Martin Scorsese

• 1. Introduction

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  Martin Scorsese had asthma as a boy and could not play sports or join in games with the other children. So his parents and his older brother took him to the movies instead. That is where his passion for cinema began, in a child who could not run. He was born on the 17th of November 1942 in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens, and grew up in Little Italy in Manhattan. Both his parents worked in the Garment District, his father a clothes presser, his mother a seamstress. All four of his grandparents were Italian immigrants from Sicily. How does a sickly Catholic kid from a family with no habit of reading become one of the most influential directors in the history of cinema? What does it cost a person to make films exactly the way he wants? And why has the same handful of faces kept returning to his sets for fifty years? This is the story of a filmmaker who nearly did not survive his own success.

• 2. The Boy In The Theater

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  The Tales of Hoffmann, a 1951 film by Powell and Pressburger, sat in a Bronx rental store with only one copy of its reel. As a teenager in Brooklyn, Scorsese kept commuting to the Bronx to rent it. He was one of only two people who regularly did. The other was George A. Romero, who also became a director. Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes by Powell and Pressburger marked him early. So did John Ford's The Quiet Man and The Searchers, and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, to which he says he responded very strongly. The Sicilian episode of Roberto Rossellini's Paisà struck him deeply. He first saw it on television with his Sicilian relatives, and it had a significant impact on his life. Rossellini's Rome, Open City and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves shaped how he saw his own Sicilian roots. He has called the French New Wave a force that influenced all filmmakers who came after, whether they saw the films or not. Toward the end of the 1950s, with no habit of reading at home, he turned to literature, marked by Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He had wanted to be a priest. He attended a preparatory seminary, failed after the first year, and could not attend Fordham University. Cinema took the place of the priesthood, and he enrolled at New York University.

• 3. From Student To Director

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  Haig P. Manoogian, an Armenian-American film professor at NYU, gave Scorsese what the young filmmaker called the most precious gift I have ever received. Scorsese made student shorts including The Big Shave in 1967, an indictment of America's involvement in Vietnam carried by its alternative title, Viet '67. His first professional job came while still at NYU, as an assistant cameraman; he later admitted he was terrible at it because he could not judge the focus distance. In 1967 he made his first feature, I Call First, later retitled Who's That Knocking at My Door. On it he met actor Harvey Keitel and editor Thelma Schoonmaker, both long-term collaborators. Roger Ebert saw it at the Chicago International Film Festival and wrote Scorsese's first published review, calling it a great moment in American movies. He became friends with the movie brats of the 1970s, Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. De Palma introduced him to Robert De Niro. Roger Corman, who had liked Who's That Knocking at My Door, asked him to make Boxcar Bertha in 1972. Corman taught him that entertaining films could be shot with very little money or time. Afterward John Cassavetes, a close friend and mentor, urged him to make the films he wanted to make rather than someone else's projects.

• 4. The Signature Style

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  Mean Streets in 1973 was the breakthrough for Scorsese, Keitel and De Niro. Critic Pauline Kael called it a true original of our time, a triumph of personal filmmaking. By then the signature was in place: macho posturing, bloody violence, Catholic guilt and redemption, a gritty New York setting, rapid editing, and a soundtrack of contemporary music. The slow motion and freeze frames appear from Who's That Knocking at My Door onward. His blonde leading ladies arrive seen through the protagonist's eyes, dressed in white in their first scene and shot in slow motion, a possible nod to Hitchcock. Cybill Shepherd in Taxi Driver, Cathy Moriarty's white bikini in Raging Bull, Sharon Stone's white minidress in Casino all follow the pattern. He favors long tracking shots, visible in Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Casino and Hugo. He sometimes highlights a character with an iris, an homage to silent film of the 1920s. The Rolling Stones song Gimme Shelter recurs across Goodfellas, Casino and The Departed. He almost always takes a quick cameo, sometimes only lending his voice, as the ambulance dispatcher in Bringing Out the Dead or the off-screen dressing room attendant in the final scene of Raging Bull.

• 5. The Films That Almost Killed Him

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  Taxi Driver won the Palme d'Or at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival and brought four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. De Niro played the alienated Travis Bickle, with Jodie Foster as an underage prostitute and Keitel as her pimp. It marked the start of Scorsese's collaboration with writer Paul Schrader. Five years later, John Hinckley Jr. blamed his attempt on President Ronald Reagan on his obsession with Foster's character. The success of Taxi Driver pushed Scorsese into a big-budget musical, New York, New York, his third film with De Niro. It failed at the box office and drove him into depression. By this stage he had developed a serious cocaine addiction. He still found the drive to make The Last Waltz, documenting The Band's final concert at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day, 1976, with guests including Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Eric Clapton. A period of wild partying damaged his fragile health, culminating in a terrifying episode of internal bleeding. By several accounts, including his own, De Niro saved his life. De Niro came to the hospital and asked, in so many words, whether he wanted to live or die, proposing they make Raging Bull. Convinced he would never make another film, Scorsese poured himself into the biopic of boxer Jake LaMotta, calling it a kamikaze method of film-making. Shot in high-contrast black and white, it was voted the greatest film of the 1980s by Britain's Sight & Sound magazine. He dedicated it to Manoogian, with love and resolution. De Niro won the Best Actor Oscar and Schoonmaker won for editing, but Best Director went to Robert Redford for Ordinary People.

• 6. Faith On Film

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  The Last Temptation of Christ retold the life of Christ in human rather than divine terms, based on the 1955 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis. Barbara Hershey introduced Scorsese to the book while they filmed Boxcar Bertha. Paramount pulled the plug shortly before shooting was to begin, citing pressure from religious groups; in that aborted 1983 version Aidan Quinn was cast as Jesus and Sting as Pontius Pilate. Universal later financed it after Scorsese agreed to make a more mainstream film, which became Cape Fear. Before its 1988 release the project caused a furor, with worldwide protests against its perceived blasphemy, most centered on a sequence showing Christ marrying and raising a family with Mary Magdalene in a Satan-induced hallucination on the cross. Willem Dafoe played Jesus and David Bowie played Pilate. Guilt and Catholicism run through much of his work, from Who's That Knocking at My Door to Shutter Island and The Irishman. Kundun in 1997 told the early life of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, and his exile to India, drawing pressure from Chinese officials on its distributor. Silence, about two Portuguese Jesuit priests in 17th-century Japan, had been in development since 1990. Asked why he held the project for over 26 years, Scorsese said it had been an obsession, that it has to be done.

• 7. The New Muse

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  Gangs of New York in 2002 marked Scorsese's first film with Leonardo DiCaprio, filmed entirely at Rome's Cinecittà studios with a budget said to exceed 100 million dollars. The production was troubled, with rumors of conflict with Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein; Scorsese's original cut ran over 180 minutes, the final cut 168. It earned him his first Golden Globe for Best Director. The Aviator in 2004, a biopic of Howard Hughes, reunited him with DiCaprio and became the most-nominated film at the 77th Academy Awards with eleven nominations. The Departed in 2006, based on the Hong Kong drama Infernal Affairs, finally won Scorsese the Academy Award for Best Director. Accepting it, he asked, could you double-check the envelope. The award was presented by Coppola, Lucas and Spielberg. Schoonmaker won her third editing Oscar on a Scorsese film. The Wolf of Wall Street followed in 2013, a black comedy based on Jordan Belfort's memoir, the fifth Scorsese-DiCaprio collaboration. Killers of the Flower Moon in 2023 brought DiCaprio and De Niro together under his direction, premiering at Cannes to a nine-minute standing ovation. While promoting it, Scorsese said: I'm old. I read stuff. I see things. I want to tell stories, and there's no more time.

• 8. The People He Keeps

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  Robert De Niro has worked with Scorsese on ten feature films and one short, including the three that made AFI's list of 100 Years and 100 Movies, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas. Scorsese has often said De Niro's best work under his direction was Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy. DiCaprio has collaborated on six features and one short. Beyond his stars, Scorsese has built a workshop that spans decades. Thelma Schoonmaker has edited many of his films and won three Oscars on his projects. Cinematographers Michael Ballhaus, Robert Richardson, Michael Chapman and Rodrigo Prieto recur across his work, as do screenwriters Paul Schrader, Mardik Martin and Jay Cocks. His parents, Charles and Catherine Scorsese, appeared in bit parts and supporting roles such as in Goodfellas. An advocate for film preservation, he founded The Film Foundation in 1990, the World Cinema Foundation in 2007, and the African Film Heritage Project in 2017. He was recognized as an Italian citizen by jus sanguinis in 2018. In 2024 he narrated Made in England, a documentary about Powell and Pressburger, the very filmmakers whose single rented reel he chased across the Bronx as a boy. In 2026 he took a role as the voice of an Ardennian shopkeep in The Mandalorian and Grogu.