Legendary filmmaker, Martin Scorsese has been putting his time in lockdown to good use. ‘The Irishman’ director has created an exclusive short based on his time in isolation for the BBC’s ‘Lockdown Culture with Mary Beard’.
The film sees Martin explore what lockdown has meant to him, self-shot by the award-winning filmmaker. It will premiere in the final episode of the show on Thursday 28th May at 7pm on BBC Two. In addition to Martin Scorsese, Director Lee Daniels will also feature, explaining why he believes the current shutdown in Hollywood could be a radical creative opportunity for filmmakers.
Talking about his experience in lockdown, Scorsese said: “What I look forward to in the future is carrying with me what I have been forced to learn in these circumstances. It is the essential. The people you love. Being able to take care of them and be with them as much as you can.”
Commenting on the final episode of this run, Mary Beard said: “Martin Scorsese makes a wonderful end to the series. We see him at home, thinking about lockdown through the lens of classic movies, like Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man. But what’s really clever is that this great Hollywood luminary also gets us to look at Hitchcock again and afresh through the lens of our current predicament. I was absolutely over the moon when he agreed to do it for us. It feels a bit like hosting a little premiere! And it all contributes to a pretty amazing finale.
What Scorsese has to say fits very much with the style of the series. When we started we were facing the practical question of whether we could actually launch a programme from my study. But we soon came to realise that there was a really important project here, and there were a lot of big names, like Scorsese, who were happy to come on board. We wanted to show that arts and culture aren’t just a comfort in times like this (though of course, they are) but that times like this can help us take a fresh look at culture, and see things with new eyes”.
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The final episode of this run of ‘Front Row Late’, retitled ‘Lockdown Culture with Mary Beard’ will also feature artists Gillian Wearing and Michael Landy with their first collaboration in over twenty years, photographer Don McCullin reflecting on a career spent risking his own life, and comedian and host of The Guilty Feminist podcast Deborah Frances-White and eminent statistician Professor David Spiegelhalter. It concludes a starry run of ‘Front Row Late’, the BBC’s flagship arts programme, which was retitled when the UK went into quarantine as part of BBC Arts’ Culture in Quarantine initiative which has sought to keep arts alive in the homes of the British public during the lockdown.
