Guillermo Del Toro Says He Would Give His Life For A Celebrated Director

Guillermo del Toro has come to the defense of Martin Scorsese, saying he would give up his own life for Scorsese.

By Douglas Helm | Published

Guillermo del Toro recently took to Twitter to defend Martin Scorsese after a scathing review of the director’s filmography by Sean Egan in The Critic. del Toro wrote out a lengthy Twitter thread that included the assertion that he would shorten his own lifespan to lengthen Scorsese’s. To be exact, he said, “To be clear: If God offered to shorten my life to lengthen Scorsese’s- I’d take the deal.”

Guillermo del Toro is a highly respected filmmaker so his words about Martin Scorsese definitely resonate. To put it lightly, Egan’s take on Scorsese is certainly contrarian. Many consider Scorsese to be one of the best directors of all time, and Egan even goes out of his way to praise Goodfellas, The King of Comedy, After Hours, Shudder Island, and The Aviator.

martin scorsese

However, Egan gets downright blasphemous from a cinephile’s perspective when he talks about how Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull aren’t good films. Many people, including Guillermo del Toro, would have a hard time saying these Martin Scorsese films are anything less than fantastic, if not downright masterpieces. Egan does mention how films like The Irishman and The Wolf of Wall Street are too long, which is a fair criticism, but it doesn’t necessarily make them bad movies.

Of course, Guillermo del Toro and Sean Egan are both entitled to have different opinions about Martin Scorsese, but del Toro seems to think that the arguments aren’t really being made with the best intentions. In his Tweet thread, Guillermo del Toro talks about how the opinions are “not backed by rationale” and that the article “baited them traffic.” You can read the entire Tweet thread yourself here.

Fortunately for people who are actually fans of Guillermo del Toro and Martin Scorsese, both directors have big projects on the way. We’ll get Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio in select theaters and on Netflix before the end of the year. The movie (as you might expect from del Toro) tells a darker version of the tale and is shot in stop-motion with a star-studded voice cast that includes Gregory Mann, Ewan McGregor, Ron Perlman, Finn Wolfard, Tilda Swinton, Christoph Waltz, Burn Gorman, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson, and David Bradley.

Fortunately, Guillermo del Toro won’t have to die for us to see the next Martin Scorsese film, which is an adaptation of the David Grann book Killers of the Flower Moon. Killer of the Flower Moon tells the real-life story of the major FBI investigation behind the 1920s murders of the Osage tribe in the United States. Martin Scorsese co-writes the screenplay with Eric Roth and directs the cast which includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert de Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Tantoo Cardinal, John Lithgow, Brendan Fraser, Cara Jade Myers, Janae Collins, William Belleau, Jason Isbell, and Sturgill Simpson.

Killers of the Flower Moon is now in the post-production stages, and we can likely expect to see it sometime in 2023. In the meantime, Martin Scorsese’s documentary Personality Crisis: One Night Only comes out on October 12, which is much sooner. You can check out Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio when it comes to select theaters in November or when it gets a Netflix release on December 9.