Martin Scorsese will be honored with a tribute during the upcoming AFI Fest celebrating the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s latest cinematic offering, Netflix’s sweeping crime saga The Irishman.
The tribute to Scorsese, 76, is set to take place Nov. 15 at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood and will include a conversation and a screening of the new pic. He previously received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1997, the year his film Kundun came out.
“Martin Scorsese is an American master,” AFI president and CEO Bob Gazzale said Tuesday in a statement. “It is a profound honor for AFI to bring movie lovers together for one night to stand and celebrate this visionary storyteller whose passion for cinema echoes from film preservation to the advancement of the art form.”
Scorsese was at the famed Chinese theater just two weeks ago for a black-tie premiere screening of The Irishman, where he was joined by the film’s stars Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci. The pic marks the first time Scorsese has worked with Pacino.
The Irishman is a strong contender in the awards race this year, and Scorsese appeared at the Hollywood Film Awards on Sunday to present his longtime producer Emma Tillinger Koskoff an award.
The iconic director also stoked a heated discussion after comparing Marvel superhero movies to “theme parks” and saying they were “not cinema,” drawing the ire of Marvel fans. On Monday, Scorsese expanded on his comments in a New York Times opinion piece, saying he didn’t think Marvel films were for him and decried franchise filmmaking as “market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption.”
