Martin Scorsese's first list on his new Letterboxd account provides some new insight into his movies' influences. The director has compiled a collection of 59 movies that he sees as companion films to his filmography, from The Wolf of Wall Street to The King of Comedy to Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story.
"Over the years, I’ve been asked to pair my own pictures with older films by other people that have inspired them," Scorsese wrote alongside the list. "The request has come from film festivals, which present the pairings as a program. The terms 'inspiration' and 'influence' aren’t completely accurate. I think of them as companion films. Sometimes the relationship is based on inspiration. Sometimes it’s the relationships between the characters. Sometimes it’s the spirit of the picture. Sometimes it’s far more mysterious than that."
His companion films for his latest movie, Killers of the Flower Moon, are listed as The Heiress (1949), The Last of the Line (1914), The Lady of the Dugout (1918), Blood on the Moon (1948), Red River (1948), and Wild River (1960).
Other interesting picks include Ocean's Eleven (1960) and Jules and Jim (1962) for GoodFellas, and On the Waterfront (1954) for Raging Bull. At the time of writing, Scorsese has around a quarter of a million followers on Letterboxd after joining the social media platform last week.
Based on real events that occurred in Oklahoma in the '20s, Killers of the Flower Moon stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart, the nephew of a wealthy rancher (Robert De Niro) who marries Mollie (Lily Gladstone), an Osage woman with a significant amount of oil money to her name. The movie follows the string of brutal murders that swept through the Osage Nation at the hands of local white men.
Killers of the Flower Moon is out now. For more from the filmmaker, check out our list of the 10 best Scorsese movies, ranked.
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