Martin Scorsese recalls the moment he 'had a calling to make movies'
Legendary director Martin Scorsese took a trip down memory lane and recalled the moment he "had a calling to make movies".
- LOS ANGELES — Legendary director Martin Scorsese took a trip down memory lane
and recalled the moment he "had a calling to make movies". He decided
on his future career at the age of five when he watched Italian war drama
“Paisan.”
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- He watched the Italian war drama with his family and
heard the Sicilian dialect spoken by relatives in New York onscreen for the
first time.
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- Speaking at the Taormina Film Festival in Sicily, where
he accepted a lifetime achievement award, the director told the audience:
"It was there in that room, that night, that I had a calling to make
movies, and to touch people in the same way that this film touched us that
night.
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- "So it is Sicily that helped draw me to cinema and
cinema drew me to Sicily."
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- He added of his American upbringing: "With the
exception of Native Americans, we’re all either immigrants, children of
immigrants or descendants of immigrants. The country is very young. It’s 250
years old, which is nothing in terms of world history. We’re learning. We’re
just crawling. We haven’t begun yet to walk or talk."
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- During his speech, Scorsese also paid tribute to
Hollywood movie legend Frank Capra, a fellow director with Sicilian roots.
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- The moviemaker ended his speech by saying: "I
wonder, where I would be without Italian cinema. The debt I owe to Italian
cinema and the people that made it and are continuing to make it, is really
incalculable. I’ll never stop talking about it, to the entire world, wherever I
go and I thank you for this wonderful honor to be here tonight.
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- "Thank you for bringing me back home."
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- In an interview with Variety, Scorsese went on to explain
his strong connection to his Italian homeland, saying: "Growing up, my
first formative years, even before my early teenage (years), I was really
living in a Sicilian village. It just happened to be downtown in Manhattan.
What I mean by that is the thinking, the behaviour, the language. All of this
was very, very much part of who I am.
