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‘Sin is fun!’ Martin Scorsese on brutality, love – and his rebirth on TikTok

At 81, the great film director suddenly has a second career as a social media star. He talks about working with his daughter, the Oscar-nominated Killers of the Flower Moon and his journey from the mean streets of 1940s New York

Here’s Scorsese trying to guess the purpose of certain items, from an eyelash curler to a menstrual cup (“A flagon?”); here he is being tested on gen-Z slang (he gets a few wrong but, basically, he slays); here he is screen-testing a prospective new muse to replace Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio – who turns out to be the family dog, Oscar. Killers of the Flower Moon – based on the true story of how white outsiders systematically murdered members of the Native American Osage tribe after they struck oil on their land in the 1920s – was six years in the making and took almost 100 days to shoot. And when Scorsese has put women to the fore, the results have usually been positive – from Pretend It’s a City, his recent Netflix series on the quintessential New Yorker Fran Lebowitz, right back to 1974’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More, for which Ellen Burstyn won the best actress Oscar as a single mother yearning to become a singer.

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