Martin Scorsese Research

Martin Scorsese Research

As a child, Scorsese was raised in New York's Little Italy neighborhood. He had a bad case of asthma, few friends, and his one hobby was going to the movies alone, or watching movies on TV. Raised strictly Catholic, he almost became a priest, and actually spent a semester at seminary before changing his mind. Attending New York University's film school, Scorsese started making short films that were darker, more cynical, more personal and more challenging than typical Hollywood fare.

His first feature was a very independent effort, Who's That Knocking at My Door?, full of odd camera angles, and starring Harvey Keitel in his first speaking role, as an working-class New Yorker falling in love with a woman clearly much more intelligent than he is. Scorsese screened Who's That Knocking at the Chicago Film Festival, and got only one offer to distribute the film, on the condition that Scorsese add a sex scene. Scorsese complied.

Working for Roger Corman, he made what could have been a schlocky action movie -- Boxcar Bertha, with Barbara Hershey and David Carradine -- into something much more substantial. Encouraged by pal John Cassavetes, Scorsese wrote and directed the gut-raw, yet almost operatic Mean Streets, with Robert De Niro and Keitel again.

Francis Ford Coppola reportedly recommended that Warner Bros hire Scorsese to make the bittersweet drama Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More, with Ellen Burstyn and Kris Kristofferson. The film was Scorsese's first commercial success, won Burstyn an Oscar, and was eventually the basis for a funny but vastly inferior sitcom, Alice, with Linda Lavin and Vic Tayback. Scorsese had nothing to do with the sitcom.

Over subsequent decades, Scorsese has repeatedly found critical and popular success, made some of the great films of his time, and often courted controversy by treating audiences as adults. He cast Disney's child star Jodie Foster as a 12-year-old prostitute in Taxi Driver, and made a psychotic De Niro the nominal protagonist in that film. Casting De Niro again, he made boxer/thug Jake LaMotta into a sympathetic, almost mythic character in Raging Bull, often mentioned as among the finest films of all time.

Scorsese confounded audiences with a dark comedy about media obsession, The King of Comedy, wherein De Niro kidnapped talk show host Jerry Lewis in a gamble for fame. He followed that with the Kafkaesque comedy After Hours, putting Griffin Dunne and an all-star supporting cast through a bizarre, sleepless night in New York.

Desperate and out-of-control individuals have often been the driving force of Scorsese's work, but when he painted Jesus Christ as another such character, Scorsese was scorned and The Last Temptation of Christ was picketed. It is ironic, since Paul Schrader's screenplay and Willem Dafoe's performance made perhaps the most honestly Christlike portrayal of Jesus ever filmed.

The Last Waltz, Scorsese's concert film chronicling the break-up of The Band, is one of the first rockumentaries and still one of the best. The Band delivers "Up on Cripple Creek", "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down", and other bits of rock perfection, while "guest" performers include Bob Dylan singing "Forever Young", Van Morrison doing "Caravan", Emmylou Harris performing "Evangeline", Neil Young doing "Helpless", and even Neil Diamond singing "Dry Your Eyes", all with The Band playing back-up.

Goodfellas is another Scorsese title that often appears on best-ever lists. "You know," said Ray Liotta as gangster Henry Hill, "we always called each other goodfellas. Like, you'd say to somebody, 'You're gonna like this guy; he's all right. He's a goodfella. He's one of us.' You understand? We were goodfellas, wiseguys." The film has been studied in film schools for its power and cinematic technique. It was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, but only Joe Pesci won, for Best Supporting Actor.

For the longest time, Scorsese had never won an Oscar, though many of his lesser efforts -- among them Cape Fear, Casino, Kundun, Gangs of New York, and The Aviator -- would be any other director's masterpiece. He has been nominated five times as Best Director and twice for Best Screenplay. In 2007, he was finally recognized by the Academy as Best Director for The Departed.

He was also co-founder and long-time president of The Film Foundation, a group working to rescue and restore early films, which are rapidly deteriorating and will otherwise soon be lost.

Scorsese's Gangs of New York was filmed before September 11 but released afterwards. It told the story of the city's earliest days, but ended with images of its modern-day skyline, including the World Trade Center. Several other films in production at the time, including Spiderman, Zoolander, and Serendipity, used CGI technology to edit out the towers. Even on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, the Manhattan skyline backdrop was covered with a curtain until a new backdrop could be constructed without the World Trade Center.

Scorsese, of course, made the opposite choice, and left the skyline intact. From the first draft of the script, that was the way it ended, with the modern skyline of New York being built. It had to end with that, or the movie shouldn't have existed. We did the paintings and edited that skyline sequence before September 11, and afterwards it was suggested that we should take out the towers, but I felt that was not the right way to go. It's not my job to revise the New York skyline. The people in the film and the people of New York, good, bad, and indifferent, were part of the creation of that skyline, not the destruction of it. And if the skyline collapses, ultimately, they will build another one.