A scene from Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore as a tribute to Ellen Burstyn, who was in the theatre; the infamous sequence from Taxi Driver in which De Niro prepares for the shooting; from Goodfellas when the characters cook dinner in their prison cell; Jack Lamotta’s defeat in Raging Bull; the scene in which Leonardo DiCaprio crashes with his plane in The Aviator; and, to top it all off, a scene from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, the first film to be restored by the RomeFilmFest and the Film Foundation, a non-profit US organisation that restores films, founded by Martin Scorsese along with other directors. This was how the Q&A opened between the audience and Scorsese in the Sala Sinopoli of the Auditorium, coordinated by Mario Sesti.

 

Said Scorsese: “It is very important to restore films so that young people can see them”. The director´s commitment to film restoration and preservation dates back to the 1970s. “It arose from anger and frustration we felt, myself and other directors, over the impossibility of seeing films like Il gattopardo (The Leopard) and Once Upon a Time in the West already back then. So I started wanting to find and preserve them. When we founded the Film Foundation, in 1990, they suggested I go to the Hollywood studios. Fortunately, in that period, after Goodfellas, which everyone liked, they listened to me.

 

“The first to respond were Columbia Pictures, then over the years the others joined them as well. At the time, film archives restored films, while now it’s the studios themselves who do it. We restored films such as Lawrence of Arabia, Spartacus, even though Kubrick would have preferred 2001: A Space Odyssey, and we are going to restore The Red Shoes”.

 

Another film “saved” by the Film Foundation is Of Mice and Men by Lewis Milestone, whose restored copy was presented at 6pm in the Sala Sinopoli as a world premiere. Research conducted by Scorsese revealed that the original film was made in the colour sepia, to reflect the rural setting of John Steinbeck’s story on which the film is based, yet the only prints available were in black and white. This new version restores the director’s original vision of the film.

 

At the end of the encounter, Scorsese was presented with the restored copy of The Facts of Murder (Un maledetto imbroglio) by Pietro Germi, which very moved the director when he saw it in New York. He then received yet another standing ovation from audience members, including Abel Ferrara, Dante Ferretti and Martin Landau.