I've always liked 3D," declares Martin Scorsese. "I mean, we're sitting here in 3D. We are in 3D. We see in 3D. So why not?" He smiles at me like it is the most obvious thing on earth, his face alive with boyish enthusiasm (even though he turned 68 recently). I smile back, my heart full of anxiety about the "future of cinema" in the post-Avatar stereoscopic 21st century, wondering whether my hero would look quite so imposing wearing the 3D specs that we will all have to wear to watch his new film.
Raised in Queens and Manhattan's Lower East Side, the son of second-generation Sicilian immigrants (a seamstress and a clothes presser), Scorsese grew up during the first wave of 3D, which threw up titles such as House of Wax, Creature from the Black Lagoon and Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder.
In the early 1970s, having served his apprenticeship under exploitation maestro Roger Corman, Scorsese revolutionised popular cinema with edgy films such as Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, inspired as much by the French nouvelle vague and Italian neo-realism as the great traditions of British and American cinema. Although his recent films have been far more financially profitable (The Departed, The Aviator and Shutter Island all cleared the $100 million mark at the United States box office) it is these early classics which remain Scorsese's defining works, along with Raging Bull, King of Comedy and Goodfellas, all of which similarly showcased an extraordinary creative relationship with leading man Robert De Niro.
In 1980 Raging Bull brought him his first Oscar nomination for best director, an accolade that would be repeated for The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York and The Aviator. When he finally won an Oscar for The Departed in 2007, it was widely accepted that the long-overdue award was as much an apology from the Academy for failing properly to honour his past glories as a plaudit for his deft remaking of the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs. As the oft-snubbed Scorsese himself said as he accepted his award: "Could you double-check the envelope?"
Growing up among "gangsters and priests", Scorsese outdid even Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola as the definitive cinematic chronicler of the American underworld with his hard-hitting films.
Yet now he is confounding expectations with an adaptation of Brian Selznick's child-friendly "historical fiction" book The Invention of Hugo Cabret — his first film to be made in 3D. Set in Paris in the 1920s, the tale centres on a 12-year-old "orphan, clock-keeper and thief" who "lives in the walls of a busy Paris train station where his survival depends on secrets and anonymity".
An encounter with an eccentric girl and the owner of small toy kiosk in the train station sets in motion a mysterious adventure involving a stolen key, a treasured notebook and an enigmatic mechanical man (or "automaton") — with the real-life figure of cinematic pioneer Georges Méliès providing the crucial link between inventive fantasy and historical fact.
"It's really the story of a little boy," explains Scorsese, "but he does become friends with the older Georges Méliès who was discovered in 1927, or 1928, working in a toy store, completely bankrupt. And then he was revived in a way, with a beautiful gala in 1928, in Paris. And in my film, the cinema itself is the connection — the automaton, the machine itself becomes the emotional connection between the boy, his father, Méliès, and his family. It's about how it all comes together, how people express themselves using the technology emotionally and psychologically. It's the connection between the people and the thing that's missing — how it supplies what's missing."
This is a central preoccupation for Scorsese: the ability of cinema as a mechanical process to somehow plug into the human heart of an audience. And it is perhaps this fascination, with the interface between technology and transcendence, that is the real clue to his interest in 3D.
At the end of a tough day's filming at Shepperton studios, Scorsese seems genuinely fired up about the possibilities of the 3D format. "Every shot is rethinking cinema," he enthuses, "rethinking narrative — how to tell a story with a picture. ..."
Whether or not Scorsese can do with Hugo Cabret what Hitchcock did with Dial M for Murder and find a way to use 3D (rather than letting the 3D use him) remains to be seen. But he is clearly entranced by challenges and themes of Hugo Cabret and says that the new technology with which he is working puts him in mind of Picasso and Braque and how inspired they were by the early cinema of Méliès and the Lumière brothers.
He describes cubism as being somehow an artistic response to the advent of cinema, pointing out that "a painting can't turn" and observing that "if you look closely at some of the portraits from cubism at the time, you'll find a portrait of a woman that is really a projector".
Again and again he returns to the idea of cinema being a machine that somehow "fills the gap" in people's emotional lives, bringing flesh and blood together through the movement of celluloid through a projector.
It is oddly fitting that Scorsese is talking to me on the eve of the 50th anniversary rerelease of Peeping Tom, British director Michael Powell's controversial thriller which Scorsese has long championed but which provoked furious outrage in 1960 for depicting a psychopathic cineaste who kills his victims with a murderously adapted camera.
Able to relate to the world only through his viewfinder, reclusive cameraman Mark Lewis (Karlheinz Böhm) becomes the embodiment of what Scorsese calls "the pathology, the obsession, the compulsion of cinema", his crimes dramatising "the dangers of gazing".
The destructive flipside may be of the "emotional connection" explored in Hugo Cabret. It is a compulsion that Scorsese recognises as an intrinsic element of the cinematic urge, summed up in one blackly comic line from Leo Marks's script for Peeping Tom in which one of Lewis's acquaintances mutters ominously: "All this filming isn't healthy."
Living through cinema can be a dangerous pursuit, as Michael Powell found out when critics tore Peeping Tom to shreds in 1960, shattering the glittering reputation he had built up through pictures such as The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death.
For two decades, Peeping Tom disappeared from distribution, becoming what Scorsese calls a film maudit (literally, a cursed film), the fall-out of which all but ended Powell's career in the United Kingdom. For a while, Scorsese admits, he thought the film was only a rumour dreamed up by hot-headed cinephiles — a belief in which he was not alone.
It was only in 1979, when Scorsese helped to get Peeping Tom into the New York Film Festival, and then rereleased, that the film began to be reassessed as a modern masterpiece. Powell described the experience of the film's rebirth as being like hearing "the cries of a newborn baby", a fitting repayment for the cinematic inspiration that Powell had provided for the young Scorsese.
He recalls the colours of his childhood as being inflected by the gaudy hues of Eastmancolor which were "very powerful, very strong and very lurid and kind of violent in a way. What I saw growing up were those colours, when there was colour. Normally it was all hallways with single lightbulbs; it was mainly black-and-white in a way.
But when it was colour, it was harsh, strong; some would say lurid. My formative years were in the 1950s, when you had all those popular novels with paperback covers and films such as Raoul Walsh's Battle Cry were splashed all over the consciousness of popular culture."
Most of all, Scorsese remembers the "curiosity and sense of completion" that drove him to seek out hard-to-find films in his youth and the undeniable fetishism of film which underwrote that all-consuming passion. "It's interesting because the fetish ideas are all there in Peeping Tom," he says. "All the elements: The projector is correct; the lenses are right; the sprockets are correct. Even the sounds of the sprockets are correct. You do" Scorsese hesitates, then gathers himself. "There is a point in time, many times over the years where I've loved to hear the sound of film going through a projector. And I could tell you if it's 35mm or 16mm, you know. Now that's gone, of course ... but there's a certain kind of it's like going into a trance almost, or I should say a ‘meditation' of some kind. It depends what you do with it. And it has to come out other ways. For me, it was burning to be able to express myself with cinema and to be inspired by films."
As somebody with such a profound sense of cinema, it is surprising that some of Scorsese's recent successes have been on television, a medium which he has credited with providing "what we had hoped for in the mid-60s this kind of freedom and ability to create another world" with the luxury of "the long form of developing character in a story". Most notably, his project for HBO, Boardwalk Empire, has become a popular and critical hit in the US.
In the wake of the success of Boardwalk Empire, screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi has been hinting that a TV prequel to Goodfellas is also in the pipeline, a prospect which Scorsese admits "is possible. I don't know yet. But we're talking to [Goodfellas producer] Irwin Winkler about it."
Meanwhile, Public Speaking, Scorsese's new documentary about writer and commentator Fran Lebowitz (hailed by some as a latterday Dorothy Parker) premiered on American television recently.
As for the big screen, Scorsese's most recent film Shutter Island, a throwback B-movie bug-house shrieker featuring Gothic asylums, sinister psychiatrists and crashing lightning storms, is being touted as a major awards contender.
A thematic companion piece to Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear, the film nods its cineliterate head towards Otto Preminger's Laura, Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor, and — I would suggest — William Peter Blatty's The Ninth Configuration.
It also marks Scorsese's fourth collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio who seems to have replaced De Niro as the director's favourite muse. When DiCaprio announced his involvement in Clint Eastwood's forthcoming biopic of J. Edgar Hoover, he confessed to feeling like he was "cheating" on Scorsese.
As our interview ends and it is time for Scorsese to introduce a gala screening of Peeping Tom to a new generation of filmgoers, I wonder whether film or TV presents the most creative opportunities for the director.
He is clearly enamoured of the narrative freedoms offered by long-form TV drama and seems able to get any number of small-screen projects (whether drama or documentary) off the ground without difficulty.
Yet as someone who remains obsessed with the "sound of the sprockets" and the "feel of 35mm" and is still sufficiently young at heart to take a late-life leap into big-screen 3D, doesn't he flinch at all from the aesthetic limitations of the small screen? Wouldn't Boardwalk Empire, for example, be better on the big screen, in the cinemas that first fired his imagination?
"Well, you know," he smiles wryly, "it is made for what I guess you would call the small screen. But we made it like a film; an epic B-film in a way. And you know what? Those small screens aren't that small any more!"
