Martin Scorsese has made no secret out of the fact that he's getting tired of Hollywood and big-budget movie making. He's already told us that at some point soon, he's going to stop making movies entirely and instead toy with making little documentaries. For now, he has a few more movies on the horizon, but now says that even those will be massively scaled down.

Marty spoke a the RomeCinemaFest after a screening of The Departed where he told the crowd that the $90 million film would be his last big budget project for a long time. "I think I am figuring out that when a film has a very big budget that means that fewer risks can be taken," he explained. "I don't know how much longer I can hold out in regard to the kind of movie the major studios would like to make and the kind of film I would like to make."

You'd think a director like Scorsese would have the control necessary to do whatever he wants, even in the constricting studio system of Tinseltown. But lately, the more he talks the more frustrated he sounds with working in and for Hollywood. If Scorsese can't get the kind of creative freedom he wants, then what hope is there for anyone else?

Martin insists he's not bitter, and that he has no beef with his studio Warner Brothers, and in fact according to The Hollywood Reporter called them "supportive". Instead, he thinks it's an industry-wide problem which he'll avoid on his next movie by going small. His next movie is Silence, the story of two Jesuit priests traveling in seventeenth century Imperial Japan. Sounds like a bad time to go low-budget to me, but he says: "'Silence' is a small-scale, lower-budget film that I have wanted to make for 15 years." Don't expect another Scorsese epic for some time, if ever. Think about that. The Departed could be his last big-budget film. I wonder if DiCaprio will work for scale?