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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in SoHo. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. Coming up on today's show, Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells will be here. The stars of the hilarious new Broadway show, Gutenberg! The Musical, and we'll speak with food writer Emiko Davies about her new cookbook, Gohan: Everyday Japanese Cooking. Tonight everybody, it's our Get Lit With All Of It book club live at the New York Public Library, Stavros Niarchos Foundation branch. We have been reading the novel, Yellow Face, and now it is time to discuss. We'll be in conversation with author, R.F. Kuang. We'll be joined by special musical guest, Mxmtoon.

Now, this event is sold out, so if you have a ticket, just a reminder, seats are on a first come, first serve basis and the doors open at 5:30. Now, if you weren't able to get a ticket, you can stream the event online. Head to wnyc.org/getlit to find out how. One more bit of housekeeping, there are still some slots available for the All Of It blood drive. It is happening in The Green Space on Monday, October 30th from noon to 4:30 PM. We'll talk about it more on the show tomorrow, but you can sign up for a slot at wnyc.org/giveblood. That's wnyc.org/giveblood. Now, let's get today's show started with the essential films of Martin Scorsese.

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Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon opened nationwide in theaters on Friday, and already it's being hailed as a "masterpiece" by the New York Times and made its way into plenty of top 10 rankings of the director’s filmography. In addition to the praise, there's also been a lot of thoughtful writing about how Scorsese depicts and positions indigenous people within the story, and about what stories get told and who gets to tell them. The film is based on a book by historian David Grant, and is about a series of murders of Osage Nation people in Oklahoma in the 1920s, motivated by the Osage oil wealth and the FBI investigation into the killings.

As we heard in our show yesterday, Martin Scorsese will be in conversation with Stephen Colbert Friday night as part of the Montclair Film Festival. If you haven't seen his TikTok video with his daughter, Francesca, after this conversation, go check it out. You're in for a treat. Martin Scorsese has been a dominant figure in filmmaking for decades, and ahead of his, guess this, his 81st Birthday is next month, we want to explore his career and filmography. Joining me now are the co-authors of a Vulture New York Mag article titled, Every Martin Scorsese Movie Ranked. Will Leitch is a novelist and contributing editor at New York Mag. Hi, Will?

Will Leitch: Hello. Thank you for having me, and Tim.

Alison Stewart: And Tim Grierson, a senior US critic for Screen International and the author of the book, Martin Scorsese Intense Scenes, and together, they host a film podcast, Grierson and Leitch. Hi, Tim?

Tim Grierson: Hello, there. Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, join in. What's your favorite Scorsese movie? The Last Waltz, Cape Fear, The Departed? If you've seen Killers of the Flower Moon, where would you rank it? 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can call in and join us on air, or you can text us at that number, 212-433-WNYC, and our socials are available, @AllOfItWNYC. Let's give a little background, Will. Martin Scorsese born in Flushing in 1942. Grew up in little Italy, went to school in the Bronx. So many of his films are set in New York, especially the famous ones, Goodfellas, Taxi Driver. What's interesting to you about the way he depicts New York in his films?

Will Leitch: It's always so personal, I think for Scorsese. It's funny that he's made-- he gets this, I think pretty unfair rap as only making movies about gangsters or about crime or so on. The breadth of the topics that he's made movies about are pretty dramatic, but I don't think there's any question that there is something about New York and where he grew up, and the people he grew up around that has really informed his work, even if he ends up making a movie that's not about New York.

A lot of movies are about young men, are about crime, are about guilt, about Catholicism, a lot of the things that he saw, about family, things that really are dramatic parts of him. Even if he's making a movie about like Kundun, which is pretty far from New York, fair to say, still is I think really infused with a lot of his passions that you see probably most acutely in his New York films.

Alison Stewart: Tim, another part of the mythology of Scorsese is he nearly became a priest instead of a filmmaker and religion, a major theme throughout his filmography. What are some of the themes that show up in Scorsese's work, religious themes?

Tim Grierson: Well, yes. It's amazing to think in a parallel world, Scorsese was a priest. It's interesting because being Catholic myself, Catholic guilt is definitely something that has been an outline throughout his filmography. His characters, as we've mentioned, sometimes are bad people, they are gangsters. Sometimes they deal with guilt, but often, there is a spiritual searching. Sometimes that's spiritual in terms of actually a religious sort of thing, but whether it's Silence, or Last Temptation of Christ, or even something like say Taxi Driver or Bringing Out the Dead, he often has characters, main characters who are seeking something and are trying to find some sort of elevation of their spirit.

Often, they go about it the wrong way, but they're often trying to find something. I think for a lot of people who are religious, that's what they find in God. His characters, whether they're religious or not, are looking for something that's going to elevate them. I think what's interesting about his more recent work is that you still see this. You still see this idea of, whether it's making a lot of money, or in the case of Killers of the Flower Moon, systematically oppressing another people to get their oil. There's this idea of nothing is ever enough. They need more and more and more, and what they find over and over again, is that it's never enough. They're never going to find that thing that fills the hole inside themselves.

Alison Stewart: The two of you have a lot of movie ranking experience. Some of your bylines from this year, every Leonardo DiCaprio movie ranked, every Stephen King movie ranked, Every Denzel Washington movie ranked. Will, what are the unique challenges of ranking Martin Scorsese films?

Will Leitch: Well one thing that's actually easy doing Scorsese movies, we've definitely seen all of them before we sit down to write them. Scorsese movies, every Scorsese is a big event. Sometimes we'll get an actor, we'll be like, "Wow, okay. Is that even available anymore?" With Scorsese, all of these movies are really essentials. The hardest part really with Scorsese, there are no real duds in this Scorsese oeuvre, even his worst movies or movies that are not successful. He’s really had one real major flop, which was New York, New York, a musical he made with Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli. It was his fifth film and even that is interesting. It has a lot of interesting things to it. It doesn't really always work, but you can definitely tell it's Scorsese's.

To me, that's what's so interesting about this. Other than maybe The Color of Money, which he made with Paul Newman and Tom Cruise, which was a sequel that was almost a way to get a hit for him, he really doesn't do projects that are overtly commercial like for the studios. Scorsese is really one of the few filmmakers in particularly now in an age where the movie business has changed so much. He's one of the few filmmakers who really can make a movie that's uniquely and specifically his and his stamp is on all of them.

That's what's so fascinating. He's made 30 movies. While they are so different and about so many different topics, that through line is there for all of them. As far as Scorsese made 30 movies, it's hard to be like, "Oh, this one's the 24th best. That one is also really good.” Martin Scorsese is really good at making movies, so, it's hard to make anything be one of his worst movies because they're almost all pretty good.

Alison Stewart: All right, Tim. You guys went with 30, Rolling Stone goes with 32 films. IndieWire says 27, Variety had a list of 26 this year. What's with the discrepancy?

Tim Grierson: It depends on certain documentaries that you pick. We did not include Italianamerican and a couple other early films that he made that are also great, but in terms of our criteria. When you ask the question, Alison about the challenge, one of the challenges is making sure your intro lays out the ground rules of these things. Because I have some friends of mine for InsideHook did everything that Martin Scorsese has ever done, including commercials and stuff like that. That's actually part of the fun, is that there's so many things that he has worked on.

We didn't focus as much on as many of the documentaries that he did, like his George Harrison documentary. He's done a ton in that world as well. We focused mostly on the features and the documentaries that we felt were the most high profile, which were the concert films. We talk about Shine a Light, the Rolling Stones concert film. We did the Last Waltz, which is one of the great concert films. That was where we made our line in the sand in terms of deciding it.

In terms of other things that are challenging in terms of a Scorsese list, like Will said, he's made so many good movies. The other challenge, though, is that you cannot get any two people, including me and my longtime buddy, Will, to agree on what his absolute best are, and I would argue that it's part of the fun. I think anybody who looks at one of these lists and says, “I can't believe this is number three, as opposed to being number one,” you can't lose, I would argue, with his top five. Any movie that we put in our- -top five could be someone else's number one and you are probably right. It's such a hair's breadth between each of those movies that it's almost like asking a person, "What's your favorite type of Scorsese movie or era of Scorsese movie?"

For a long time people thought Raging Bull or Taxi Driver were his best movies. That's changed over time and it's changed on our list where we actually have Goodfellas as number one. I think that people are now starting to think that maybe Goodfellas is his best movie, but there's debate about that and that's part of the fun of making a list. That's why we stuck to 30, because any more than that, it would just cause more of us to pull our hair out and more people to be mad at us.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] We've got a text that says, “King of Comedy! After hours!” We actually have a call with an interesting question before we dive into your list. Bill's calling in from New York. Hi Bill, you're on the air.

Bill: Hey. Hi. How are you?

Alison Stewart: Doing great. What's your question?

Will Leitch: My question is something I've always wondered about. In many of Scorsese's movies, there’s a voiceover or a narrator. I was just wondering, he does this so often, what does that say about his style of movie making, his skill as a moviemaker or lack of it, or why does he actually do it?

Tim Grierson: Interesting. Yes. I have some thoughts about that. I went to a film school and I was in a writing program. One of the things they used to teach us back then was if a movie uses voiceover narration, the scriptwriter isn't doing a very good job. Respectfully to that teacher from 30 years ago, they were wrong. Because I think one of the things that Scorsese has done very well is show that you can tell a great story with voiceover narration.

A movie like Casino has several different people doing voiceover narration, but providing their own perspective on the story that's being told. A movie like The Irishman that uses some voiceover as well, it's an unreliable narrator. You don't exactly know the Robert De Niro character if he's telling you his perspective on things, which may be different than the truth, and so you have to question who is telling you their story in his movies.

A lot of like, I would say maybe, old-fashioned screenwriters really don't like the style that Scorsese does in his movies, but I am a big fan. I really love it. Obviously, it's a thing that he returns to again and again. He likes his characters to talk directly to the audience I think in some ways to make us think that we know these people, but in fact we do not know these people. Often they're terrible people, who are trying to level with us in terms of the stories about themselves they want to tell.

Alison Stewart: This text says, “Killers ranks in my top Scorsese 10. To me it's at the same level as The Departed and Cape Fear and Above Gangs and Irishman, but below Goodfellas and Wolf of Wall Street.” Thank you for that text. That is somebody who knows their Scorsese. Let's get into the list, Will. His most recent films make it into the top 10. The Irishman at 10 and Killers of the Flower Moon lands at number seven. What kind of gut-check did you all do to make sure this wasn't recency bias?

Will Leitch: Yes. One of the remarkable things about both of those movies, after The Irishman, you heard a bunch of people say, "Wow, well, obviously we don't want to be morbid, but he's getting older, so if this is his last movie, what an incredible statement to make?" I found people saying the exact same thing about Killers of the Flower Moon, and perhaps they'll say the same thing about his next movie. I think that he's reached the level in his career where-- he talks about this in interviews a lot about how he doesn't know how many movies he has left.

There's something particularly exciting about these new movies, because obviously they're long and that's been I think the facile way to look at them. What they really are, in a lot of ways, they feel like a filmmaker who is trying to say everything that he wants to say now. Like the energy level, we talk about him being 81 next week, you watch these films, they do not feel like they are made by an older man. There is energy and vigor and narrative thrust to them and excitement.

Like a lot of times, you'll see filmmakers and they slow down at the end their career, they do these more ponderous things. Both The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon are highly energetic, highly entertaining movies while still being very contemplative and still being not only remarking about Scorsese's career, but really remarking about the world as it is now. I don't think it's coincidence that his last two movies have focused in a lot of ways on bad people who believe they can just get away with being bad without recourse. I think that's probably not a coincidence as well. America as a concept has always been something that Scorsese focused on these movies.

If you look at these last two movies, while they are certainly recent and therefore fresher in the mind, they're almost sometimes in conversation with some of Scorsese's old movies that he's having that conversation. The Irishman in particular is sometimes a reflection on some of his old gangster movies in a way that's fascinating. I do feel pretty comfortable that these numbers are going to hold up. They feel instantly-- Some movies like King of Comedy, we talked about that earlier, when that came out, people didn't really love that movie. That's aged into something really great. These movies feel like big statements from the beginning, and I think they've been received as such.

Alison Stewart: I do want to bring up something that's been floating around the internet, a clip of a Osage language consultant from Killers of a Flower Moon, which has been popular in line. He says the movie has a flaw. This comes from a red carpet interview. Let's take a listen.

Speaker 5: Martin Scorsese not being Osage, I think he did a great job representing our people, but this story is being told, this history is being told almost from the perspective of Ernest Burkhart. They give him this conscience and they depict that there's love, but when somebody conspires to murder your entire family, that's not love. That's not love.

Alison Stewart: Scorsese's made films in Japan, other parts of America, this is obviously Osage Nation. Tim, what are his strengths and what are his limitations when it comes to engaging with cultures outside of his own?

Tim Grierson: Well, I think to speak to that clip, which I've seen before. I have a lot of respect for that comment and I understand, I would say respectfully in response. I think that the movie is more complicated than he's giving a credit for in terms of the portrayal of Ernest. Because yes, to Earnest's mind, that's the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who marry Lily Gladstone. He marries Lily Gladstone's character and helps to destroy her family. He thinks that he loves the Lily Gladstone character. He thinks he feels bad about what's happening to them, but they think what is great about Killers of the Flower Moon, among other things, is that the movie is very clear about the fact that Leonardo DiCaprio character is not in fact very smart and doesn't have much of a moral compass at all.

He may think these things but to the gentleman's point, the movie knows that that is not true. I think that that is the criticism of that character and of the white characters. Also in reflection of his comment, I would say I think there is a beautiful movie to be made from the perspective of the Osage, a tribe, but that's a different movie than Scorsese is making. I give Scorsese a lot of respect because I think that he understands the right perspective from his perspective to tell that story.

Now, in terms of other things like Will mentioned, Kundun, Silence is set in Japan, and those movies are also really interesting I think because they do show a filmmaker who has a respect and understanding, not that it's not his story to tell, but that he is coming from it as an outsider. There's an outsider's, I would say respect almost reverence and understanding that he does not fully understand the story that he's telling. I think there's room in his movies to acknowledge that.

There are going to be good movies, great movies made about this story from Killers of the Flower Moon, but Scorsese can't tell those stories. That's up to other filmmakers to tell those stories. I'm glad because that clip that you played, Alison, has gotten a lot of attention and I think it has created a lot of conversation around what is Scorsese's intention in terms of making this film. I think it strengthens the overall impact of the movie, this conversation.

Alison Stewart: My guests are Tim Grierson and Will Leitch. We’re talking about their piece ranking every Martin Scorsese movie. Number five is Mean Streets. Will, came out in ‘73, just rereleased for its 50th anniversary. Harvey Keitel is in this one. When you think about the actors that Scorsese works with again and again, Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Leonardo DiCaprio, what is special about his relationship with these actors across his filmography?

Will Leitch: Yes, there's something wonderful. I think that Scorsese has an Instagram account and he posted a picture of him and Robert De Niro on the set of Killers of the Flower Moon and it's just the most charming. He was like, “Movie number 10.” It is really incredible to have watched them throughout the years. In Mean Streets, it's funny because now Scorsese is like this revered older figure and this keeper of the flame of cinema, but in 1973, he was a punk kid.

He was a punk kid coming out and him and De Niro, they'd come from this whole different school of filmmaking and this whole different school of acting and came in and bum-rushed the scene. I think that familiarity, it's been one of the things that's been so fun to watch De Niro, specifically though, Keitel is correct, and there's a lot of actors. I think a lot of actors have worked with him for a really long time, including DiCaprio, which is now his seventh movie- -with Scorsese.

One of the things that's so incredible to watch is you see the actors and the director evolving and growing and maturing themselves. Like Mean Streets, Mean Streets is a great film. It's number five on our list, but it definitely feels rawer than some of the later Scorsese films. It feels like it's rushing through the gates and it's been incredibly powerful. It's reflective and it's very intelligent, but it also has a young man's fervor and vigor in a way that is different than, say, The Irishman, for example.

One of the things that's really fun about doing a list like this, because we watch a lot of these movies, and you start to realize how you see the subtle little ways that Scorsese tries this in his next film or talks back to something he did in the previous film in this film. A lot of times, that's done through the actors.

DiCaprio is a particularly fascinating person because I would argue the worst performance that Leonardo DiCaprio has given in a Martin Scorsese movie is the first one, in Gangs of New York where he almost gets blown off the stage by Daniel Day-Lewis. Cameron Diaz is finding that too but DiCaprio feels almost a little tallow, maybe a little young, like he was just playing in a Scorsese movie to help the budget. At the time, after I watched Gangs of New York, I definitely for the first time, I did not think, "Oh, Scorsese and DiCaprio are going to be working together forever."

I think that that speaks to Scorsese recognizing the talent of DiCaprio and recognizing that he can grow with him as well. The DiCaprio that you see in this film is so different than DiCaprio that you see in Gangs of New York and I think that speaks to a filmmaker getting comfortable with his actor and vice versa.

Alison Stewart: My text says, “The Age of Innocence is his best work and often overlooked.” I do want to get through to number one so number five we said was Mean Streets, number four, The King of Comedy, number three, Raging Bull on your list, number two, Taxi Driver, and number one was Good Fellas. Got to play a clip.

Tommy DeVito: What do you mean funny, funny how? How am I funny?

Henry Hill: You know, how you tell a story, what?

Tommy DeVito: No, no, I don’t know… you said it. How do I know? You said I’m funny. How the fuck am I funny, what the fuck is so funny about me? Tell me! Tell me what’s funny!

Alison Stewart: What's funny and what's good about it? You got one minute Tim?

Tim Grierson: It is I would argue his most rewatchable movie. It is so incredibly entertaining, and so fast-paced. I think any smart person watches a movie and understands that you're sucked into a story about people who seem really seductive, but they're monsters. They're monsters. They're horrible people, and you're tricked along the way thinking, “What a great ride.” You learn at the end it's not a great ride at all.

Alison Stewart: I wish we had a little more time but I'm going to read two comments because I think it's worth saying out loud. This one says, "Sigh, great filmmaker, yes. Pretty awful female characters." Someone else wanted to know why he's never done a film around African Americans or has he?

Tim Grierson: He hasn't, but I would say that again, I don't know if that is a perspective that maybe he understands. I would say Age of Innocence and Casino argue against the fact of not good female characters. I would also say Killers of the Flower Moon, fantastically performance by Lily Gladstone in that movie.

Alison Stewart: My guests have been Will Leitch and Tim Grierson talking about Martin Scorsese films. Thanks so much, you guys.

Tim Grierson: Thank you.

Will Leitch: Thank you for having us.

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