Martin Scorsese said he thinks cinema is changing but not dying and, in an appearance at the Berlinale at the age of 81, said he is contemplating making a film about Jesus.

“I don’t think it’s dying at all. No, I think it’s transforming,” Scorsese said when asked about the future of cinema at a press conference at the 74^th Berlinale where he was presented with an honourary Golden Bear lifetime achievement award on Tuesday.

“It never was meant to be one thing. We were used to it being one thing. you know, I mean I grew up (with cinema) as one thing. If you want to see a movie you went to a theatre. A good theatre or a bad theatre, but it was a theatre. It was always a communal, a communal experience.”

Scorsese, director of some of cinema’s biggest hits, from “Taxi Driver” (1976) to “Goodfellas” (1990) to “Killers of the Flower Moon” (2023), said new technologies that allow filmmakers to produce movies on Tik Tok, with handheld digital cameras or even on mobile phones, posed a challenge but also created new frontiers for filmmaking.

“What I’m getting at is that I don’t think we should let the technology scare us,” he said. “Don’t become a slave to technology, let us control the technology and put it in the right direction — the right direction being from the individual voice rather than, again something which is just consumed and tossed away.”

Asked to share “the best 30 seconds” of his life, Scorsese clarified that the questioner was talking about cinema and answered that it was a 30-second commercial he shot in black and white for Giorgio Armani in the 1980s.

“It was a boy and a girl in a bedroom talking and learning each other’s language,” Scorsese said. “I thought it was very sweet.”

He said he’d recently had an audience at the Vatican with Pope Francis and that he is contemplating making a film about Jesus.

“I’ve always been interested in that. As far as making a film on it, I’m contemplating it right now. What kind of film I’m not quite sure. But I want to make something unique and different and that could be thought provoking and I hope also entertaining.

“I’m not quite sure yet how to go about it. But once we finish our rounds here…maybe I’ll get some sleep and then wake up and I’ll have this fresh idea of how to do it.”

By Michael Roddy