Ellise Shafer Martin Scorsese was lauded with the Berlin Film Festival‘s honorary Golden Bear on Tuesday night, celebrating a lifetime of achievement in cinema.
As he accepted the award, Scorsese — whose most recent film, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” is currently up for 10 Oscars — reflected on his career thus far and even teased a return to the festival “in a couple years.” Scorsese was introduced by German director Wim Wenders, who is also Oscar-nominated for his latest feature, “Perfect Days.” Wenders told a hilarious story, complete with a photo slideshow, about one of his earliest interactions with Scorsese at the Telluride Film Festival in 1978, where he came upon the director and his then-girlfriend Isabella Rossellini on the side of the road with a flat tire. “Ladies and gentlemen, Martin Scorsese did manage to take off the flat tire,” Wenders said to roaring applause. “But much to his dismay, we all realized that his bloody rental car did not have an extra tire, which was a real bummer — the whole effort had been in vain.” As the slideshow flipped to an old-school selfie of Wenders, Scorsese and Rossellini in Wenders’ car, he said: “Proof that a young German director, equipped with a panoramic camera, rescued his American colleague and his future wife from a dreadful fate.” After Wenders’ opener, Scorsese began his speech by discussing the history of the Berlinale and how it has impacted him as a filmmaker, specifically recalling the 1968 festival, when Brian De Palma won the Silver Bear for “Greetings.” “It was a very important event and it was a real turning point for all of us — for Brian, of course, and by extension all of us who were working low-budget in America at the time, particularly not in.
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