Martin Scorsese has made a new film at his home in NYC about being in isolation, in a short made for arts series Lockdown Culture with Mary Beard.

The self-shot film sees Scorsese explore what lockdown has meant to him.

It will premiere in the final episode of Lockdown Culture with Mary Beard on 28th May on BBC Two. In addition to Scorsese, director Lee Daniels will also feature, explaining why he believes the current shutdown in Hollywood could be a radical creative opportunity for filmmakers.

The final episode of the run of Front Row Late, retitled Lockdown Culture with Mary Beard, will also feature artists Gillian Wearing and Michael Landy with their first collaboration in over twenty years, photographer Don McCullin reflecting on a career spent risking his own life,  and  comedian and host of The Guilty Feminist podcast Deborah Frances-White and statistician Professor David Spiegelhalter.

Throughout the run of Lockdown Culture with Mary Beard, some of the world’s most influential artistic talents have taken part including Margaret Atwood and her sister with a homespun puppet show created at their kitchen table, sculptor Antony Gormley on a state of isolation and creativity and Icelandic-Danish visual artist, Olafur Eliasson, in a debate about nature and art and Kwame Kwei-Armah with Antonio Pappano and Juliet Stevenson on why theatre matters.

The programme has seen Mary Beard move from presenter to chief engineer, camera woman to makeup artist, welcoming some of the biggest names in the arts to her programme as they explore their lockdown experiences and will return to BBC Two in the Autumn.

Commenting on the final episode of this run, Mary Beard said: “Martin Scorsese makes a wonderful end to the series. We see him at home, thinking about lockdown through the lens of classic movies, like Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man. But what’s really clever is that this great Hollywood luminary also gets us to look at Hitchcock again and afresh through the lens of our current predicament. I was absolutely over the moon when he agreed to do it for us. It feels a bit like hosting a little premiere! And it all contributes to a pretty amazing finale.

“What Scorsese has to say fits very much with the style of the series. When we started we were facing the practical question of whether we could actually launch a programme from my study. But we soon came to realise that there was a really important project here, and there were a lot of big names, like Scorsese, who were happy to come on board. We wanted to show that arts and culture aren’t just a comfort in times like this (though of course they are) but that times like this can help us take a fresh look at culture, and see things with new eyes”.

 

The series is produced by BBC Studios

Jon Creamer

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