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The director will be receiving the Honorary Golden Bear award at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival, celebrating the 81-year-old auteur’s lifetime achievement in cinema.
By Benjamin Svetkey
This year, Martin Scorsese will be receiving the Honorary Golden Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival, celebrating the 81-year-old auteur’s lifetime achievement in cinema.
But 43 years ago, in 1981, when Scorsese ventured to the Berlin festival for the first time for a non-competitive screening of Raging Bull, it didn’t look like he had much of a lifetime left in cinema. Indeed, Scorsese seemed all but washed up.
His previous movie, 1977’s New York, New York, had been a colossal box office bomb as well as one of the worst-reviewed films of his career. Scorsese had been so devastated by that picture’s dismal reception, he spent the next year spiraling into despair and cocaine addiction, his weight dropping to 109 pounds, until he collapsed and nearly died of massive internal hemorrhaging. “I was kept in a hospital for 10 days and nights,” he told THR in 2016. “And they took care of me, these doctors, and I became aware of not wanting to die and not wasting [my life].”
Among the friends who visited Scorsese in the hospital was Robert De Niro, the director’s Taxi Driver star, who had become obsessed with making a movie about Jake La Motta, the troubled middleweight boxing champion from 1949 to 1951. Scorsese didn’t initially share the fascination — he had no interest in making what he thought was a sports movie. But De Niro was persistent.
The actor couldn’t have been more right. Raging Bull turned out to be a masterpiece, with eight Oscar nominations (it lost best picture and best director to Robert Redford’s Ordinary People but won best actor for De Niro), teeing up Scorsese for four more decades of extraordinary filmmaking. The King of Comedy was next, followed by After Hours, The Color of Money, The Last Temptation of Christ and more than a dozen others, including Goodfellas, Casino, Gangs of New York, The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street, and this year’s Oscar contender Killers of the Flower Moon.
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