How Tarantino pushed Scorsese to make ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’: a theory.

An essay by JJ DeCeglie

ROGER: And the Number 2 film on my list is possibly the most influential film of the decade, Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction," from 1994. The movie looped through time to tell parallel stories involving two-bit criminals, broken-down boxers, low-level drug dealers, gangsters' girlfriends and hit men, in a movie that combined sudden bursts of action with ironic comedy, parody, and characters who loved to make small talk on their way to big moments.

If you follow the characters through the loop-the-loop of the plot, you also find that most of them do find personal redemption in one way or another so that "Pulp Fiction" becomes a comedy masquerading as hard-boiled. And it's a complete original, which unfortunately inspired way too many other young filmmakers to write way too much Tarantinian dialogue. They knew the words, but not the music.

MARTIN: What I love about the picture is the structure, the way he tells the story, the many different stories and literally the humour, the irony and all based on the bedrock of the American pop culture. Which threw me at first in terms of … at first I approached the picture as a kind of realistic film in a way or naturalist. Not naturalistic, but realistic in the way these people would behave. But who are these people? I've never met people like this.

ROGER: You know, Paul Schrader, who has written four of your films, was telling me that he feels in the '90s that existentialism, the idea of what we do with our lives, has been replaced by irony so that everything has quotation marks around it. Your films are not in quotation marks, they are meant. Do you feel any urge at all to start using the quotation marks or is it just...

MARTIN: Oh no. Never.

ROGER: Alien to you as a film-maker.

MARTIN: No, no I just can't. I just have to be attracted to the material, really the characters; the morality of the characters is what I'm interested in. And how one deals with morality in today's world.

ROGER: And "Pulp Fiction" isn't really about morality at all

MARTIN: No.

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Martin Scorsese has directly commented on Quentin Tarantino just once.

He was the guest critic on a Roger Ebert special that aired in the year 2000 - “The Best Films of the 1990's”.

Nobody speaks as finely, as eloquently, as fervently about cinema, as Scorsese. He crafts each sentence. Takes his time. Dissects and expands upon his ideas with scholarly grace. Explaining his thoughts with an almost nourishing wholesomeness, a devout energy, an impassioned sincerity; no modern film-maker discusses their personal inner cinema consciousness better. Nobody makes you want to see the film they are mentioning more.

The way Scorsese says 'picture' instead of film; the way he elevates that word, with such measure and piety and feeling, it really is quite wonderful. And also revealing, by Scorsese using an archaic term to describe his devotion, the word suddenly becomes his own, and is candidly revealed to us as sacrament. The cinema is his religion.

The exception of course, is Tarantino. An autodidactic. A cinema fanatic with a punk sensability who expertly guards his immense studiousness and intelligence and knows his Kael by heart. A zealous, excitable orator, he darts into divine cinematic fluency with such seeming ease and with such smooth intellectual level shifts, that we almost see him catching himself becoming reverent, followed by the instantaneous internal scolding made up for by a rearing up with such wide-eyed intensity and enthusiasm that when he announces “Go see the fucking movie!” - you do exactly that.

Above is the dialogue shared during the ‘Best Films of the 1990’s’ special on Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction”. Ebert adored the film and goes out of his way to say so. It was his penultimate pick for the decade. Considering what he is capable of, and what he gives throughout the rest of the show, Scorsese hardly comments - coming across as somewhat confounded by it, reserved in opinion, almost at odds to share his true thoughts. There is a definite ambivalence that Ebert skilfully loops back around and into a discussion about Scorsese's films themselves.

You get the feeling that Scorsese is just too polite to say what he really feels. Tarantino himself would have never held back.

Scorsese did not include “Pulp Fiction” in his personal list of ten best films from that decade. And never really comments on Tarantino ever again.

For the record the Coen Brothers (Fargo), Michael Mann (Heat), Spike Lee (Malcolm X), Wes Anderson (Bottle Rocket), David Cronenberg (Crash), Abel Ferrara (Bad Leiutenant), Lars Von Trier (Breaking the Waves), Kubrick (Eyes Wide Shut) and Malick (The Thin Red Line) are all mentioned on Scorsese's list.

Scorsese also includes two foreign films by lesser known directors. “A Borrowed Life”, a Taiwanese film directed by Wu Nien-Jen. An autobiographical story about a poor family in the Taiwanese countryside during the 1950s, right after the end of Japanese rule and the nationalist secession from the mainland, and “The Horse Thief”, a Tibetan film directed by Tian Zhuangzhuang. A man is ostracized from his tribe for stealing horses, his living conditions become so severe that his son dies, he repents and is accepted back into the fold, but is forced to steal horses again to keep his second child alive. It actually was released in 1986, but gained a international reputation abroad in the early 90’s.

On the flip-side Tarantino has always worshipped openly at the altar of Scorsese. Besotted by the coked-up 70's mythology of the man. Genuflecting especially to “Taxi Driver”. Which he has repeatedly said is in his personal top five films of all time, Scorsese's masterpiece - and the greatest first person character study ever put to film. When he recorded Alex Cox “Moviedrome” type-intros to five films he programmed in 2009 for Sky Movies, he repeated all of those lines, excitedly told the Brian DePalma whilst filming “Scarface” 'No matter what you do there's always Scorsese' story (after DePalma had watched Raging Bull in a theatre and been blown away by the one-take tracking shot from change-room to ring) and as a bonus retold the infamous Marty was gonna shoot a studio executive with a gun (until Spielberg talked him down) if they cut “Taxi Driver” rumour.

During a 1997 interview on Charlie Rose Tarantino said “I could learn from Scorsese, but how I could learn from Scorsese is not like how he does anything, because how he does it, is how he does it, and how I do it, is how I do it, but Scorsese is so much ‘Film’ and ‘Love of Film’...I might be a better director if I just had dinner at his house every week and we just talked. Not about filmmaking per se...I wouldn’t doubt that he felt that way about Fellini too.” Considering his well-known admiration of Marty, his youth at the time, and the with which sincerity he says it all with (including the Fellini comparison), it can be viewed as an oblique, circuitous ask. He knew Scorsese had been on and possibly, perhaps hopefully, watched the show.

Early on, no matter what Tarantino achieved, he was always compared to Scorsese (even though he wanted to be DePalma). Graphic violence, crime and dark humour put them in the same broad media comparison brackets. Of course Marty had made his bones years before (films which Tarantino held as holy experiences), but you have to remember they were contemporaries in the 90's, “Goodfellas” came out in 1990, “Cape Fear” in 91, “Age of Innocence” in 93 and “Casino” in 95, with “Reservoir Dogs” in 1992 and “Pulp Fiction” in 1994.

And there is the completely fair argument that “Goodfellas” directly influenced both of those films. Scorsese was one of Tarantino's idols, a living God. He had snubbed him on the Ebert Special when he had a chance to give him an 'Atta Boy!' - entirely his right to do, but I'm betting it hurt Tarantino, possibly deeply, and perhaps affected his attitude toward Scorsese from that time on. (There is also the chance that the ‘adrenaline shot to the heart’ scene in ‘Pulp Fiction’, which Tarantino borrowed from, or paid homage to (depending on your personal stance) “American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince”, Scorsese’s little seen documentary, really pissed Marty off...)

The appointed surrogate father backhandedly scolding the devoted inadvertent successor son.

Both men had documented difficult relationships with their fathers; Scorsese's was there but didn't say much and offered little in the way of affection, Tarantino's wasn't around at all.

But the boy bit back...

Tarantino said this in 2004:

"If I say Martin Scorsese's movies are getting kind of geriatric, he can say, 'F*** you, man! I'm doing what I want to do, I'm following my muse.' And he's 100 per cent right. I'm in my church, praying to my god and he's in his church, praying to his. There was a time when we were in the same church - I miss that. I don't want to do that church."

On ‘The Charlie Rose Show’ in 1994, Tarantino was already expounding on the artistic death of film-makers as they age, he never mentioned names early on, his rough theory is that the last four films a director helms are the worst four, and as he aged himself he pointed out again and again that this would never happen to him, he'd get out first. I've never been sure if this was a straight out challenge to aging film-makers, or just the stating of a fact that he thought he'd happened upon and that everyone else should now know too. Most likely a little from column A and a little from column B.

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A few years back Bret Easton Ellis profiled Tarantino for the New York Times magazine. Tarantino makes such an interesting subject because of his honesty, if he feels something he speaks it. Easton Ellis is much the same. The unexpurgated version of the interview was published on Easton Ellis' personal website. Tarantino says in the piece that he likes Gus Van Sant's almost shot-for-shot “Psycho” remake more than Hitchcock's original. He has been quoted on previous occasions as saying he liked “Psycho 2” better than Hitchcock's original as well.

This is cinephile sacrilege. But it is Tarantino, so it beyond interesting.

Scorsese we imagine would have just laughed at the comment. Producing one of those great, hearty guffaws he is capable of. It is the main divide between the two greats, one played out in terms of genre and aesthetic. Tarantino won't bow down to craft or history alone, he has to flat-out like the film, even if he only kinda likes part of it, he'll still praise it and heartily recommend it (see Danny Boyle's “Sunshine”, which he argues has a terrible third act, but still programmed it on his Sky Movies' run).

35 people (including Slavo Zizek, Joe Dante, Michael Haneke, Errol Morris and Paul Mazursky) when asked to participate in the British Film Society's Greatest Films Ever Made survey (which Hitchcock's “Vertigo” won) placed “Psycho” in their top ten. Tarantino says in the same Easton Ellis article that he doesn't even like “Vertigo”, a film Scorsese placed in his top ten.

Eli Roth knows his Hitchcock very well (he is featured repeatedly during In the Master's Shadow: Hitchcock's Legacy (2008), and Edgar Wright has placed Psycho in his all-time top ten too (he has different versions floating around the web). The point here being Tarantino has definitely defended his ideas about the films rigorously with his close film-maker friends on previous occasions.

He screened Psycho 2 at the 6th QT Film Festival in 2005 and has stated he prefers Richard Franklin, Curtis Hanson and Brian DePalma's Hitchcock-esque films to their actual Hitchcock counterparts.

Tarantino on Hitchcock:

“I’ve always felt that Hitchcock’s acolytes took his cinematic and story ideas further.”

Pauline Kael shared a similar sentiment.

The films he’s most likely referring to are Franklin's “Road Games”, “Cloak & Dagger” and “Psycho 2”, Hanson's “The Silent Partner”, “The Bedroom Window”, “Bad Influence” and “The Hand That Rocks The Cradle” and DePalma's “Sisters”, “Obsession”, “The Fury”, “Dressed to Kill”, “Blow Out” and “Body Double”.

And here in lies the difficult and beautiful dilemma. These men will, thank God, never agree.

Both are hailed as cinematic geniuses, but both grew up in a starkly different time and place and reality. Scorsese in New York. Tarantino in LA. One went to film school and hung out with Lucas, Spielberg and DePalma, with Coppola watching from above with care acting like a protective big brother. One educated himself working in a video store. Add in the fact that Marty is old enough to be Quentin's father and we begin to get somewhere. It comes down to cinematic doctrine and reverence, films as formation and denomination, cinema as spirit, as subconscious and as personality.

Scorsese on Psycho:

“We were up there that night at the Mayfair Theater, it was called. And that was one of the first films I ever saw that said, "Please do not reveal the ending." We were yelling at people as they were coming out of the theater, saying, "What happens, what happens?" "Don't ask, don't ask, we're not saying." We were all laughing and running. It was like a circus ...a circus.”

Marty was 18 when the film came out. Every new Hitchcock film was a gift. Tarantino would have felt this way about Scorsese himself. Born in 1963, he was 13 when “Taxi Driver” was released. He speaks about his preparation, the ritual and countdown to seeing films by directors he loved. He'd go the very first session on the first day of release by himself. Just so as to get a feel for the film and the story. He'd go again that night to the midnight screening, this time with a friend, and dissect how the film was made. He'd collect reviews in scrapbooks. Read everything he could get his hands.

If you examine Tarantino's recent top ten greatest films list from the BFI poll (he actually lists twelve), it is interesting to note that nine of the films he places on the list he would have seen in the cinema at formative years (eight of which are American and made in the 70's).

These include Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), The Bad News Bears (Michael Ritchie, 1976), Carrie (Brian de Palma, 1976), Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), Pretty Maids All in a Row (Roger Vadim, 1971), Rolling Thunder (John Flynn, 1977), Sorcerer (William Friedkin, 1977) and Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976).

He also includes “Dazed and Confused” (Richard Linklater, 1993), released when Tarantino was 30.

Then three films he wouldn't have seen on release The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966), The Great Escape (John Sturges, 1963) and His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1939).

This is a brave and honest list from Tarantino. It gives us a warm and open insight into how he feels about cinema, it provides perspicuity on what he loves about it and about how he tries to convey this to us on his screen. It is the list of a rebellious son. Brilliant, dark yet entertaining films full of unfolding story and unswerving style. Films that Tarantino loved on first and last viewing and that wielded everlasting influence. His personal cinema is one of adventure, variety and the alchemistic extensions of his personal and vital cinematic talismans.

In many ways Scorsese's list is amazingly similar…he would have probably watched at least nine of twelve films he listed (like Tarantino he also included twelve films) at the cinema in formative years. Born in 1942 Scorsese would have seen 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick), 8½ (1963, Federico Fellini), Ashes and Diamonds (1958, Andrzej Wajda), The Leopard (1963, Luchino Visconti), The Red Shoes (1948, Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger), The River (1951, Jean Renoir), Salvatore Giuliano (1962, Francesco Rosi), The Searchers (1956, John Ford) and Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock) all in the cinema. From his cinephile documentaries we know he watched Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles) and Paisan (1946, Roberto Rossellini) on television. Ugetsu Monogatari (1953, Mizoguchi Kenji) is a hard one to place in terms of viewing. The most recent film mentioned in the film is Kubrick's 2001, released when Scorsese was 26 years old.

Compared to Tarantino this is a more eclectic list. Less about influence and obvious cinematic inspiration (though there is definitely much of it there), and more about wonder and awe. Scorsese is bowing down to these films, their beauty, their ability to sweep both outward and inward, the way in which they leave a lasting impression on the viewer, the film-making here is superb, ethereal. You don't walk out these films saying to yourself - 'That was a fucking great movie', instead you are released in reverence and meditation. Sometimes spiritual confusion. It is the list of a father. As calculated as the list of the son but inverse to it, a list that is also religious, yet with a different, parallel faith. These are films I think Marty believes he could never make, instead he aspires to them with faith and will.

The Psycho question becomes fascinating. We know Scorsese adores the film.

Scorsese on seeing Hitchcock films:

“I knew DeMille's name, I knew John Ford, too, but Hitchcock's name was synonymous with something that was gonna be very special.”

The entire Sugar Ray Robinson fight scene in “Raging Bull” is edited to the same sequence as the shower murder scene in Psycho.

As he aged he's grown to see the magnificent craft in other sequences:

“Once you've sort of mined the classics and they become like logos that you see everywhere, the beauty of Hitchcock's work is that the more subtle moments are even more powerful and more lasting, I think, ultimately, in the less bravura scenes in pictures like Psycho. In Psycho we have two or three very strong bravura moments which, of course, are the shower scene, the killing of Martin Balsam, the shocking ending...But the sequences that continually give me inspiration are the sequences in which she's driving. The camera is very, very dead centre on her, it's very precise. And when you see her point of view, it's dead centre. It isn't slightly off, that's a big difference. These are very specific shots and they exist in almost an abstract way. You know, here it's stripped down black and white. It's like a dream, and yet you're still awake. And you know with that music, too, that something terrible is going to happen to her. But it can't because she's the lead of the film. Come on, she stole 40,000 dollars, she's on the lam, she's running away, that's the plot of the picture, let's see what happens. So I was one of the ones who bought that completely.”

And Tarantino knows the film well. The scene in “Pulp Fiction” where Butch sees Marsellus Wallace from his car in the street is a straight nod to “Psycho”, it mirrors the scene where Janet Leight sees her boss whilst leaving town with his money. But Tarantino wants more from it, and gets more from it, cause Butch doesn't dally around like Janet, he straight up runs Wallace down.

We take Tarantino at his word on it all. He has exclusive and earned individualistic taste. Liking 'Psycho 2' more the original I think somewhat plays directly into the power of his viewing the film at the cinema. He was 20 years old. He'd loved Richard Franklin's “Patrick” in 78 and also “Road Games” in 81. So when the Australian ventured to Hollywood to helm the sequel Tarantino would have been salivating in anticipation. And he obviously wasn't disappointed by what Franklin delivered.

Tarantino on Psycho 2:

“I feel that PSYCHO 2 has the very best performance by Anthony Perkins. I completely care about Norman Bates in this thing and that’s fucked up. I remember at the time with friends saying if they’d just fucking left him alone he’d have been ok, Alright? If that fucking Vera Miles bitch had just left him alone, he’d been fine! He was really trying to be good, and they all got what they fucking deserved!”

We assume from this that Tarantino felt Bates wasn't developed enough as a character in the original. Pauline Kael had a similar complaint about Jake LaMotta in ‘Raging Bull’ (describing LaMotta as a cockroach). Kael herself described ‘Psycho’ as “a borderline case of immorality… which, because of the director’s cheerful complicity with the killer, had a sadistic glee that I couldn’t quite deal with.” and condescended to the shower scene as “a good dirty joke.” She also described the psychiatrist’s explanation at the end as “arguably—Hitchcock’s worst scene”.

Of course, Tarantino knows the original is a great film, and not just that, a colossally influential film in the history of cinema. But he has the balls and bluster to say “Hell man, I like this interpretation better, because this is what I want from cinema...not that other fucking thing”, which if you think about it, is pivotal to his career as a film-maker. It's a very large part of what he does. He interprets, then amplifies, heightens and personalises. It's also what DePalma does, to an extent it's what Scorsese does too. The original didn't sing to him the way the sequel did, cause it didn't have what he wanted, most people would never admit that, most people would just say what a devoted cinephile is supposed to say, but Tarantino goes profane, and thus the heretical opinion becomes important.

The Van Sant remake is a more peculiar case. In time it has come to be viewed more as a cinematic experiment than a straight up film - And perhaps this is what Tarantino has been doing from the very beginning, hence the interest and stark continuing defence of the film. He got it when not many others did not.

Note: Soderbergh’s mash-up of the two Psycho’s is great study to view in context.

Tarantino on Van Sant's Psycho in 2001:

“My purpose in life is to go see that movie and say “Fuck you all. This movie is good”. And I'll tell you why! I thought Psycho was one of the balliest movies of the year, maybe one of the greatest experiments in the history of cinema. It inspired me in a way no movie has before. What Gus Van Sant did was, he took the exact same script as the original Psycho, not one word re-written, and shot it with 80% of the same camera angles. And that's a very interesting experiment, Okay? No one has ever done that before. If you take the same script and use the same camera angles, but if your intention is completely different to the intention of the original director, and you update it 20 years later but you don't change anything in the relationships, now viewed from today's audiences in today's times – how different a movie will you get?”

Tarantino had in part been doing something like this from the start, mining cinema he loved and reinterpreting it in brilliant, innovative ways. In the ‘Psycho’ remake, where others saw a waste of time, he saw credence, he'd really enjoyed the film, saw the experimental importance to it and has never backed down in defending it. Perhaps it allayed whatever forced guilt he'd felt from the critics for his oeuvre, he viewed the film and knew he was right, more than right, he internally felt he was vindicated. He saw the virility in what Van Sant had attempted, something he prided himself on, something he felt others lost as they aged. Tarantino is in essence a commercial barn buner. Pushing the form. Experimenting with it. He is a trailblazer, impressively working within Hollywood creating strange hybrid pieces of cinematic art that never fully conform in any way, he always pushes limits and is completely unpredictable in all facets - character, story, content, style, casting, structure, career and political correctness. He is a complex contradiction as an artist, glued in nostalgia in some ways (he is continual campaigning against digital filming and projection), yet a partial embodiment of Apollonaire's call “To burn down the Louvre” in another. There is no sanctity for Tarantino, he has enough confidence is his own artistry to speak mostly as he pleases and he creates in the same manner.

In his calling out of aging film-makers we again see the father/son dynamic, realising the indestructible patriarch is fallible, swearing that this will never be you. Silently realising as you age that it just might be.

Nobody but Tarantino knows if the Scorsese slight got to him all those years ago or not. What he calls ‘geriatric’ Scorsese, others have hailed masterpieces. Both “The Departed” & “The Aviator” won Academy Awards. “Gangs of New York” has issues, but the Daniel Day-Lewis sections are rich and brutal cinema; Paul Thomas Anderson surely wouldn't have gotten to ‘Daniel Plainview’ without Scorsese getting to 'Bill the Butcher' first. The performance in “Gangs” is the equal of “Blood”. “Shutter Island” is hugely underrated. It's an involved maze of a film about obsession, loss, mental illness, existentialism, masculinity and in the most part - cinema. All of Scorsese's films are about Marty himself. He has never lost this. The true auteur cannot make a film otherwise, and we know Tarantino knows this because a) he's too intelligent not to, and b) his films are extremely personal too. (The topic of a future essay...)

The son goading the father, “Come on Dad, you used to be so fucking cool”.

“Django Unchained” is very important for where we’re going here. Leonardo DiCaprio worked with Tarantino on it in 2012. You'd have to think the two shared notes prior, during and post - over coffees, whiskey, cigarettes, screenings, dinners, lunches. Surely there was a hearty, lengthy and healthy discussion. Scorsese must have come up in conversation. We know both guys venerate ‘Taxi Driver’.

Dicaprio on Taxi Driver:

"That, to me, is the ultimate independent film, I was so emotionally invested in that character. When Bickle starts to betray you by trying to kill a senator, it's shocking. When the Mohawk comes, you're like, 'Wait, I was with you when you were embarrassed to take a girl to the porno theatre. I'm with you, man, what are you doing?' They were able to get the audience to give that type of emotional investment on someone that is absolutely insane. And then you start to make excuses for him, and you want to be with him,It was one of the best portrayals of insanity I've ever seen in my life, because you understand this man — and it's scary."

Going by history we can be sure Tarantino said his piece. DiCaprio, Scorsese’s post DeNiro muse, must have been somewhat protective of his cinematic father figure. Now ‘Django’ was made in 2012. ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ in 2013. Do the math on that and I put it to you readers that DiCaprio went back to Marty, took a deep, deep breath, and broached the subject, furthered the daring discussion, enlightened Scorsese on the finer points of the beef; Marty probably already knew what Tarantino was saying but had pushed it to the back of his mind, Leo possibly said “Hey Marty, you gotta show him you still got what he thinks you don't...we gotta. I mean, the balls on this guy! You know I still really wanna do ‘Wolf’”. And it ignited something in him, lit it up, call it pride, ego, competition, annoyance, braggadocio, whatever you the hell you like, the potential fact is that from said fire was born “The Wolf of Wall Street”, which in arguably the best American adult drama/comedy made in 30 years, Scorsese’s highest grossing film ever and a film torrented over 30 million times.

A young man's film conceived and crafted by a 70 year old. A riotous, ruthless and fearless picture, three balls-to-the-wall hours of audacity, cinema and engrossment (Scorsese at his best, which is to say, utterly and compulsively watchable, five minutes viewed leads to end of the film no matter which part you walk in on, three hours somehow seeming like ninety minutes). It displays a merry band of greedy sociopaths working their way to Wall Street and then rending US economics a new one all whilst doing more drinking, drugs and hookers then had ever before in a supposedly mainstream film. It captured the ever potential psychopathy of capitalism on the ground floor, without the abstractions of ‘Fight Club’ or ‘American Psycho’. This really happened.

A perverse morality play which Marty surely related to, the readily available excesses of Hollywood slamming into the simple neighbourhood Catholic virtues of his childhood as he rose through the cinematic ranks, the unwanted necessity of the hustle, tragically trading in one woman for another, the trials of marriage, affairs, jealousy issues, cocaine addiction, the struggles with finances and getting pictures off the ground, and of course the possibilities, punishment and traps of false redemptions. The bravado and bluster required to to steer sinking ships (every film is a sinking vessel during the arduous shoot) and humanity/masculinity required to never blink as virtue after virtue is stripped away in your life and on your watch, the constant question to yourself of “How much can I endure?” and “When will this end?”.

A film that goes directly against Tarantino's theory of age and careers and the benefits of getting out early. Scorsese didn't care if the critics wouldn’t get it. He didn't care if the audience misunderstood it. He just made it. Independently. Giving DiCaprio his Bickle in the process.

I stand by my claim that Tarantino had something to do with it.

And I think Tarantino would say so too.

Scorsese said “Hey kid...fuck you”...and I bet Tarantino loved it.