From that point on, cinema opened to me many different worlds: Martin Scorsese on ‘Pather Panchali’

New Delhi, Oct 9: He was just a boy when he first saw Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali and it was from that point on that cinema opened to him “many different worlds,” says Martin Scorsese who decades later draws on that experience in his new film Killers of the Flower Moon.
Scorsese, viewed by many as one of the greatest filmmakers in the world, said he knew about Indian culture after seeing Jean Renoir’s 1951 Kolkata-set The River. But Pather Panchali was a turning point.
“I happened to love ‘The River’ but it is seen through the prism of another culture,” Scorsese told PTI. And then came Pather Panchali, the 1955 classic set in rural Bengal.
“So from that point on, cinema opened to me many different worlds. I wonder what it would be like to be a colonised person and a wide part of a colonised world that you live in,” he said in response to PTI’s question in a group interview on whether his new film will resonate in countries like India with a colonial past.
The 80-year-old said he saw a dubbed English version of Pather Panchali on television in New York.
“… And I said, ‘Wait a minute, those are the people I usually see in the background of other films. What’s the difference here?’ The difference is that this film is being made by them, the real people, and I’m being introduced to another culture and another way of thinking, a whole life and the universality of it all. How we all are, basically the same as human beings,” Scorsese said in the virtual interaction from New York.
The makers of classics such as Taxi Driver and The Departed said he has always been interested in other cultures and the way people think in different parts of the world, a philosophy that inspired him to alter the script of Killers of the Flower Moon.
The original story, an adaptation of the book of the same name by American journalist David Grann, revolves around the birth of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and its investigation into a series of murders of the Osage people, a Midwestern Native American tribe of the Great Plains, after oil is discovered in Oklahoma, US, in the 1920s. It’s a true story.
Leonardo DiCaprio was set to play an FBI investigator probing the killings but Scorsese decided to flip the narrative late into the production and tell the story from the point of view of the Osage people. (PTI)