It's telling, perhaps damning, that a Martin Scorsese film now feels like an audacity. With tentpole movies reliably and surgically extracting billions from the box office, funding a drama by arguably Hollywood's biggest director is now something to scratch chins and underline scripts over with uncertainty.* His most recent film, Silence, eventually came into existence after 26 years of toil on Scorsese's behalf, during which, he tells me, he was even asked to give up on the project by his agents and managers. A “passion project” is how it will always be referred to – perhaps the ultimate one – but I can’t help but feel that as a director that term might be irksome, a cliché verging on pejorative in how it implies that the film in question is an act of self-indulgence and that the rest of a filmography was not motivated by passion.

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