#Martin Scorsese’s Set Ritual Is Like Going to Church Says Emily Mortimer

Through a long and distinguished career, actress Emily Mortimer has played a wide range of characters, and worked with some of the biggest filmmakers Hollywood has to offer. Mortimer worked with Martin Scorsese on two movies, Hugo and Shutter Island. In a recent interview with Collider, the actress described the combined feeling of excitement, awe, and intimidation that she experienced while working with Scorsese.

“Walking onto his sets, it’s like walking into church or something. Really, it’s like you could hear a pin drop and everybody just knows their place. There is a kind of ritual to the whole thing. It’s like all these people who’ve been working with him for years and years, and adore him and are adored by him. But everybody from the person that’s bringing you your cup of tea to the sound person, to the costume designer, Sandy Powell, they’re all at the absolute top of their game.”

“They are all the most brilliant people in our industry and to be surrounded by those people and to be able to have the benefit of their expertise is so crazy, it’s so wonderful and it is really intimidating but in the best way. I don’t know, there’s something about working with people who are so good at what they do and working with Martin Scorsese who’s so good at what he does that the terror and the horror of the situation is completely mitigated by the fact that they are so expert and so good.”

Frequently said to be the greatest filmmaker working in Hollywood, with a career spanning decades, it is understandable that Martin Scorsese would have an intimidating effect on others on the sets of his films. But Mortimer goes on to explain that the legendary, almost mythical status often afforded to Scorses by those in the industry is offset by the filmmaker’s humility and infectious enthusiasm for the process of moviemaking.

“The reason that he makes movies is because he loves movies. He’s a cinephile, bar none, and so there’s such enthusiasm for the process of making a film and he’s so un-grand about it and every shot that he’s creating … you’re lying in this scene so I’m gonna put the camera above your head because in every Hitchcock scene when a character’s lying or not telling the truth, the camera’s looking down at them from higher than they are.”

“And he just is getting such a kick out of it that you do too, and it doesn’t feel precious; it just feels very precise and good. He has a great talent that the great filmmakers have of just somehow by some osmosis or something, you understand the world that you’re in, that you understand the world that he’s creating and you know half your job is done because he lets it be clear what the world is and you can just enter it and go with it.”

Scorsese’s next project will see the filmmaker unite with his two greatest muses, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, for an adaptation of a novel by David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. This news arrives from Collider.