Watch Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese’s Epic ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Chat, a Tribute to Cinema and Friendship
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Perhaps the best, most consistently wonderful thing about awards season is the engrossing legend-on-legend conversations that it always yields. If a famous Hollywood triple-OG has an Oscar contender on deck, you can bet sooner or later they’ll pair up with someone of equal stature to engage in a very dope discussion where they both get to fan out over the other.
But what we have here may break the Cool Meter: noted Brooklyn filmmaker Spike Lee, interviewing noted Little Italy filmmaker Martin Scorsese, on the occasion of the latter’s Killers of the Flower Moon, which is up for 10 Oscars next month, including Best Picture You’ve seen that awesome picture of Spike, Marty, Joe Pesci, and Robert De Niro, suited up and having a laugh back in 1998? Well imagine those vibes, stretched across a 40-minute convo.
We get Scorsese going into great detail about the process of making Flower Moon, from the meeting with a group of Osage elders that unlocked the story to the pivotal casting of Lily Gladstone (“She has a face that’s like a natural for cinema— you can read anything into it…I’m Italian, so it’s like Renaissance painting. Like the Madonna.”) But even this part of the conversation yields back-and-forths only an interlocutor like Spike—an auteur on his own right, but also a fan just like us—could pull out, like the two vets laughing knowingly at a concept so naive as “an easy shoot” and commiserating over how easily one falls prey to the “the director’s disease” (first symptom: imagining you’re in for an “easy shoot.”)
But Scorsese and Lee go way back—they met for the first time in 1985, when Scorsese screened After Hours for a group of NYU film students that included young Spike—and before long, the conversation opens up naturally into a larger reminiscence between two bros who have been around the block for a couple of decades. A tender tangent about Scorsese’s fifty-year friendship and creative collaboration with the late Robbie Robertson (“We’d get together, years ago, and we’d be playing music and listening and talking stories, and getting crazy, and two days and nights had gone by”) leads to Spike hilariously imploring his “brother” to explain—without naming names—why some of their fellow directors are so bad at using non-diegetic music in their films.
Then we get into untold stories from their respective legendary filmographies, like how Spike smoothed over static with Frank Sinatra (who didn’t take kindly to seeing his photo burned up in Do the Right Thing) in order to license songs for Jungle Fever, or Scorsese recalling what it was like for him and his longtime right hand, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, to sit with an unsuspecting test-screening audience as they watched Joe Pesci pull out a kitchen knife to finish off Billy Batts in the opening sequence of a then-unreleased film called Goodfellas.
“So, I’m sitting there— and this is a rough cut of the picture,” Scorsese recalls. “There are three stabs…people start to leave. It starts becoming like the exodus from Egypt. They’re leaving. They’re going up the aisle. I start to sink in my chair…I tell Thelma, ‘How many more stabs do we have?’ She goes, ‘Seven more.’ I go ‘Oh, no! We don’t need seven more!’”
Watch the full video below for more of the same on classics like King of Comedy (“When they saw DeNiro, Scorsese [on] a picture…They wanted Raging Bull. We showed it in a couple of previews and people got mad”) and Do the Right Thing, and count your blessings that we get to watch two titans casually shoot the shit over making some of our best pictures.
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