Scorsese delights fans with secrets of his art

"It reminds me of the old Dean Martin line: `How did all these people get in my room?' " quipped Martin Scorsese. He was responding to a rapturous standing ovation from more than 300 admirers who packed into Ardmore Studio's `A' stage on Saturday afternoon for a workshop on film directing organised by UCD Film School.

As a rule, film people affect blase indifference about the starry glitz of their trade, but Scorsese, by general consent the greatest director working in the world today, is different. As a result, the assembled film students, writers, directors and producers present were as frisky as a bunch of 14-year-olds confronted with Leonardo DiCaprio.

They also warmly applauded veteran movie star Gregory Peck, who as patron of the Film School had been instrumental in persuading the director of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas to stop off in Dublin on his way to Cannes to chair the jury for this year's film festival.

Jim Sheridan watched Scorsese taking us through the boxing sequences in Raging Bull, and commented wryly: "I told him that he could have left something new for us to do (in The Boxer)."

Film directors Thaddeus O'Sullivan and Paddy Breathnach were there too, and U2 manager Paul McGuinness, while Bono sat in the front row, shaking his leg to GoodFellas' rock 'n' roll soundtrack. Two-time Oscar-winning documentary film-maker Barbara Kopple (whose documentary about Woody Allen, Wild Man Blues, opens here next month) supervised the cameras which swooped around the diminutive New Yorker as he strode around the cavernous studio stage like a seasoned talk show host, answering questions with charm, wit and unflagging energy. The Ardmore event was the second leg of a day which Scorsese began in the Savoy Cinema in a public interview with Irish Times Film Correspondent Michael Dwyer.

He was reminded that when they last met Dwyer had told the exseminarian that he should come to Ireland as the place that invented Catholic guilt. Scorsese, whose 1988 film, The Last Temptation of Christ, aroused the wrath of Christian conservatives, told us that his favourite book as a teenager was A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, because he "connected with the religious aspects". He had also had a great time in Dublin, including a guided Joycean tour from David Norris, having finally finished reading Ulysses the week before.

He expressed delight that his latest film, the Tibetan epic Kundun, officially became the Irish Film Centre's most successful ever release last week.

Infamously, Scorsese has never received an Academy Award for his work, losing out on several occasions to clearly inferior movies. Taxi Driver was beaten by Rocky, Raging Bull by Ordinary People and GoodFellas lost out to Dances with Wolves. "The academy will always find a way not to give me anything," he said. "But I've made my own peace with it now."

The most important qualities for a director, he believed, were tenacity and an openness to ideas. And the film of which he is most proud? "Probably Mean Streets - there was a burst of passion in making that film that still seems exciting. There seem to be all these young people making films now that have their roots in Mean Streets."

The UCD workshop on screen direction and style at Ardmore began with screenings of three short films produced under the auspices of the film school's six-week production course, a stricture accepted with resignation rather than enthusiasm by an audience which wanted to hear more about Scorsese and less about these rather limited technical exercises.

The man himself indicated that he prefers to talk about student films which are more concerned with the creative implications of the medium as an art form. As someone from Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design pointed out (through clenched teeth, one imagines), such films are produced - in Dun Laoghaire, not UCD. It does help to have Gregory Peck as your patron.

But as we moved on to the clips from Raging Bull and Goodfellas, the tempo was raised, with Marty (as we like to call him) opening up on his use of camera, on music, and most of all on editing, on his attitude to violence and on working with actors like Robert De Niro. His encyclopaedic, eclectic perspective on a century of movie history was peppered with references to film-makers from Eisenstein to Ford to Hitchcock to Fellini. The audience was enthralled as he explained his approach to scriptwriting and improvisation, describing the gradual evolution of scenes such as De Niro's famous "You talkin' to me?" speech from Taxi Driver in an engrossing two-hour session that seemed to pass in less than half that time.