Martin Scorsese has joined Bahman Ghobadi’s movie Trees are Watching.
Filmmaker Martin Scorsese
The 83-year-old filmmaker serves as an executive producer on the 57-year-old director’s psychological horror film, which stars 46-year-old actress Eva Green as its lead character, Darya.
Per IMDb, Trees Are Watching follows the novelist who “returns to her hometown with her deaf daughter to work on her new book. There she is haunted by the memory of twin girls from her childhood, and the two trees planted as their memorials”.
Deadline reports that Ghobadi’s project is deeply personal to him, as it is “shaped in part by the nightmares that have followed his 18 years of exile and his reflections on the connection between humanity and the natural world”.
Scorsese’s involvement in Trees Are Watching comes as the film prepares to have its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival on Friday (18.09.26).
In June, it was announced that the Wolf of Wall Street filmmaker had joined the artificial intelligence company Black Forest Labs as an adviser, with the collaboration aiming to “push the bounds of creativity to create deeper and richer experiences for audiences”.
In a statement posted on Black Forest Labs’ website, Scorsese said: “Cinema is a young medium, only around 125 years old, so we have to be open to how it can evolve.
“I utilised 3D with Hugo and de-aging technology with The Irishman. Now, with this tool, I can share what I’m visualising more clearly and efficiently to my creative team – the production designer, art designer, and cinematographer – for them to build on to enrich cinematic intelligence.”
In a video clip filmed at Scorsese’s New York City office to accompany the announcement, the Goodfellas director uses Black Forest Labs’ FLUX generative-AI model to help storyboard a scene.
The star discusses how he staged the 1990 film’s famous Steadicam shot, which follows mobster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) as he makes his way through the Copacabana nightclub, and notes how each “vignette” through the scene had to be precisely staged.
Scorsese said in the video: “If you have a tool like this, you could figure it out much, much quicker and you could save production time, and also less wear and tear on the crew.”
Black Forest Labs CEO Robin Rombach told The New York Times that the collaboration with The Departed filmmaker represents “a great proof point that this works”.