Martin Scorsese at
Cannes in 2002
Martin Scorsese (born November 17, 1942 in Queens, New York, USA) is an American film director.
A highly acclaimed film director, Scorsese's body of work addresses such themes as Italian-American identity, Catholic concepts of guilt and redemption, machismo and the violence endemic in American society. Although he has received much critical acclaim he has never won an Academy Award despite numerous nominations. Scorsese is widely considered one of the most significant and influential of post-war American film makers.
Martin Scorsese came from a working class Italian-American family; his father Luciano Charles Scorsese (1912-1993) and mother Catherine Scorsese (1912-1997) both worked in New York’s Garment District. A sickly child, he spent much of his time recovering from asthma at home. It was at this stage in his life that he developed his passion for cinema. His initial desire to become a Catholic priest was forsaken for cinema; the Catholic seminary traded for New York University, where he received his M.A. in Film in 1966.
Career
1960s and 1970s
Scorsese attended New York University's film school (B.A., English, 1964; M.A., film, 1966) making short films. His most famous short is the blackly comic The Big Shave, which featured an unnamed man who shaves himself until he is profusely bleeding, ultimately slitting his own throat with his razor. Many critics have claimed the film is an indictment of America’s involvement in Vietnam. Whatever its thematic concerns, one can argue its visceral quality prefigured the director’s entire oeuvre.
He made his first feature-length film, the black and white Who's That Knocking at My Door with fellow student, actor Harvey Keitel, and editor Thelma Schoonmaker both of whom were to become long term collaborators. This film was a clear precursor, perhaps even a dry run for his later Mean Streets. Even in embryonic form, the “Scorsese style” was already evident: a feel for New York Italian American street-life, rapid editing, and an eclectic rock soundtrack.
From there he became a friend and acquaintance of the so-called "movie brats" of the 1970s: Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg. It was De Palma who introduced actor Robert De Niro to Scorsese, and the two figures became close friends, working together on many projects. Scorsese during this period also worked as one of the editors of the movie Woodstock. He also befriended actor-director John Cassavetes, who would go onto become a close friend and mentor.
In 1972 Scorsese made his directing debut with a depression-set gangster film, Boxcar Bertha for famed B-movie producer Roger Corman, who had also helped directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron and John Sayles launch their careers. Widely considered a minor work, Boxcar Bertha, however, taught Scorsese how to make films cheaply and quickly, preparing him for his first film with De Niro, Mean Streets.
Championed by influential movie critic Pauline Kael, Mean Streets was a breakthrough for Scorsese, De Niro and Keitel. By now the signature Scorsese style was present and correct: macho posturing, bloody violence, Catholic guilt and redemption, gritty New York locale, rapid-fire editing, and the obligatory rock soundtrack. Although extraordinarily fresh, innovative and exciting, it’s wired atmosphere, edgy documentary-style and gritty street-level direction perhaps owes a debt to directors John Cassavetes and early Jean-Luc Godard. (Indeed the film was completed with much encouragement from Cassavetes, who felt Boxcar Bertha was undeserving of the young director’s prodigious talent).
Actress Ellen Burstyn chose Scorsese to direct her in the 1974 movie Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, for which she won an Oscar for Best Actress. Although well regarded, the film remains an anomaly in the director’s early career, focussing as it does on a central female character.
Returning to Little Italy in New York City to explore his ethnic roots, Scorsese next came up with Italianamerican, a rich documentary featuring his parents Charles and Catherine Scorsese, both of whom went on to make cameo appearances in several of his movies. (For many years his mother worked as the official caterer for all of Scorsese's films and his father helped in the wardrobe department).
Black and white publicity still from
Taxi Driver (1976); Martin Scorsese's cameo with Robert De Niro
Two years later, in 1976, Scorsese sent shockwaves through the cinema world when he directed the iconic Taxi Driver, an unrelentingly grim and violent portrayal of one mans’ slow descent in to psychosis in a hellishly conceived Manhattan.
Scorsese’s direction by now was highly accomplished, using jump cuts, expressionist lighting, point of view shots and slow motion to reflect the protagonist's heightened psychological awareness. However Taxi Driver’s immense power was no doubt in part down to Robert De Niro’s intense lead performance. (Notable support was also given by Jodie Foster and Harvey Keitel).
Taxi Driver also marked the start of a series of collaborations with writer Paul Schrader. The film bares strong thematic links to (and makes several allusions to) the work of French director Robert Bresson, most explicitly Pickpocket (in essence the ‘diary’ of a loner/obsessive who finds redemption. Writer/director Schrader often returns to Bresson’s work in films such as American Gigolo, Light Sleeper and Scorsese’s later Bringing Out the Dead).
Five years after Taxi Driver was released, in 1981, John Hinckley, Jr. made an assassination attempt on the American president, Ronald Reagan. He subsequently blamed his act on his obsession with Jodie Foster's character, Iris, in Scorsese’s movie. (In Taxi Driver, De Niro’s character, Travis Bickle, makes an assassination attempt on a senator)
Taxi Driver won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival and also received four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, although all were unsuccessful.
In this cameo, Scorsese lounges in front of the building where
Cybill Shepherd's character works. According to Shepherd, Scorsese requested a "Cybill Shepherd-type" for the role she played in
Taxi Driver.
The critical success of Taxi Driver encouraged Scorsese to move ahead with his first big-budget project: the highly styilized musical New York, New York. This heart-felt tribute to Scorsese's home town and the classic Hollywood musical was a box-office and critical failure.
New York, New York was the director’s third collaboration with Robert De Niro, co-starring with Liza Minelli (an obvious tribute and allusion to her father, legendary musical director Vincente Minelli). Although possessing Scorsese’s usual visual panache and stylistic bravura, many critics felt its enclosed studio-bound atmosphere left it leaden in comparison to his earlier work. Often overlooked, it remains one of the director’s early key studies in to male paranoia and insecurity (and hence is in direct thematic lineage with Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and, the later, Raging Bull)
The disappointing reception New York, New York received drove Scorsese into depression. By this stage the director had also developed a serious cocaine addiction. However, he did find the creative drive to make what is arguably the finest film about rock and roll, The Last Waltz (1978), a beautifully photographed documentary of the final concert by The Band. Another Scorsese-directed documentary entitled American Boy also appeared in 1978 (focussing on Steve Prince, the cocky gun-salesman in Taxi Driver). A period of wild partying followed, damaging the director’s already fragile health.
1980s
By many accounts, Scorsese's included, Robert DeNiro practically saved his life when he persuaded him to kick his cocaine addiction to make what many consider his greatest film, Raging Bull (1980). Convinced that he would never make another movie, he poured his energies into making this violent biopic of middleweight boxing champion Jake La Motta (nicknamed the Bronx Bull). The film is widely viewed as a masterpiece and was voted the greatest film of the 1980s by Britain's prestigious Sight and Sound magazine. It received eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Robert De Niro, and Scorsese's first for Best Director. De Niro won, as did Thelma Schoonmaker for the editing, but Scorsese lost to first-time director Robert Redford.
Raging Bull, filmed in high contrast black and white is perhaps where the director’s style reached its zenith. Taxi Driver and New York, New York had used elements of expressionism to ‘replicate’ psychological point of view, but here the style was taken to new extremes: extensive slow-motion, complex tracking shots, extravagant distortion of perspective (the size of boxing rings would change from fight to fight). Thematically too, the concerns carried on from Mean Streets and Taxi Driver: insecure males, violence, guilt, redemption.
Although the screenplay to Raging Bull was credited to Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin (who earlier co-wrote Mean Streets), the finished script differed extensively from Schrader’s original draft. It was re-written several times by various writers including Jay Cocks (who went on to co-script The Age of Innocence and Gangs of New York). The final draft was written by Scorsese and Robert De Niro.
Scorsese’s next project was his fifth collaboration with Robert De Niro, King of Comedy (1983). An absurdist satire on the world of media and celebrity, it was an obvious departure from the more emotionally committed films he had become associated with. Visually too it was far less kinetic then the style the director had developed up until this point, often using a static camera and long takes. The expressionism of his recent work here gave way to moments of almost total surrealism. However it was still an obvious Scorsese work: apart from the New York locale it bore many similarities to Taxi Driver, not least its focus on an obsessed troubled loner who ironically achives iconic status through a criminal act (murder and kidnapping, respectively).
King of Comedy failed at the box office but has become increasingly well regarded by critics in the years since its release. It is arguable that its themes of vacuous showbiz and celebrity obsession are more pertinent today then when the film was originally released.
In 1983 Scorsese began work on a long cherished personal project, The Last Temptation Of Christ, based on the 1951 book written by Nikos Kazantzakis (which was introduced to the director by actress Barbara Hershey when they were both attending New York University in the late 1960s). The movie was slated to shoot under the Paramount Studios banner, but shortly before principal photography was to commence, Paramount pulled the plug on the project, citing pressure from religious groups. In this aborted 1983 version, Aidan Quinn was cast as Jesus, and Sting was cast as Pontius Pilate. ( In the 1988 version, these roles were played by Willem Dafoe and David Bowie.)
After the collapse of this project Scorsese again saw his career at a critical point, as he described in the recent documentary Filming for Your Life: Making 'After Hours' (2004). He saw that in the increasingly commercial world of 1980s Hollywood the highly stylized and personal 1970s films he and others had built their careers on would not continue to enjoy the same status, and decided on an almost totally new approach to his work. With After Hours (1985) he made an aesthetic shift back to a pared-down, almost "underground" filmmaking style-- his way of staying viable. Filmed on an extremely low budget on location and at night in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, the film is a black comedy about one increasingly misfortunate night for a mild New York word processor (Griffin Dunne) and featured cameos by such disparate actors as Terri Garr and Cheech and Chong. A bit of a stylistic anomaly for Scorsese, After Hours fits in well with popular low-budget "cult" films of the 1980s, by lesser-known directors, e.g. Something Wild or Repo Man.
Along with the iconic 1987 Michael Jackson music video Bad, in 1986 Scorsese made The Color of Money a sequel to the much admired Paul Newman film The Hustler (1960). (The original was directed by Robert Rossen, whose 1940’s boxing film, Body and Soul, was a major influence on Raging Bull). Although typically visually assured, The Colour of Money was the directors’ first foray in to mainstream commercial film-making. It won actor Paul Newman a belated Oscar and gave Scorsese the clout to finally secure backing for a project that had been a long time goal for him: The Last Temptation of Christ.
Scorsese filmed The Last Temptation of Christ on a low budget in 1987, knowing that the film would be controversial and would not take in strong box-office revenues. However, he did not anticipate the furore and controversy his movie would spark when it was released a year later. Nationwide protests against the film made it a textbook case for the modern method of religious outrage and influence. The movie did have a number of staunch supporters, particularly among film critics, including Scorsese's friend Roger Ebert. Scorsese also received his second nomination for Best Director, although the award would go to Barry Levinson. The backing of the movie by important political figures kept Scorsese from becoming an outcast in Hollywood, and it gave him the impetus to film Goodfellas.
1990 to present
After a troubled decade, gangster epic Goodfellas (1990) was a return to form for Scorsese and his most confident and fully realized film since Raging Bull. A return to Little Italy, De Niro and Joe Pesci, Goodfellas offered a virtuoso display of the director’s bravura cinematic technique and re-established, enhanced, and consolidated his reputation. The film is widely considered one of the director’s greatest achievements.
However, Goodfellas also signified an important shift in tone in the director’s work, inaugurating an era in his career which was technically accomplished but some have argued emotionally detached. Despite this many view Goodfellas as a Scorsese archetype, the apogee of his cinematic technique.
Scorsese earned his third Best Director nomination for Goodfellas but again lost to a first-time director, Kevin Costner. (The director gives part of the credit for the film to "Musketeers of Pig Alley” an early gangster film made by the Biograph Company in 1912).
In 1990, Martin Scorsese acted in a cameo role as Vincent Van Gogh in the film Dreams by legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.
Next came Cape Fear (1991) a remake of a cult 1962 movie and the director's seventh collabortion with De Niro. Another rare foray in to the mainstream, the film was a stylized grand-guignol thriller taking its cues heavily from Alfred Hitchcock and Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955). Cape Fear received a mixed critical reception and was lambasted in many quarters for its scenes of violent misogyny. However, the over-heated lurid subject matter did give Scorsese a chance to experiment with a dazzling array of visual tricks and effects.
The opulent and handsomely mounted The Age of Innocence (1993) was on the surface a huge departure for Scorsese, a period adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel about the constrictive high society of late-19th Century New York. However, its complex psychological undercurrents, immense attention to detail and visual flourishes clearly betrayed the hand of the director.
1995’s expansive, violent Casino, like The Age of Innocence before it, focussed on a tightly wound male whose well-ordered life is disrupted by the arrival of unpredictable forces. The fact it was a violent gangster film made it more palatable to fans of the director who perhaps were baffled by the apparent departure of the earlier film. Critically, however, Casino received mixed notices. In large part this was due to its huge stylistic similarities to his earlier Goodfellas. Indeed many of the tropes and tricks of the earlier film resurfaced more or less intact, most obviously the casting of Joe Pesci as an unbridled psychopath. Casino was by some considerable distance Scorsese’s most violent and detached film, its early establishing scenes verging on documentary. Any critical misgiving were tempered by the fact the movie (which runs to 3 hours) remains an extraordinary technical achievement.
A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995) was an essential 4 hour documentary offering a thorough trek through American cinema from the silent era to 1969 (when the director began his feature career- stating “I wouldn't feel right commenting on myself or my contemporaries”).
If Age of Innocence alienated and confused some fans, then Kundun (1997) went several steps further, offering an account of the early life of the 14th Dalai Lama, the invasion of Tibet by communist China, and the Dalai Lama’s subsequent exile to India. Not least a departure in subject matter, Kundun also saw Scorsese employing a fresh narrative and visual approach. Traditional dramatic devices were substituted for a trance like meditation achieved through an elaborate tableaux of colourful visual images. In the short term, the sheer eclecticism in evidence enhanced the director’s reputation. In the long term however, it generally appears Kundun has been sidelined in most critical appraisals of the director, mostly noted as a stylistic/thematic detour.
Bringing Out the Dead (1999) was a return to familiar territory, with the director and writer Paul Schrader constructing a pitch-black comic take on their own earlier Taxi Driver. Like Scorsese/Schrader previous collaborations- maybe even more so- its final scenes of spiritual redemption explicitly recalled the films of Robert Bresson. (It’s also worth noting that the film’s incident-filled nocturnal setting is reminiscent of After Hours).
In 1999 Scorsese produced a documentary on Italian filmakers entitled Il mio viaggio in Italia aka My Voyage to Italy. The documentary foreshadowed the director's next project, the epic Gangs of New York (2002), influenced by (amongst many others) major Italian directors such as Luchino Visconti and filmed in it's entirey at Rome's famous Cinecittà.
With a production budget said to be in excess of $100 million Scorsese's production of Gangs of New York was his biggest and most mainstream venture to date. Like The Age of Innocence, it was a period set New York movie, although focussing on the other end of the social scale (and like that film, also starring Daniel Day-Lewis). The production was highly troubled with many rumours referring to the director’s conflict with Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein. Despite denials of artistic compromise, Gangs of New York revealed itself to be the director’s most conventional film: standard film tropes which the director had traditionally avoided, such as characters existing purely for exposition purposes and explanatory flash-backs, here surfaced in abundance. The original symphonic score composed by regular Scorsese collaborator Elmer Bernstein was rejected at a late stage for a more conventional score by Howard Shore and mainstream pop artists (making commercial, if little historic/contextual sense).
None the less, the themes central to the film were consistent with the director’s established concerns: New York, violence as culturally endemic, sub-cultural divisions down ethnographical lines.
Originally filmed for a release in the winter of 2001 (to qualify for Academy Award nominations), Scorsese delayed the final production of the film until after the beginning of 2002; the studio consequently delayed the film for nearly a year until its release in the Oscar season of late 2002.
In February of 2003, Gangs of New York received ten Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis. This was Scorsese’s fourth Best Director nomination, and many thought it was finally his year to win (the award went instead to Roman Polanski)
Scorsese's film The Aviator, is a biopic of director, producer, legendary eccentric, multi-millionaire and aviation pioneer Howard Hughes. It was released in December 2004 and met mostly with critical acclaim. The film was nominated for six Golden Globe awards, including Best Picture - Drama, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor - Drama for Leonardo DiCaprio. It won three, including Best Picture - Drama. In January of 2005, The Aviator became the most-nominated film of the 77th Academy Award nominations, nominated in 11 categories including Best Picture. The film has also garnered nominations in nearly all of the other major categories, including Best Picture, a fifth Best Director nomination for Scorsese, Best Actor (Leonardo DiCaprio), Best Supporting Actress (Cate Blanchett), and a surprise nod for Alan Alda for Best Supporting Actor. Despite having a leading tally, the film ended up with only five Oscars: Best Supporting Actress, Art Direction, Costume Design, Film Editing and Cinematography. Scorsese lost out (again), this time to director Clint Eastwood for Million Dollar Baby (which also won Best Picture).
Scorsese is currently in post-production of a crime thriller set in Boston, Massachusetts, based upon Infernal Affairs, a trio of Hong Kong action pictures centered upon battles between the Asian police and the gangs in the area. The film is tentatively entitled The Departed. The film will once again unite Scorsese with Leonardo DiCaprio, an actor he has now been working with for three consecutive films. 'The Departed' will also bring Scorsese together with Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg, none of whom he has worked with before.
Scorsese is president of the Film Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to film preservation and decaying motion picture film stock.
At a ceremony in Paris, France on January 5, 2005, Martin Scorsese was awarded the French Legion of Honor in recognition of his contribution to cinema.
Director Trademarks
- Begins his films with segments taken from the middle or end of the story. Examples include Raging Bull (1980), Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995).
- His lead characters are often sociopathic and/or want to be accepted in society.
- Often uses diegetic music (i.e., source of music is visible on-screen).
- His blonde leading ladies are usually seen through the eyes of the protagonist as angelic and ethereal; they always wear white in their first scene and are photographed in slow-motion (Cybill Shepherd in Taxi Driver (1976); Cathy Moriarty's white bikini in Raging Bull (1980); Sharon Stone's white minidress in Casino (1995). As the movie progresses, these ladies usually prove to be anything *but* angelic.
- Often uses long tracking shots.
- Use of montage sequences involving aggressive camera movement and rapid editing, set to popular music.
- Opening credits for Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence, Casino and Cape Fear have been designed by Elaine and Saul Bass, the latter being HItchcock's title designer of choice.
- NOTE: his name is pronounced Scor-SEH-see.
Themes
The main themes of Scorsese's work are intimately wrapped up in his Roman Catholic upbringing and his early attraction to the priesthood. Scorsese has once remarked that when he was growing up the most powerful people in his neighborhood were the gangsters and the priests. He claims that as a filmmaker he is in some ways a combination of the two.
Redemption and sin are the primary themes of Scorsese's films. His heroes tend to be fallen souls seeking redemption in a world of corruption. They often achieve this redemption only through a "passion", a crucifixion of sorts, in which a blood penance is extracted for their former sins. Charlie's final scene in Mean Streets, Travis Bickle's psychotic rampage in Taxi Driver, and Jake LaMotta's pounding his fists into the walls of his prison cell in Raging Bull would all seem to be expressions of this obsession with sin and redemption.
Scorsese's films have, oddly enough, become more bleak in this regard as his career goes on. GoodFellas, Casino, and The Aviator all end with their protagonists trapped in a metaphorical purgatory from which it is uncertain they will be redeemed.
Solitude and obsession also permeate Scorsese's films. His characters tend to be loners or misunderstood outcasts who are driven by emotional forces they cannot fully control. Over the course of his films, these forces tend to gather strength until they erupt into a frenzy of emotional or physical violence. It has been said that this is one of the factors which attracts actors to his films, because it gives them the opportunity to play extremely emotionally dynamic characters.
The corruption of the material world and the fall from paradise are also persistent themes in Scorsese's films, particularly in his gangster films. His characters are often torn between the temptations of the material world and the self-betrayal of their own spirits that the material world demands of them. This conflict often erupts into a cataclysmic fall from grace that sometimes leads to a quiet redemption. This theme is most explicit in Raging Bull, which ends with a New Testament verse spoken by a blind man who has been given sight by Jesus. (However, this quote can be read as part of the film's dedication to Haig P. Manoogian, his NYU film school mentor.)
Oscar-less Director
Scorsese has been nominated five times for an Oscar for Best Director, but has never won. This places him in the company of such directors as Alfred Hitchcock (5 nominations), Robert Altman (5), Stanley Kubrick (4), Federico Fellini (4), and Ingmar Bergman (3), all of whom are also considered masters of cinema and none of whom won an Oscar for directing, though it should be noted that Altman, Hitchcock, Fellini, & Bergman were all awarded honorary Oscars eventually.
Jon Stewart noted this at the 2006 Oscars, joking: "Martin Scorsese, zero oscars. Three 6 Mafia, one."
Selected filmography (as director)
Selected filmography (as actor)
Bibliographies
See also
External links
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