You’ll get the horns of Guillermo del Toro if you mess with the Raging Bull director.
Award-winning Shape of Water director tweeted on Friday to defend Martin Scorsese after an essay from a British outlet The Critic, criticizing most of the iconic director’s filmography, saying he “had debased his talent” because of “rinse and repeat self-indulgence.”
“I very, very seldom post anything contradictory here,” del Toro said in his defense.
“But the amount of misconceptions, sloppy inaccuracies and hostile adjectives not backed by an actual rationale is offensive, cruel and ill-intentioned. This article baited them into traffic, but at what cost?”
He continued, “To be clear: If God offered to shorten my life to lengthen Scorsese’s – I’d take the deal. This man understands Cinema. Defends Cinema. Embodies Cinema. He has always fought for the art of it and against the industry of it. He has never-been tamed and has a firm place in history.”
Del Toro also noted the claims of the essay on Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is “achingly slow” and that Raging Bull is “quite simply across-the-board bad filmmaking,” hinting that “film language discussions, history lessons and research may be needed” for the critic.
Written in the essay, critic Sean Egan says, “Scorsese’s career is speckled with genuine greatness,” however, he writes, “the truth, though, is that his directorial talent has never been as great as occasional masterpieces like Goodfellas (1990) tricked us into believing it was.”
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Scorsese is Lucky with del Toro
Being a defense wall for him, del Toro compares the article to “faulting Picasso for ‘not getting perspective right’ or Gaugin for being ‘garnish.’”
He ends: “If you assail these cornerstones, you should lay it out – you disassemble the work and build your position – not just hand an opinion with ‘slamming’ adjectives. When I read pieces like this one. Aimed at one of the most benign forces and one of the wisest, I do feel the tremors of an impending culture collapse – and I do wonder: ‘To what end?’ …and find myself at a loss.”
Scorsese – who won an Oscar and earned nominations for 13 others – is hard at work on many upcoming projects, such as Killers of the Flower Moon.
Meanwhile, del Toro is gearing up to premiere stop-motion Pinocchio on Netflix on December 9th.
In the past, the Mexican filmmaker has jumped between personal, lower-budget Spanish language movies, like 1993’s Cronos, 2001’s The Devil’s Backbone, and Hollywood successes, such as 1997’s Mimic, 2002’s Blade II, 2004’s Hellboy and its follow-up 2008’s Hellboy II: The Golden Army, 2013’s Pacific Rim, 2015’s Crimson Peak, and 2021’s Nightmare Alley.
In his producing and writing career, he has been involved in films such as 2007’s The Orphanage, 2010’s Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, 2021-14’s The Hobbit film series, 2013’s Mama, 2014’s The Book of Life, 2018’s Pacific Rim: Uprising, 2019’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and 2020’s The Witches.
In addition, he has spent his career as an author in several projects like one with Chuck Hogan, The Strain trilogy (2009-2011), which later had its comic-book series adaptation in 2011-2015, and ultimately had a live-action television series between 2014-2017.
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Photo: Indie Wire
