(Credit: Netflix)

As one of the most dedicated cinephiles in the industry, Martin Scorsese has leveraged his extensive knowledge of film to inspire many of his acclaimed works. However, he has singled out only one movie as being crucial to the creation of Shutter Island.

The legendary director has always been an open book when it comes to rattling off the films that inspired his own back catalogue in one way or another, even if it was just a solitary title that cast a looming shadow over his intense, atmospheric, and ultimately acclaimed mystery thriller.

Based on Dennis Lehane’s novel of the same name, it was fitting that Shutter Island took several cues from a fellow page-to-screen translation, one that arrived in cinemas less than a decade before Leonardo DiCaprio’s Teddy Daniels touches down at the titular landmass to investigate the goings-on at Ashecliffe Hospital in 1954.

Jacques Tourneur’s classic 1947 noir Out of the Past stars Robert Mitchum as an everyman gas station owner who finds his new life upended when a figure from his old one recognises him. Kirk Douglas’ gambler had previously tasked Mitchum’s Jeff Bailey to hunt down an ex-girlfriend who stole tens of thousands of dollars from him, only for the pair to fall in love and head off on the lam to try and live out a happy existence together.

Adapted from Daniel Mainwaring’s book Build My Gallows High, Scorsese didn’t just name Out of the Past as a perfect companion piece to Shutter Island on Letterboxd, but he revealed it as being the classic old school noir that made more of an impact on his leading man than any other film he was assigned as research into developing the duality of Teddy.

“I showed Leo a few pictures – post-war, noir – to prepare for Shutter Island, and the one that seems to have made the biggest impression on him was this one,” Scorsese shared. “The tone, the cool unfolding of the action and the imagery, the way that Robert Mitchum looks in the frame.”

Much like Shutter Island, Out of the Past‘s narrative is tethered to an inciting incident that informs everything to come, with the Academy Award winner drawn to how “there’s something mysterious about the past itself as it unfolds in the flashbacks.”

“I’ve always felt like I could enter it anywhere, at any point, and experience it like a dream,” he continued, although that’s one count where Shutter Island greatly differs from Out of the Past seeing as the third act of the former hinges on a rug-pulling and revelatory twist that recontextualises everything that’s come before.

Reflecting on the way “there’s a metaphysical level to the movie in that it deals with the past as a presence, a force,” Scorsese “very much had that in mind when I made Shutter Island.” The two films may have been made more than 60 years apart, but they combine for quite the spiritually and thematically-inclined double-bill.

Watch Shutter Island on Netflix now.