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Legendary director Martin Scorsese is now 80 years old, and no one on Earth seems to be more obsessed with that fact than Scorsese himself.
In what’s become something of a habit for the iconic filmmaker, a recent GQ profile sees the New York City native — speaking to the magazine ahead of the release of Killers of the Flower Moon — pondering mortality and what it means for his career, specifically, how many more films he’ll make.
And according to Scorsese, he thinks he might only have another one or two in him.
“It’s just, I got as far as this. And that’s what I do. That’s it. And if I could just muster up the energy, God willing, to make a couple more, one more maybe, and that’s it, okay? That’s as far as I got. You keep going until you can’t,” Scorsese said.
“But what I mean is that you gotta rip it out of your skull and your guts. To find out what the hell you really… what do you really feel should be said at this point in life by you? You gotta say something with a movie. Otherwise, what’s the point of making it? You’ve got to be saying something.”
While it’s undeniably melancholy that a figure as influential as Scorsese is deeply pondering when and where this all ends for him, it also displays the level of genius that still courses through his soul.
When he says you “keep going until you can’t”, he isn’t talking about working until he drops dead, but rather, until he doesn’t feel he has anything interesting left to say.
According to recent reports, Scorsese has two projects that appear to be lined up following Killers of the Flower Moon: a movie about Jesus and an adaptation of David Grann’s novel The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder.
Killers of the Flower Moon, which features Scorsese’s longtime muses Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro alongside the likes of Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Brendan Fraser, and John Lithgow, will hit movie theaters in the United States on Friday, October 20.