Martin Scorsese’s Flop Led Him To Directing One of His Best Movies

Summary:

• It may be hard to imagine something like this right now, but back in the day Martin Scorsese ’s entire career was about to rip apart after one of his movies became a total flop.
• Having faced a big fiasco, Scorsese seemingly had a real career crisis while he wasn’t entirely sure whether he needed a change of his directing style.
• Despite that, the director was quick to come up with an idea for another bold film that eventually got to be one of his finest works to this day.

Right now a thought about one of Martin Scorsese’s movies flopping in the box office seems something unfathomable, but back in the 1980s this did happen and even jeopardized the director’s entire career.

In 1983, Scorsese released a comedy drama The King of Comedy starring Robert De Niro, and though the movie was well received by the critics, it got to be the director’s biggest commercial fiasco that caused a lot of uncertainty for Scorsese of whether he needed a change of direction or not.

Luckily for Scorsese and everyone else, the director’s next feature not only saved his career, but started it afresh.

Starring Griffin Dunne and Rosanna Arquette, After Hours follows mere computer data entry worker Paul Hackett who after a hard day at work feels a need to refresh his mind and an accidental luck gives him a reason for it.

After meeting attractive, yet somehow disturbed Marcy, Paul is set to go see her again at her place, but then he gets into a series of surreal events and misadventures that become Paul’s trying ordeal while he still tries to save his date.

Released in 1985, After Hours became a totally fresh look at Scorsese’s directorial legacy while still preserving his unique touch that masterfully blended a nerve-racking thriller and black comedy.

Scorsese then adds some screwball comic elements which traditionally show a quite normal character that has to constantly deal with quirky people around him, but in this case the movie’s focus doesn’t highlight everyone else’s quirkiness, but rather their total ignorance of the fact that they look weird.

Though Scorsese wasn’t really prone to working with such a mix of genres back then, he still took a risk of bringing all of his usual instruments back to the screen, even if they weren’t that effective as they looked like in the director’s sinister thrillers full of deep meaning.

Scorsese’s daring directing style proved back then that it couldn’t let him down anyway, whatever he would choose to film next; it still may be one of the main reasons for the director’s cemented status as Hollywood's legendary filmmaker.