A nice bit of business in the movie ether today – in The Guardian Mr Scorsese talks to Steve Rose about his love for ‘The Red Shoes’ – one of the most gorgeous-looking and serious-about-human-pathology films ever made, the new print of which he’ll premiere at Cannes tomorrow:

‘Movie directors are desperate people. You’re totally desperate every second of the day when you’re involved in a film, through pre-production, production, post-production, and certainly when you’re dealing with the press,’ says Marty.  (He should consider co-hosting a film podcast.)

Steve Rose continues on the film’s mystique:

“It’s easy to forget how obscure most movies were in the days before DVD, video on demand, or even VHS. Studio boss J Arthur Rank lost faith in the commercial potential of The Red Shoes on first seeing it, and sent only a single print to the US. So for two years it played continuously at a single movie theatre in New York, before eventually breaking out to become a huge success, picking up Oscars in 1949 for best art direction and music. Scorsese saw it that first time in colour; after that, the only way to see such movies was on television. “Even with commercial breaks, in black and white, and cut to about an hour and a half, it still had a powerful magic,” [Scorsese] says. “The vibrancy of the movie and the sense of colour in the storytelling actually came through. Then, eventually, the prize was to track down a 16mm Technicolor print. I was able to do that a few times.” The rest of the Powell/Pressburger back catalogue Scorsese would track down one film at a time. “We were in a process of discovery.”