No surprise Mark Ruffalo, who plays the MCU’s Hulk, had a thoughtful answer about the economics of the movie biz following the publication of Scorsese’s op-ed. “If we’re living in a world where economics are how we measure the value of a society, then yeah, whoever makes the biggest thing is going to dominate,” Ruffalo said in an interview with with BBC Cinematic’s Sam Asi in 2019. “They are going to try and keep making it again and again. In that article [Scorsese] said something really interesting, and I wish he took it all the way. He said, ‘I am not suggesting that we subsidize films.’ But that’s exactly what he’s suggesting. We should have a national endowment of the arts that gives money to another kind of cinema and does support another kind of cinema.”
He continued, “If you’re working in the milieu of ‘I’m going to try and make a movie that has economic success,’ which [Scorsese] does too by the way, then how can you complain about that system when you’re not on top of it anymore? I would love to see Marty create a national film endowment, and he could do this, that lets young, new talent come in that isn’t just driven by the marketplace but driven by precepts of art. That would be amazing. That’s really the crux of this conversation.”
(For the record, Martin Scorsese is the founder and chair of The Film Foundation, whose mission is to restore and archive films across the globe. It also has an educational program to teach young people “about film language and history.” Maybe not precisely the same, but hey, you can’t say Marty isn’t doing his part.)
