turns exist. He just seems to know stuff when the film wants him to know stuff, and the more coincidental information he seemingly knows about the island, the more determined the folks who occupy the island seem to be in keeping him stuck there (yet letting him run free all over the facility).

This created a problem for me -- I became less interested in the mystery that moves the film, that of Rachel Solando, and much more interested in the "why" of Daniels getting the run-around from doctors and patients alike. I couldn't figure out to what end it would serve to have a U.S. Marshal come out to help with a dangerous situation, then have him stomp around the whole place hamstrung by selective lying on the part of the institution. The film loses focus as Daniels loses his focus (his preoccupation with the lighthouse superseding his drive to find Solando) -- creating situations that make you question your own suspension of disbelief over the questions at hand in the plot itself.

It's to the film's credit then that it answers all pressing questions by the time it reaches its finale, including those questions of "why" that I'd found distracting through most of the film's running time. If my brain hadn't been allowed to wander, trying to figure out character motivations in Kalogridis' convoluted script, I'm sure the wrap-up would've had a greater emotional impact on me. Scorcese certainly gets the best from DiCaprio in those final scenes, elevating what could've been a forgettable thriller into an exceptional performance piece.

DiCaprio's violent streak is utterly believable, though we never see it fully on display. There's rage in Teddy Daniels' eyes and a body language that speaks of high-blood pressure and binge drinking. He's perpetually sweaty and perpetually troubled, about a great many disturbing things, and it makes for an interesting contrast against everyone he comes in contact with in Shutter Island -- from the oddly peaceful Dr. Cawley (Kingsley) to the jovial alpha-male hospital guard played by Ted Levine (who attempts to verbally goad Daniels into violence during one of the film's most memorable scenes). If Shutter Island's delay to 2010 kept anyone out of the 2009 Oscar race, it was Leonardo DiCaprio.

Scorsese gets fabulous work from cinematographer Robert Richardson as well (as usual). Richardson lensed Casino, Bringing Out the Dead, and The Aviator for this director, and the two, when paired, seem especially interested in playing with color palettes. Shutter Island's flashbacks and dreams are vivid beyond belief, offering an eye-popping respite from the grey, rain-soaked cliffs that so often fill the frame. Story quibbling aside, Shutter Island is high on atmosphere, in large part due to the visuals, and the collaboration between Scorsese and Richardson actually feels like the two men having a blast with their craft.

I'm certainly sure Scorsese is having fun. While I wouldn't describe Shutter Island as a "fun" movie, its B-movie roots show through with obvious abandon. Everything exists in a heightened reality here. Everyone is a little too sinister; the cops are a little too hard-nosed; the shadows loom a little too large. Shutter Island, despite all of its flaws, is not a career misstep for the director, just a bit of a sidestep. I have no doubts that Scorsese made exactly the film he wanted to make, with all its corkscrew logic and earnest intensity, but it's missing a bit of the visceral punch we're used to from a Scorcese work. Maybe we're a little bit spoiled?

Note: Shutter Island will arrive in theaters on February 19th, 2010.

The 60th Berlinale: Films by Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski to celebrate world premieres in the Competition programme

The first seven titles for the Competition of the 60th Berlin International Film Festival have been confirmed. The films selected so far are from Austria , Bosnia and Herzegovina , Croatia , France , Germany , India , Iran , Turkey , the UK and the USA .

This first group of films selected for the Competition is characterized by up-and-coming young directors, stars and masters of filmmaking like Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski.

“The Competition of the 60th anniversary Berlinale will be marked by a mix of styles and genres, by exciting newcomers and renowned directors,” says Festival Director Dieter Kosslick.

The following films have been confirmed for the Competition programme so far:

Bal (Honey) Turkey / Germany
by Semih Kaplanoglu (Süt/Milk, Yumurta/Egg, Melegin Düsüsü/Angel’s Fall)
with Bora Altas, Erdal Besikcioglu, Tülin Özen, Alev Ucarer, Ayse Altay
World premiere

Der Räuber (The Robber) Austria / Germany

by Benjamin Heisenberg (Sleeper, Max-Ophuels-Preis 2006)

with Andreas Lust, Franziska Weisz

World premiere

My Name Is Khan India

by Karan Johar

with Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol

Out of competition

Na Putu (On the Path) Bosnia and Herzegovina / Austria / Germany / Croatia

by Jasmila Žbanić (Grbavica, Golden Bear 2006)

with Zrinka Cvitešić (Shooting Star 2010), Leon Lucev, Ermin Bravo, Mirjana Karanović

World premiere

Shekarchi (The Hunter) Germany / Iran

by Rafi Pitts (Zemestan - It's Winter)

with Rafi Pitts, Mitra Hajjar, Ali Nicksaulat, Hassan Ghalenoi

World premiere

Shutter Island USA

by Martin Scorsese (The Departed, Aviator, Cape Fear)

with Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Sir Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams, Patricia Clarkson, Max von Sydow
World premiere / Out of competition

The Ghost Writer France / Germany / UK

by Roman Polanski (The Pianist, Oscar 2002, China Town, Cul-de-sac, Golden Bear 1966)

with Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Kim Cattrall, Olivia Williams

World premiere

A total of 26 films will be selected for the Competition section of the 60th Berlin International Film Festival. Further Competition title confirmations will be announced in January 2010.

Trailer Trash: "Invictus", "Green Zone", "Alice in Wonderland", "Shutter Island"

Alice in Wonderland - Extended Trailer

"Shutter Island", de Martin Scorsese (poster)

"Shutter Island" es... "La isla siniestra"

Esta es la primera foto oficial enviada por la distribuidora UIP de la nueva película de Martin Scorsese, "Shutter Island", que tendrá aquí el muy anodino título de "La isla siniestra". En la Argentina su estreno está anunciado para el 8 de octubre.

"Shutter Island", de Martin Scorsese (Official Trailer)

Entrevista a Martin Scorsese (Clarín)

Otra vez, como ya tantas, acá va la desgrabación completa de la entrevista a Martin Scorsese que se publica hoy en "Clarín" y que, como suele suceder, por motivos de espacio hubo que cortar. Lo más interesante que hay aquí que no entró en la nota es cuando habla de la película de Elia Kazan que está haciendo junto a Kent Jones. La versión publicada en el diario la pueden leer aquí. Y la foto --nobleza obliga-- es gentileza de Rolex. Podrían haber mandado un relojito también, ¿no?

Martin Scorsese no necesita demasiada presentación. Probablemente uno de los cineastas más admirados y respetados de todos los tiempos, realizador de clásicos como “Taxi Driver”, “Toro salvaje”, “Buenos muchachos” y la ganadora del Oscar “Los infiltrados”, Scorsese eligió a la cineasta argentina Celina Murga en el marco de la Iniciativa Rolex para Mentores y Discípulos. De esa manera, la realizadora de “Ana y los otros” compartió con el director el rodaje de su nuevo filme, “Shutter Island”. Con motivo del estreno local de “Una semana solos” –la segunda película de Murga--, el director de “Casino” y “Después de hora” accedió a hacerse un tiempo en su apretada agenda para responder las preguntas de “Clarín” acerca de sus películas, sus mentores e influencias y su pasión por la historia del cine y los grandes realizadores.

-Usted siempre menciona a John Cassavetes como su mentor y maestro. ¿Cuán importante fue para su carrera y que aprendió de él?

-John me dio un ejemplo muy importante de dos maneras y en dos momentos cruciales. El primero fue mucho antes de conocernos, cuando vi “Shadows” por primera vez –la única vez, en realidad, porque la impresión que me causó la película fue tan inmediata e indeleble que siempre quise conservar la experiencia de esa primera vez en mi memoria. “Shadows” me demostró que no había excusas, que podías agarrar una cámara y trabajar directamente desde su propia experiencia y que si respetabas tu propia verdad, podías comunicarla en un filme, más allá de las limitaciones. “Shadows” estaba llena de errors técnicos, pero no importaba ni un poquito. Nos mostró que no era fácil, porque ser honesto con vos mismo y con la vida que te rodea es difícil: no es amable, esta siempre cargado de cosas. Pero también nos mostró que no era imposible, que hacer cine estaba a nuestro alcance.

-¿Cómo se conocieron?

Muchos años después, a través de nuestro amigo en común Jay Cocks. John vio mi primera película (“Who’s That Knocking on My Door”) y le gustó lo que trataba de hacer; pero cuando vio mi segunda, “Boxcar Bertha”, fue brutalmente honesto. De hecho, me dijo: “Hiciste un buen trabajo, pero pasaste un año de tu vida haciendo un pedazo de basura. Ahora andá y filmá algo que tengas ganas de filmar, algo que necesites filmar.” Y así fue que salió el guión que, eventualmente, se convirtió en “Calles salvajes”. Ahora, lo que es importante entender es John no era crítico sólo por el hecho de serlo. El hablaba desde la urgencia. El había pasado por el sistema de estudios, él pensó que así podría hacer películas que lo iban a satisfacer a él y a ellos al mismo tiempo, y se dio cuenta de que no podía --no en ese momento de su vida, al menos. Y el reconoció que para mí, entonces, era lo mismo. Me comunicó la urgencia de la situación y me habló a mí y para mí al mismo tiempo.

-Además de John debe haber habido otros maestros en su vida, no sólo en el cine…

-La vida de todos está llena de mentores. Y esas enseñanzas pueden venir de las formas más raras e inesperadas. En mi caso empieza por mis padres, Charles y Catherine Scorsese. Con mi tía Fanny, que falleció recientemente. Con mi tío Joe. Y luego con el Padre Francis Principe, a quién conocí cuando tenía doce años. Y luego, a la distancia, Elia Kazan fue una clase de mentor completamente diferente. El lo sabía y yo también, pero nunca hablamos del tema. Y luego sigue toda la vida. Por ejemplo ahora aprendo mucho de mi hija Francesa, cuando miro el mundo a través de sus ojos.

-¿Porqué eligió a Celina Murga como su “discípula”? ¿Qué es lo que vio en su trabajo que le hizo sentir que se trata de una cineasta promisoria?

-Cuando vi “Ana y los otros” y luego “Una semana solos”, lo supe enseguida: aquí hay un cineasta de verdad. ¿Cómo lo supe? El cine es algo que parece natural en ella. Cuando alguien tiene un sentido de la “vida” dentro del cuadro, del movimiento, de la distancia, y cuando saben cómo dirigir tu mirada a través del material, entonces sabés que hay un cineasta allí. Lo podés notar inmediatamente en las películas de Celina, desde la primera imagen.

-¿Y cómo fue tenerla a Celina en el set de “Shutter Island”?

-Me encantó estar con Celina en el set porque ella tiene pasión por el cine, es algo que compartimos. Y además es alguien que sabe “estar presente” y eso es más que suficiente. Eso es algo que aprecio y que valoro mucho.

-¿Usted piensa que se aprende más viendo trabajar a un cineasta o viendo sus películas?

-Lo que se aprende de ver a cineastas trabajando es una cosa, y supongo que siempre tiene que ver con el hecho de que cada uno tiene su propia forma de trabajar. Ver las películas es otra cosa. ¿Cómo hizo King Vidor para conseguir esa extraordinaria toma de los rascacielos a través de la ventana de la ambulancia en “The Fountainhead”? ¿Por qué tiene un efecto emocional tan profundo y visceral? La ví muchas veces y me doy cuenta que tiene que ver con el lugar que tiene en la historia, el hecho de que es la visión de un hombre que está muriendo, que es una sorpresa en el filme, que engancha directamente con el tema de la película, que el ángulo es importante, que la Cruz Roja está en el centro del cuadro y que es algo que se consigue ópticamente y es muy importante porque es casi el emblema de un credo, de un credo de vida, en este caso del poder de la arquitectura. Ves algo, te afecta, lo volvés a mirar para ver cómo fue conseguido. Y mirás la misma imagen algunos años después, en un momento diferente de tu vida, y te atrapa otra cosa por razones completamente diferentes. El punto es: nunca podés mirar demasiado cerca, ir demasiado profundo. Es algo con lo que vivís, que se convierte en parte de tu existencia. Uno cambia y también cambian las películas.

-Usted es un realizador y a la vez un historiador del cine. ¿Nunca tiene la impresión de que tanta información e “influencias” pueden ser un poco paralizantes a la hora de trabajar?

-El término “influencia” ha sido mal usado por alguna gente, me parece. Es una de esas palabras que no entiendo bien qué significan. Podés tener grandes sensaciones sobre todo tipo de películas y cargar con miles de imágenes en tu cabeza, pero cuando empezás a trabajar, créame, estás solo. Quiero decir: en un sentido no lo estás porque tenés colaboradores de los que podés depender y eso es invaluable. Pero en otro sentido, si querés ser fiel a algo que sentiste que había en el material, está en vos y sólo en vos. La parte de la “influencia” viene antes, cuando estás preparando, o ni siquiera preparando, sino mirando imágenes; escenas y películas porque son parte del vocabulario cinematográfico que tenés en mente para una historia en particular. Pero no es realmente una cuestión de influencia.

-¿Existen películas que lo hagan pensar: “Desearía haberla hecho yo”?

Hay tantas… Tantas películas geniales e inspiradoras. Tomá mis cinco películas favoritas –“El Ciudadano”, “Más corazón que odio”, “Las zapatillas rojas”, “Ocho y medio” y “El gatopardo”--. Hay veces en las que tenido una sensación de envidia viéndolas y también hay momentos en que he pensado, “podría parar ahora porqué, ¿para qué intentar hacer otra cosa? Está todo acá!” Y hay otras veces en las que me siento a verlas asombrado y agradecido que esos filmes existen en el mundo, y me siento un privilegiado por haberlos visto.

-¿Cómo es su relación con los críticos de cine en general? ¿Lee las críticas de sus películas o críticas en general?

-Trato de no leer críticas de mis propias películas y no leo demasiado teoría cinematográfica. Me gusta leer sobre la historia del cine y vuelvo a ciertos críticos, de tanto en tanto, algunos como James Agee, por ejemplo, pero más como escritor que como crítico de cine.

-¿Hay algún cineasta de la historia que lo haga sentir “impotente” en el sentido de sentir que nunca podrá hacer lo que él hizo?

-Bueno, no sé si quiero hacer lo que otro ya hizo… Pero sí que hay ciertos cineastas que me maravillan. Powell y Pressburger, por ejemplo. Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard, Kubrick, Bertolucci. Ves su obra y es inspiradora. Y también puede llegar a ser atemorizante. Pero eso es parte de la vida. Es como Beckett: “No puedo seguir… Voy a seguir”. Ves algo que te hace pensar, “bueno, eso fue tan genial que la vida podría parar ahora, todo podría terminar”. Pero no. Siempre hay más cosas para ver y para hacer.

-Después del Oscar a Elia Kazan y la controversia que se generó al respecto, usted está trabajando ahora con Kent Jones en un documental sobre el director. ¿Por qué siente que es tan importante hacerlo?

Como dije, Elia Kazan fue muy importante para mí. “Nido de ratas” y “Al Este del Paraíso” me abrieron muchas puertas, emocional y cinematográficamente como era un adolescente. Fueron formativas para mí. Sentí la necesidad de hacer una película sobre Kazan que realmente mostrara la importancia que él tuvo para mí y, por extensión, la importancia que el trabajo de un artista puede tener para un chico en sus años formativos, cómo si bien la percepción de una obra puede cambiar a través del tiempo, esa primera reacción poderosa permanece, como una semilla que crece y se transforma en el deseo de hacer tus propias películas. Le pedí a Kent que trabajase conmigo y nos tomó mucho tiempo hacerla, refinarla, llevarla a donde queríamos. Se llama “A Letter to Elia” y esperamos poder terminarla pronto. En un nivel más amplio, es importante porque la gente necesita aprender de cineastas del pasado una y otra vez. Ahora hay generaciones para las cuales Kazan es sólo una leyenda o tal vez apenas un nombre, o ni siquiera eso.

-Los cineastas norteamericanos parecen estar sólo interesados en el cine norteamericano y, a lo sumo, en algunos directores europeos. ¿Qué piensa que se están perdiendo del cine del mundo?

Hay algunos directores norteamericanos a los que solo les interesa el cine de los Estados Unidos, pero también hay muchos otros con una apreciación más amplia del cine de todo el mundo. Eso se distorsiona un poco en la prensa porque hay una cierta presión por focalizarse sólo en las películas norteamericanas. Pero muchos cineastas que conozco ven películas de todos lados y de todas las épocas. Parafraseando a Peter Bogdanovich, “no hay películas extranjeras: solo hay películas que vi y películas que no vi”.

-Si tuviera que elegir cineastas de todo el mundo que usted piensa que merecen ser más conocidos, ¿a cuáles elegiría y porqué?

Hay muchísimos cineastas talentosos trabajando actualmente cuyo trabajo merece mucha más exposición: Souleymane Cissé de Mali, Tian Zhuangzhuang and Jia Zhang-ke de China, Celina and Lucrecia Martel de Argentina, Carlos Reygadas de México, Hong Sang-soo de Corea del Sur, Apichatpong Weerasetakhul de Tailandia… Y podría seguir y seguir…

- La Argentina tiene una larga tradición cinematográfica. ¿Conoce algo de ella? ¿Hay algún cineasta que le parezca interesante? ¿Habló con Celina acerca de eso?

-Estoy aprendiendo sobre cine argentino. Conocía algunas películas de Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, pero Celina me ha mostrado filmes de Leonardo Favio y Kent (Jones) me ha hablado acerca de otros cineastas cuyo trabajo me gustaría ver. Siempre es excitante porque hay muchísimo para descubrir. En todos lados. Y en el cine norteamericano también.

-¿Cuán importante fue finalmente ganar el Oscar para usted después de todos estos años?

Pongámoslo de esta manera: no fue algo intrascendente. Pero a la mañana siguiente recuerdo haberme dicho a mí mismo, “OK, ¿cuando podemos volver a trabajar?”

-¿Puede adelantar algo acerca de cómo será su nueva película “Shutter Island”?

Se basa en una novella de Dennis Lehane y transcurre en una isla fuera de Boston en 1954 en la que hay un lugar que funciona como prisión y hospital para los “criminalmente insanos”. Más allá de eso, no quiero adelantar mucho. Prefiero que la gente la descubra por sí misma.

RECUADRO

En el pasado Festival de Cannes, Scorsese anunció que la World Cinema Foundation (WCF) que él preside trabajará para que las películas que restauran puedan ser vistas a través de Internet. Al respecto, dijo a “Clarín”: “ La WCF fue creada para facilitar la restauración y diseminación de películas de países en los cuales el sistema de archivos cinematográficos no es una prioridad. Hasta ahora, con nuestros colaboradores en el Bologna Film Archive hemos restaurado películas de Turquía, Senegal, Taiwan, Corea del Sur, Egipto y muchos otros países, elegidos por los cineastas que forman nuestro consejo asesor. También queremos ayudar a construir un archivo en Mali. Y el area en la que sentimos que más podemos hacer es en la diseminación. En este clima, en el cual los distribuidores y exhibidores están pasando por un momento tan duro, sentido que era importante tener una presencia online. Obviamente que yo quisiera que las películas se vean en las condiciones ideales, pero enfrentemos la realidad: esas condiciones no son posibles para todos. Esa por eso que hemos formado sociedades con The Auteurs y B Side. Queremos que toda la gente posible vea películas como Trances y The Housemaid. Uno puede debatir respecto al hecho de cómo se ve una película online, pero la idea es crear una conciencia, un deseo para que la gente vea las películas en condiciones óptimas.”