Today, speaking to me for the BBC’s Talking Movies programme, he wistfully recalls a past when major studios would turn out “serious work, even serious comedies. What I’m saying is that the money now is for the franchise, for the action film, and that’s where it’s going to stay”. By the same token, he says today’s indie movies, which is where the art form continues to flourish, are not getting the platforms they deserve: “We want them bigger. We want more audiences to see them,” he says.

Scorsese has never really been a big player in the studio system but Killers of the Flower Moon is in its way a rare example of the big-budget “serious work” he says has gone missing. It’s a three-and-a-half hour epic adaptation of David Grann’s book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, starring Scorsese acting stalwarts Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. It chronicles the murders of many members of the indigenous community in 1920s Oklahoma that constituted the so-called “Reign of Terror”, in which more than 60 Native Americans were killed by white interlopers trying to get their hands on the oil that lay beneath Osage Nation land.

It’s Scorsese’s first western but it’s also a crime drama, his stock-in-trade, and it certainly features the macho-posturing men and violence that have long defined his work. His earlier films, focusing on New York gangsters among others, were stories of characters with motivations not too dissimilar from those of the unscrupulous businessmen in Killers of the Flower Moon.

As he explains: “I grew up in an area of street crime, organised crime, there were a lot of people doing some bad things. So in this story you could take it from robbing somebody’s store to take it to the point of wiping out a nation, an indigenous nation.”

These days, many Hollywood blockbusters, especially franchise films, fail to offer distinctive storytelling. Although Scorsese has at times been a director-for-hire, he has usually made films on his own terms that reflect his voice. He truly values cinema in which the single artistic vision of a filmmaker prevails.

He seems to have got his way with Killers of the Flower Moon. It was reportedly bankrolled to the tune of an estimated $200 million dollars by Apple Original Films, but the director maintains he was more or less left alone. “You could say, ‘Well, that’s because you are who you are, but yeah, I’m 80 years now’. So I was able to make a picture with nobody looking over my shoulder… if they were, they were very quiet,” he says.

Scorsese occupies a now rarefied position in US cinema, as a director making epic films very much his own way. Just recently, both Christopher Nolan with Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig with Barbie triumphed with big-budget films which, like Scorsese’s, bore their own personal stamp. But they are the exception.

Cinema’s brave new world

Eighty-year-old Scorsese knows he and other filmmakers are facing a changed landscape where overall moviegoing still hasn’t returned to pre-Covid levels.  When it comes to the US release of his films, too, he has to contend with a viewing audience that is more than ever atomised and politically polarised. Also, in an age where there is greater scrutiny about who is represented on screen and how, Scorsese had to apply extra care to telling a story like that of the Osage murders. He was determined that Killers of the Flower Moon would give due weight to the indigenous characters – and in fact the soul of his new epic doesn’t belong to the white men played by Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio but to a Native American woman portrayed by Lily Gladstone.

Gladstone’s performance has become one of the big talking points of the film. Scorsese spotted her in Kelly Reichardt’s 2016 drama film Certain Women. “I saw that face and I saw what was going on with her eyes and I said ‘This is the one, she’s really interesting’,” he recalls of the impact she made on him. In the emerging Oscars race, Gladstone is campaigning to become the first indigenous performer to be nominated for a best actress Academy Award.

Although Scorsese has a formidable reputation, there’s no guarantee that Killers of the Flower Moon will be a box office triumph. In the director’s 1970s heyday, films like The Godfather were capable of unifying audiences across the globe. Scorsese doubts whether cinema still has that same power to bring audiences together.

“I’m not sure, I hope it can,” he says. “I may be wrong on this, but the problem is that [the film landscape] is fragmented. Films are made for a certain group… you have films made for different groups of different gender, different sexuality etc. They should be films, all together.”

His mission to ‘save’ film history

With the fate of moviegoing uncertain, Scorsese is more invested than ever in preserving our celluloid history, and restoring it. In 1990, he helped create The Film Foundation as an organisation dedicated to film preservation; since it was founded, it has been involved in the restoration of more than 1,000 works. Among its recent triumphs is the restoration, with the BFI National Archive, of Pressure, Britain’s first ever black feature film, which was released in 1976 and directed by Sir Horace Ové, who died last month. The world premiere of the Pressure restoration will be screened at both the London and New York Film Festivals on 11 October.

Comparing old movies to ancient books, Scorsese believes they need to be preserved. “The picture it gives us … [the] representation of who we are or who we were, how we’ve shifted, the good things, the shameful things – these can’t be swept under the rug.”

What next for him?

Scorsese will turn 81 in November, and there are films he would still like to make. In deciding where to devote his energies, he remembers the advice of legendary Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami: “He looked at me and he said, ‘Don’t do anything you don’t want to do. Just don’t.’ And I know what he meant.”

In fact, the veteran director views filmmaking nowadays in rather pragmatic terms. “It comes down to what’s in the frame, where to place that camera and where to spend whatever time is left of your life telling a story. Is it worth it to you?”

Most of the reviews of Killers of the Flowers Moon have judged that it was a story definitely worth telling. One critic, Deadline’s Pete Hammond, went so far as to call it a “landmark motion picture achievement”, and that’s a verdict on which many would agree – a late-in-his-career gift from one of America’s foremost filmmakers.