Nicole Kidman has derided Martin Scorsese for a common movie complaint often levied the director’s way.
The Australian Oscar-winning star has worked with numerous high-profile filmmakers over the year, including Stanley Kubrick, and has made no secret of the fact that she wants to work with the Taxi Driver and Goodfellas director.
Throughout Kidman’s career, she has starred in films from Jonathan Glazer, Park Chan Wook, Lars Von Trier, Yorgos Lanthimos and Robert Eggers – and while she wants to add Scorsese to that list, she has suggested that she believes it’s him who is preventing that from happening.
Kidman, in a new interview with Vanity Fair, stated: “I’ve always said I want to work with Scorsese, if he does a film with women.”
The pointed remark follows years of criticism aimed at the filmmaker for making movies primarily led by men, including his frequent collaborators Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. He has also worked with Daniel Day-Lewis twice, on The Age of Innocence (1992) and Gangs of New York (2002).
Scorsese’s sole film led by a woman is the 1974 drama Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, which won Ellen Burstyn an Oscar for Best Actress. While the then up-and-coming director was a left-field choice to direct the drama, it was Burstyn who hired him after seeing a test screening of his 1973 film Mean Streets before it was released.
Bustryn told Forbes in 2014 that, although she loved that film, she told him at the time: “I can’t tell if you know anything about women.”
She said the director replied: “No, but I’d like to learn,” which the actor described as “good an answer as you can get from a guy”.
While not the leads, other key performances by women in Scorsese’s films include Liza Minnelli in New York, New York (1977), Sharon Stone in Casino (1995), Vera Farmiga in The Departed (2006), Margot Robbie in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and, most recently, Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon (2023).
Kidman is not the only actor to have taken a swipe at the filmmaker over his lack of female leads, with Meryl Streep saying in 2011: “I would like Martin Scorsese to be interested in a female character once in a while, but I don’t know if I’ll live that long.”