Nicolai Haugsted
The director now calls one of his more well-known films a mistake, believing he should have pursued a different project.
Martin Scorsese has directed some of the films that movie lovers discuss repeatedly: Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, The Departed, The Irishman. And with Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role, he has built one of Hollywood’s most prolific director-actor relationships since Gangs of New York.
So it’s quite a revelation when the man himself singles out one of their five collaborations as the film he wishes he hadn’t made. Not an overlooked, flopped cinema release, but a psychological thriller that grossed nearly $295 million worldwide and has stood for many years as one of DiCaprio’s most-watched works.
The film is 2010’s Shutter Island. And in an interview with GQ ahead of Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese said his win for Best Director for The Departed “made me do another film, Shutter Island. It turned out that I probably should have moved on and made Silence instead.”
A studio film he never made again
Scorsese calls Shutter Island “the last studio film I’ve made.” Since then, he has found funding outside the major Hollywood studios, including through Netflix (The Irishman) and Apple TV+ (Killers of the Flower Moon).
The point of his regret is not that the film was bad. The thriller, starring DiCaprio as the tormented U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels, became one of his highest-grossing films and received 69 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, where critics wrote that it doesn’t match his best but shows “the director at his most unrestrained.”
The point is that it cost him time on a project he had been passionate about for decades.
Silence: A 25-year wait
Scorsese first read Shūsaku Endō’s novel Silence in 1989 and began working on the screenplay around 1991, according to the film’s production history. The story of Jesuit priests in 17th-century Japan didn’t reach cinemas until 2016, 25 years after he started.
And when it finally arrived, it was a commercial disappointment. With a budget of $40-50 million, the film only grossed $24 million worldwide. Critically, it was embraced with 83 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, but it didn’t achieve the audience or awards Scorsese had hoped for.
The regret, therefore, is less about Shutter Island as a work and more about the sequence of events. He won his first Oscar for Best Director with The Departed in 2007. That momentum could have been used for his passion project. Instead, it was used for a genre thriller.
Shutter Island was the fourth collaboration between Scorsese and DiCaprio after Gangs of New York, The Aviator, and The Departed. The duo has since reunited for The Wolf of Wall Street and Killers of the Flower Moon.
