I look at a movie like “The Aviator” as a film by a director who was born to direct. I look in slack-jawed awe and know I could never have done that, and I am ashamed to call myself a director in the same breath — it’s like comparing a surgeon with a guy who hands out Band-Aids at the free clinic.

Think about the sequence with [Howard] Hughes locking himself in his screening room: You feel like you are in that fucking screening room with him. Scorsese didn’t do the simple film-school thing of shooting forced perspective to make the walls come in on Hughes, or the high wide-angle that gives you a sense of isolation; he shot that sequence in such a way that you feel you are trapped in the room, too. How did he do it? If I knew how, I would ape it in my next film!

There’s also a wonderful scene in which Errol Flynn reaches over and grabs something off his plate. All of a sudden, Hughes’ mood completely shifts and changes, and Scorsese gets that just be cutting between Hughes’ look and the plate, between the plate and Hughes and over to Errol Flynn.

It’s this really quiet moment in the middle of this massive, loud scene where you go: “I get it! I get it!” He really conveys that mania quite well.

The wonderful thing about “The Aviator” is, it is a story that all comes down to one swear word, when Alec Baldwin’s character finds out that TWA is going to get its international air [routes], and he stops at the globe [in his office] and he just suddenly says, “Fuck!” That whole movie comes down to that word — it is really about how this dude beat the odds — and in that respect, I can relate to what Martin Scorsese is trying to do.

I would give Scorsese best director because this took the most to direct, to keep all of those plates spinning at once. Directing is answering a series of questions: Red or blue? Light or dark? That’s what a director does — field 4 million questions — and in a movie like that, imagine the questions you have to deal with on a daily basis?

The scope of the picture is something very few directors could have handled; add to that the fact that the story is as gripping as it is. It is a movie about passion; Scorsese is a very passionate director, and boy, that translates in the film. For heaven’s sake, isn’t this man due?