Faith & Spirit Quote by Martin Scorsese

Howard Hughes is Scorsese's perfect mirror-monster: a man whose genius is inseparable from compulsion, whose ambition looks like prophecy until it starts reading as pathology. When Scorsese calls Hughes a "visionary" obsessed with "speed and flying like a god", he's not just romanticizing aviation; he's naming a distinctly American intoxication with transcendence-through-technology. Speed becomes a moral category, a proof of worth. Flying isn't travel, it's conquest, an attempt to outrun the body, the clock, the ordinary.

The key move is the pivot from Hughes-the-myth to Hughes-the-method: "I loved his idea of what filmmaking was". That's Scorsese admitting attraction to a dangerous definition of art: cinema as engineering challenge, spectacle as obsession, precision as salvation. In Hughes, filmmaking isn't a collaborative medium or a humanist project; it's control at scale, an industrial dream where the frame can be mastered the way an aircraft can be tuned. It's also a confession of kinship. Scorsese's best films are powered by velocity and risk, by the sense that motion itself is meaning. Hughes offers an extreme version of that credo.

Context matters: Scorsese is talking as the director of The Aviator, a film that treats Hughes as both hero and cautionary tale. The line slyly signals what Scorsese is doing: using a biopic to interrogate his own medium's hunger for bigger, faster, more - and the psychological cost of mistaking technical perfection for freedom.