US director Martin Scorsese
© AFP/File Anne-Christine PoujoulatCANNES (AFP) - "You have to have an obsessive mind, you have to want to make film more than anything else in the world," he said, baring his heart during a two-hour master class on film-making at the world's paramount filmfest, a 12-day event closing Sunday.
"There is no need to go to a school, you can learn everything you need to know about a camera in four hours," he added, saying that after five decades of film-making he still knew nothing about opening and closing lenses.
Scorsese, who this year walked off with his long-overdue first Oscars for best director and best film for "The Departed", said he first fell in love with movies as a child growing up in New York.
Because his parents were working-class and did not read books, they would take him to the movies, he said.
"Ultimately the connection to cinema and movies was made emotionally through my parents, really.
"And I think because I may not have been able to speak to them of what my feelings about them were, I lived my feelings with them and for them, through the films they took me to see.
"And in a sense, I don't think I've ever have gotten past that, and that has given me the obsession, the emotional connection to please the parents maybe."
Scorsese, born in New York and aged 64, said his parents had liked most of his films but were shocked by "Mean Streets", a 1973 movie about wheeling and dealing in New York's Little Italy district.
The film-maker said he started haunting movie theatres at the age of 11, seeing old films by the likes of Fritz Lang or Elia Kazan's "East of Eden" to see "the way it was directed, the nature of the acting, the story.
"I didn't know about film-making, but then when I began to understand the need to experience that film again, and films like that again, I began to wonder why I felt a certain way at a certain point of the movie".
"You become obsessive when you want to see every film that was made", he added.
"You collect those films in a way, in your mind, and in your heart, and the obsession becomes dangerous. This is before video and DVDs, I started to collect the pictures, like in "La Nuit Americaine" (Francois Truffaut, 1973) where the boy wakes up at night to steal the pictures of "Citizen Kane" (Orson Welles, 1941).
"Then I had to get those pictures, then I had to buy the posters ... then I needed to make the films! Make 'Citizen Kane' just the way Orson Welles did".
©AFP