“Only a true, passionate filmmaker could have made this picture.”– Scorsese on Aronofsky’s mother!
“Before I actually saw mother!, I was extremely disturbed by all of the severe judgments of it. Many people seemed to want to define the film, box it in, find it wanting and condemn it. And many seemed to take joy in the fact that it received an F grade from Cinemascore. This actually became a news story — mother! had been "slapped" with the "dreaded" Cinemascore F rating, a terrible distinction that it shares with pictures directed by Robert Altman, Jane Campion, William Friedkin and Steven Soderbergh.
After I had a chance to see mother!, I was even more disturbed by this rush to judgment, and that's why I wanted to share my thoughts. People seemed to be out for blood, simply because the film couldn't be easily defined or interpreted or reduced to a two-word description. Is it a horror movie, or a dark comedy, or a biblical allegory, or a cautionary fable about moral and environmental devastation? Maybe a little of all of the above, but certainly not just any one of those neat categories.
Is it a picture that has to be explained? What about the experience of watching mother!? It was so tactile, so beautifully staged and acted — the subjective camera and the POV reverse angles, always in motion … the sound design, which comes at the viewer from around corners and leads you deeper and deeper into the nightmare … the unfolding of the story, which very gradually becomes more and more upsetting as the film goes forward. The horror, the dark comedy, the biblical elements, the cautionary fable — they're all there, but they're elements in the total experience, which engulfs the characters and the viewers along with them. Only a true, passionate filmmaker could have made this picture, which I'm still experiencing weeks after I saw it.”– Martin Scorsese
source: THR [the hollywood reporter] Martin Scorsese on Rotten Tomatoes, Box Office and Why 'Mother!' Was Misjudged 10/10/2017 http://bit.ly/2DyjTKr