DGA members took a hilarious trip into the underbelly of New York on March 15 when the Eastern Region Special Committee hosted a special 40th anniversary screening of Director Martin Scorsese’s dark screwball comedy, After Hours.

Following an introduction by Committee Chair Raymond De Felitta, the audience in the Guild’s New York Theater revisited the tale of Paul Hackett, an ordinary guy who experiences the worst night of his life after meeting a girl in a Manhattan café and agreeing to visit her Soho apartment. The seemingly simple trip descends into a series of awkward, surreal and life-threatening situations with a colorful cast of characters as Paul spends the rest of the night trying to return uptown.

Critically acclaimed for its black humor, After Hours won the Independent Spirit Award for “Best Feature” and earned Scorsese “Best Director” awards at the Independent Spirit Awards and the Cannes Film Festival, as well as a nomination for Cannes’ Palme d’Or.

Following the screening, Scorsese and the film’s star, Griffin Dunne, joined De Felitta onstage to recall the making of After Hours.

During the conversation, Scorsese revealed that the film captures a snapshot of his life at the time, and said, “I was living down there [in lower Manhattan] at the time and we even shot around the lofts I was living in. I had no money. Nothing. I had to reflect on what kind of movies I was going to make from then on. The bleakness of the streets [in the movie] reminds me of how I was feeling at the time. I felt that I had to go back and learn how to make a movie again with the least amount of financial support, making it the lowest budget that I can, shooting as fast as I can. That’s the personal landscape when I think of the film.”

Of his memories of working on After Hours, Dunne reminded Scorsese of a prank the Director pulled during a lighthearted day on the set. “That final shot when I’m getting out the elevator and it opens up. You played a joke on me. You rolled the camera, the elevator door opens... and there’s absolutely no one on set. There was just no one. Everybody just took off. I’m acting my little heart out, and I was like, ‘Where the hell is everyone!’”

Scorsese made his feature directorial debut in 1967 with Who’s That Knocking at My Door . Some of his other early films include Boxcar Bertha (1972), Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) and he won critical and popular acclaim for his feature, Mean Streets (1973). In 2024, Scorsese’s feature Killers of the Flower Moon earned him his 13th DGA Award nomination. He won the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film in 2006 for The Departed and was nominated in that category for Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), Goodfellas (1990), The Age of Innocence (1993), Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004), Hugo (2011), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and The Irishman (2019). Scorsese also won the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Dramatic Television in 2010 for Boardwalk Empire and was nominated for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary in 2011 for George Harrison: Living in the Material World . He received the DGA Honor in 1999 and the DGA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003. Scorsese has been a DGA member since 1971 and has served as an alternate on the DGA National Board.