Happy Birthday Martin Scorsese!

Raising a glass to Martin Scorsese on his birthday – celebrating with some old pals – with a story from Catherine O'Hara. 

That time Catherine O'Hara first met Martin Scorcese...

CATHERINE O’HARA: “I had met Martin Scorsese about a year or two before ‘After Hours,’ at the Toronto Film Festival. He was being honored, and he was at the back of the theater where you enter. My sister, Mary Margaret, and I were arriving late and trying to sneak in without anybody noticing. And he looked over and went, ‘Hey, I know you!’

“While the crowd is waiting for him to go on, he’s telling me how much he loved SCTV. I was beyond flattered. Then he sent someone over to invite us to join him for dinner afterward. At the table was Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, his longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker—and Mary Margaret and me! It was crazy! I was way in over my head but just thrilled to be sitting there.

“At the end of the night, he said, ‘I wanna give you my phone number.’ He ripped out a piece of his passport and wrote his number on it. A year or two later, when I went in to meet him to talk about ‘After Hours,’ he told me this nightmare story that while in the Middle East scouting locations for ‘The Last Temptation of Christ,’ he got stopped at a border because of the ripped passport. He tried to explain: ‘I only ripped it out because I gave it to some actress.’

“I remember really being pumped up by Scorsese. He’d go, ‘Who’s this little fucker? He thinks that he can tell you what to do? You’re the one helping him!’ He made it clear my job was to make Griffin’s character’s life hell. It’s fun when you’re given license to be bad.

“Also, I got to drive the Mister Softee truck that’s trying to hunt down Griffin. Most of that driving you see in the movie is actually me behind the wheel. It wasn’t easy, but I was driving in an ice-cream truck in a Martin Scorsese movie, so I was not complaining.”

From Jake Malooley’s “‘After Hours’”:The Oral History of a Cult Classic”

Martin Scorsese and daughter Francesca celebrated their birthdays together with cakes of their own.