According to Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese is the true godfather of modern cinema.
Coppola took to Instagram to call his “longtime friend” Scorsese the “world’s greatest living filmmaker” while including the trailer for Scorsese’s upcoming epic “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
“My longtime friend Martin Scorsese has a new film coming out this month, ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’” Coppola captioned. “He is a wonderful person and the world’s greatest living filmmaker. His new film delivers on every level.”
“Killers of the Flower Moon” stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro as swindlers in 1920s Oklahoma, preying on the oil reserves of the Osage Nation. Lily Gladstone stars as DiCaprio’s onscreen wife.
Meanwhile, Coppola recently wrapped production on self-funded “Megalopolis” with Adam Driver, Talia Shire, Shia LaBeouf, and Dustin Hoffman.
Scorsese and Coppola have often voiced their shared admiration for each others’ work. Scorsese called “The Godfather Part II” his favorite Coppola film in an opinion piece for Esquire, writing that the family drama is “constructed like a symphony and directed by a master as a great conductor directs his orchestra, it reaches its highest points of lyricism.”
Scorsese added, “I admire the ambition of the project, its Shakespearean breadth, its tragic melancholy in its portrayal of the dissolution of the American dream…It is particularly the film within the film, the story of young Vito Corleone and his journey from Sicily to the Lower East Side, that touched me in a deep, personal way. Perhaps I saw a bit of my grandparents in that journey; perhaps I recognized my old neighborhood; perhaps I shared the sadness of the dream turning into a nightmare.”
In turn, Coppola called “Raging Bull” his favorite Scorsese movie in the same Esquire piece.
“The Departed” director Scorsese told Deadline earlier this year that Paramount turned down hiring him at Coppola’s suggestion for “The Godfather Part II.”
“I don’t think I could have made a film on that level at that time in my life, and who I was at that time. To make a film as elegant and masterful and as historically important as ‘Godfather II,’ I don’t think…Now, I would’ve made something interesting, but his [Coppola’s] maturity was already there,” Scorsese said. “I still had this kind of edgy thing, the wild kid running around. I didn’t find myself that comfortable with depicting higher-level underworld figures. I was more street-level. There were higher-level guys in the street. I could do that. I did it in ‘Goodfellas’ particularly. That’s where I grew up. What I saw around me wasn’t guys in a boardroom or sitting around a big table talking. That took another artistic level that Francis had at that point. He didn’t come from that world, the world that I came from. The story of ‘Godfather II’ is more like Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. It’s wonderful art.”
