The early reviews have landed for Martin Scorsese’s “Silence,” and it sounds like the director’s long awaited passion project is a challenging, and for many, a very rewarding cinematic experience. However, it’s also a project that had many false starts, and moments where it almost went into production over the years, and even though filming finally begun in January 2015, it still seems like “Silence” raced to the finish line to get into cinemas this month. And Scorsese is the first to admit that the movie didn’t quite hit deadlines.
Speaking with America magazine, the director shared that has spiritual journey with the material and the film is still ongoing.
“I thought it would for a little while, but once I was there, I realized no. Even in the editing room, it’s unfinished. It will always be unfinished,” he explained. “It’s easy to make a pilgrimage the way I want to make a pilgrimage [laughs], but it wasn’t easy to make the pilgrimage. It’s not easy to make the film, and there were a lot of sacrifices. They can’t even be fixed in a way, some of the things that happened personally, so there were a lot of sacrifices to make the picture. Whether it’s a good picture or not is up to other people, but for me the spirituality helped to a certain extent, and it’s something that I would want my children to feel comfortable with in the future.”
And in terms of marrying the spiritual with balancing a literary adaptation for the big screen, at some point Scorsese just had to let it go, even if it seems like there was more he wanted to mine within Shūsaku Endō’s novel on which the film is based.
“Well, there are parts of the book I wish I could have shot that we chose not to, that I would have like to have realized, but it’s a different form. Literature is very different from the visual image and the moving image. So could I have done it page by page almost? It’s almost trying to reach a point in which you pull things away rather than putting things in, and hopefully the things that are in resonate. But the resonating? I’d like to make a film just on one of those vibrations, so to speak. So for me I don’t want to finish it,” he said. “It’s been way over schedule too. I can say that now, but it’s time to finish it. It’s time to finish it, and it’s just time to let it go out there and people see it. That’ll be good, and take what comes. But it’s almost a very private thing.”
The entire conversation is fascinating, and perhaps more personal that we’re used to from Scorsese. “Silence” opens on Christmas Day.
