Shared Lenses
“My films are 180 degrees away from the type of picture Celina makes,” Martin Scorsese says. “With some exceptions — Raging Bull and Goodfellas are two —they’re very direct narratives.” Featuring vivid characters and settings, noisy conflict and sudden eruptions of violence, all of it leavened by inspired flashes of humour, they come at you head on.
By contrast, Celina Murga is a stealth artist — Scorsese calls her work “oblique” — and in her unobtrusive way, she shares her mentor’s originality. Low-key and deceptively casual, her movies sneak up on their subjects and their audiences, too, until you’re thoroughly hooked.
Despite their different ways with narrative, Murga cites Scorsese as a key influence when she was in film school in Buenos Aires. Another was independent American director John Cassavetes, whose pictures also influenced Scorsese when he was a student in New York in the 1960s. For all their vivid action, Scorsese’s movies are no less character-driven than Murga’s.
She has found commonalities with her mentor in the course of the Shutter Island shoot, sitting side by side in the director’s tent as he monitors the action on video and confers with his cinematographer between takes. “We both work in this very obsessive way,” she says. “He’s also very concentrated during the take, observing every detail of the image. That’s something I really care about as well.”