Martin Scorsese has said the simultaneous release of Barbie and Oppenheimer was a “wonderful” thing for cinema.
The director discussed the “Barbenheimer” phenomena during an interview with the Hindustan Times, saying that it offered “hope” for a different kind of film landscape.
“I do think that combination of Oppenheimer and Barbie was something special,” Scorsese said. “It seemed to be, I hate that word, but the perfect storm. It came about at the right time. And the most important thing is that people went to watch these in a theatre. And I think that’s wonderful.”
While the director admitted he hasn’t seen either film yet, he explained that he’s a fan of both Christopher Nolan and Margot Robbie – who had her breakthrough role in Scorsese’s 2013 film The Wolf Of Wall Street.
“The way it fit perfectly – a film with such entertainment value, purely with the bright colours, and a film with such severity and strength, and pretty much about the danger of the end to our civilisation – you couldn’t have more opposite films to work together,” Scorsese added.
“It does offer some hope for a different cinema to emerge, different from what’s been happening in the last 20 years, aside from the great work being done in independent cinema.”
In the same interview, the director also defended the runtime of his latest film Killers Of The Flower Moon, which runs for three hours and 26 minutes.
“People say it’s three hours, but come on, you can sit in front of the TV and watch something for five hours,” Scorsese said. “Also, there are many people who watch theatre for 3.5 hours. There are real actors on stage, you can’t get up and walk around. You give it that respect, give cinema some respect.”
Recently, the director called for young filmmakers to “reinvent” cinema and steer away from producing “content”, which he described as “something you eat and throw away”.
Killers Of The Flower Moon is released in cinemas from October 20.
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