James Gunn, the director of the DC film The Suicide Squad that released in India on Thursday, shared a clarification on his comment against Martin Scorsese which received backlash online. In a podcast on Wednesday, Gunn had implied that Scorsese used his comments against superhero films to get publicity for his 2019 film, The Irishman.
After netizens blasted him for “disrespecting” the veteran filmmaker, Gunn took to Twitter and said, “For the record, Martin Scorsese is probably the world’s greatest living American filmmaker. I love and study his films and will continue to love and study his films. I disagree with him solely on one point: That films based on comic books are innately not cinema, that’s all.”
Scorsese, who has directed celebrated films such as Taxi Driver, and Mean Street, to name a few, compared Marvel superhero films to theme parks during an interview with Empire in 2019.
“I don’t see them. I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema. Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well-made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being,” the veteran filmmaker said ahead of the release of his film The Irishman.
In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Scorsese later expanded on this and wrote, “Many franchise films are made by people of considerable talent and artistry. You can see it on the screen. The fact that the films themselves don’t interest me is a matter of personal taste and temperament. I know that if I were younger, if I’d come of age at a later time, I might have been excited by these pictures and maybe even wanted to make one myself.”
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On Wednesday, in response to a question from journalist Josh Horowitz, host of the Happy. Sad. Confused podcast, Gunn, who has directed superhero films for both Marvel and DC, said, “I just think it seems awful cynical that he would keep coming out against Marvel and then that is the only thing that would get him press for his movie. He’s creating his movie in the shadow of the Marvel films, and so he uses that to get attention for something he wasn’t getting as much attention as he wanted.”
Horowitz also clarified on Twitter that it was not his intention to “start a war between two directors I admire. If you watch/listen there’s a lot more nuance than many of these headlines are going with.”