Martin Scorsese: Blu-ray will extend the life of movies

Blu-ray gets two thumbs up from Scorsese
Blu-ray gets two thumbs up from Scorsese

Taxi Driver director Martin Scorsese has been speaking about the virtues of Blu-ray this week, saying the hi-def format "will extend the life of movies".

Speaking via video-link at Blu-con 2.0, a US symposium celebrating all things home entertainment, the director was positively glowing about the format explaining: "It's like experiencing the film for the first time again" and "it's not just the details of the eyes or such; it creates a completely different experience."

Film quality

Scorsese even compared HD to 35mm, noting that it brings a "film-grain quality" to movies and "allows the film to be seen as closely as possible to how it was intended to be."

When asked what his favourite Blu-ray movie was, Scorsese revealed it was The Searchers and that there's "something about the beauty of the landscape and the nature of the faces – you put it on just to check something out, and you can't take it off."

It seems that his Blu-ray seal of approval has got other director's interested (finally) in using the format to rekindle old movies as well as the latest films, with Sony's Senior VP of Restoration and Mastering Grover Crisp telling audiences at the conference that the director has now piqued the interest of directors like Michael Mann and Christopher Nolan into readying their back catalogue for Blu-ray release.

Via Blu-ray.com and Hollywood Reporter

Marc Chacksfield

Marc Chacksfield is the Editor In Chief, Shortlist.com at DC Thomson. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.