Martin Scorsese doesn't have the answer to life's meaning, but he needed to ask the question
It's telling, perhaps damning, that a Martin Scorsese film now feels like an audacity. With tentpole movies reliably and surgically extracting billions from the box office, funding a drama by arguably Hollywood's biggest director is now something to worriedly scratch chins and underline scripts over.* His most recent film, Silence, eventually came into existence after 26 years of toil on Scorsese's behalf, during which, he tells me, he was even implored to give up on the project by his agents.