Martin Scorsese analyzes old age: "I spend most of my time alone"

These are bittersweet times for Martin Scorsese. Every time he leaves his house he is revered as one of the most important directors that cinema has ever had and also enjoys the unequivocal response of critics, who consider his latest film, The Assassins of the Moon, as another of his works. teachers. However, when he returns to his townhouse on the elegant Upper East Side in his native New York, he hangs fame and accolades on the rack to continue dealing with a complex family life with his fifth wife, Helen Morris, with whom he has lived since nineteen ninety six.

Helen, the great love of his life and the woman who fulfilled Marty’s wish to have a third daughter, Francesca, who is now 23, has been battling Parkinson’s for more than three decades, which is why she has serious mobility problems. and requires permanent attention. But Scorsese, who will turn 81 on November 17, does not get along at all well with an age that limits him physically and forces him to be realistic in the face of his ambitious plans to continue directing.

In a long interview with the American edition of GQ magazine, the great master of cinema admitted: “I am at an age where I know I can die at any moment. That’s why I have to reduce everything to the bare minimum and not pay attention to people’s expectations,” he said, adding that at this stage of his life there is no room for social life: “My house requires a lot of attention, and there is just a few people who understand it and are courteous enough to participate. We used to have big dinners and events, but now we do much less. I spend most of my time alone, and if I meet people, it is only for business reasons,” he confessed.

Scorsese says that he always wondered what it would be like to grow old, although it is also true that turning 80 was at other times a distant goal. Asthma plagued him since he was a child, and his fascination with cinema dates back to that time, when his illness forced him to spend most of his time at home accompanied by his books, and his only outings were to the neighborhood cinema. poor place full of Italian immigrants where you could escape for a while from a suffocating reality.

Later, a life of excess in the late 1970s forced him to repeatedly visit the hospital: “While I was filming the documentary The Last Waltz, Robbie Robertson moved into my house and we had a great time. I wanted to see how the magic of his music was generated, and that meant participating in a lifestyle that had to do with always partying, and I lost control. Luckily, I survived that moment,” he told Zach Baron.

Still, and although he is in good health, dealing with the demands of a star director at his age is not always easy. Watching his own film in one sitting, with its 206 minutes of duration, involved an unusual effort, although it was much easier than finishing it, since from its conception to its arrival in theaters it took six years of his life, and included a moment in which the script had to be completely rewritten, leading Paramount Pictures to suspend financing.

But the most difficult thing for him is, as he describes it, “the experience of being 80.” Scorsese explains in the interview: “My family has been dying: my parents and my brother are gone and maybe I have a couple of cousins ??left. We are talking about a family in which my mother had seven siblings and my father had eight. They are all gone,” he bitterly shared in that interview.

Despite his regret, Scorsese knows he can’t waste time. His name appears as an executive producer on countless projects, including Maestro, which Bradley Cooper directs and stars. A few days ago it was confirmed that his next film will also feature Leonardo DiCaprio and will be called The Wager: a tale of shipwreck, mutiny and murder.

As he told GQ, this true story about the shipwreck of the HMS Wager off the coast of Chile in 1741, which will likely begin filming within a year, could be his last film: “Maybe I can muster the energy to make a couple more, maybe just one, and that will be all. I will have arrived there. I’m going to keep trying until they pick me up off the ground. “You keep going until you can’t take it anymore,” says the man who mentioned to Time magazine in a cover article that he dreams of adapting Marilynne Robinson’s novel Home and that he would like to make another film about Jesus that would not have a traditional structure.