Martin Scorsese: The Obsessed Filmmaker
MARTIN SCORSESE, the film director born in 1942 and raised in New York City, is an obsessive film director, a nervous perfectionist who’s staked almost everything on the films he’s made. Yet once he’s attended the premiere of one of his films, he never watches it again.
Scorsese grew up at 253 Elizabeth Street in the Little Italy of the early 1950’s. He was a small, sickly boy who always had pills to take. He felt vulnerable and didn’t play outside with other boys, didn’t play stickball in the street, or run errands for wise guys. He was part of an Italian-American working class culture that was stubbornly inward-looking, sturdy and unchanging.
As much as anyone who’s ever lived, Scorsese was raised by the movies — all kinds, all genres. He loved Sam Fuller films, especially “Pickup on South Street,” awed by the way Fuller conveyed menace. He loved Roy Rogers shoot-’em-ups. When Marty was five or six, he’d sit in the evenings with his Italian-American parents and Palermo-born grandparents, in front of an RCA 16-inch black-and-white TV, and watch the subtitled Italian art films featured on local TV. Any film with a storyline fascinated him, even B movies, and he could recall, almost shot-by-shot, every film he’d ever seen.
His father, his older brother and sometimes his mother took him to the movies. His father suffered from a sadness of no obvious cause and rarely spoke to Marty — but somehow the movies spoke for both of them. Taking his son to the movies was a way of saying ‘I love you’ without saying the words.
The day he graduated eighth grade, Marty and some friends went to the Criterion Theater to see the new John Ford-John Wayne picture “The Searchers,” in VistaVision. Scorsese thought he knew how this John Wayne movie would be — because he knew “Fort Apache” and he knew “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.” Marty and his friends walked into the film in the middle, as usual. If you wanted, you could always stay after the film ended, and watch the first part of the next show to see what you’d missed.
But “The Searchers” was NOT like “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.” John Wayne played his character, Ethan Edwards, as an obsessed sadist. The film brought the racism of the American rancher right to the surface. Yet Ethan Edwards was brave and, at times, poetic in the way he spoke — a poet of hatred, the first one Scorsese had ever seen.
He never forgot “The Searchers” — or Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”— films where the director’s personal vision is so strong, his identification with the project so intense, that it overwhelms both the film’s flaws and the genre expectations of the day.
Four other films obsessed Scorsese in his first 21 years: “Citizen Kane,” a masterfully constructed 1941 picture about the failures of a newspaper baron; “The Red Shoes,” a 1948 British drama about a ballet company brilliant for its camera movement, music and color; and two films from 1963: “8 1/2” by Fellini, a brilliantly surreal take on the film director’s life; and “The Leopard” by Visconti, a wise and tragic historical drama of 19th century Italy.
Scorsese intended to become a Catholic priest — but found himself transported not by faith but by the films of Elia Kazan, Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Stanley Kubrick and John Ford. So he enrolled instead at NYU Film School, later became an instructor there, and — finally — a film director. He’s brought to each of his films a Catholic sense of vocation. His church tells him that people are good — but his eyes tell him otherwise, and he wants the lead characters in his movies to feel similarly torn.
One of the first films he directed, set in Little Italy, was “Mean Streets.” The main character, played by Harvey Keitel, is torn between the mob and the Catholic church. All the main characters are young working-class Italian-American men. They feel guilt, they don’t know how to be friends with a woman, and see women as either Madonnas or whores.
People assumed that making this movie was a labor of love for Scorsese and a point of pride for his friends and neighbors. Not so; Little Italy was an insular place, wary of being portrayed in a film. Being a native only made it harder; Scorsese had to make choices about what parts of the neighborhood to show, and which locals he’d use as extras, and who to use as the caterer. All of these decisions were watched carefully in Little Italy to see if Scorsese was still “one of us” or had “gone Hollywood.”
The film was shot in dim light, the plot was murky, but the notoriously hard to please Pauline Kael raved about “Mean Streets” in the New Yorker. Here, she said, was a film that was stylized without being artificial, that showed the emotional experience of its characters in extreme states of feeling — but without distortion.
“Mean Streets” was also the first collaboration between Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. Scorsese and Robert De Niro had a nodding acquaintance as teenagers and shared a lot in their upbringing: what was expected of a young man, what could and could not be discussed. De Niro was from an artistic home, financially comfortable, oriented toward art, profoundly respectful of great painters, sculptors and actors. Scorsese had always longed for a home like that. On the other hand, Scorsese had things which De Niro envied — the ambition and confidence to direct a film, a smooth comfort with working-class values and that encyclopedic recall of movies.
They worked together again on “Taxi Driver” — some very tough material, a disturbed taxi driver played by De Niro returning again and again to 42nd Street, his version of hell. A taxi driver appalled to find a place where God doesn’t exist and people are punished unequally for their offenses.
De Niro loved the freedom Scorsese gave him to try things, to improvise. Scorsese has a light touch with actors. He feels they have a rare gift and, if they go off script, they’re entitled. Many directors approach their stars with pages of “notes” about their performance; after shooting a take, Scorsese will approach a star and ask gently, “Do you want to do another one?” If the answer is yes, Scorsese seems pleased. If the answer is no, Scorsese might say, “Good, let’s move on.”
In the late 1970’s, Scorsese almost died from cocaine abuse, he was bleeding internally and he felt “Raging Bull” might be the last movie he’d ever make.
It seemed to have no chance to become a classic. It told the story of a boxer, Jake La Motta, who’d lived quite a life but was neither a great nor a famous boxer. The other elements in his life — family problems, being leaned on by the mob — had already been used in many boxing films, none of which had been great films either critically or commercially.
There was a deeper problem, too: Scorsese found boxing stupidly brutal — cruelty without letup or disguise. He also found it boring, which made it hard for him to master the details of a boxer’s life, and he wants his movies to have the feel of the real thing, to pass muster with those who’ve spent their lives doing that thing.
Robert De Niro showed Scorsese Jake La Motta’s memoir, hoping it could be made into a film. Anything from De Niro got Scorsese’s attention. And then there was the fact that boxing gave Scorsese a chance to explore a pet theme of his: the masochism in macho behavior, the fact that many fighters want to GET HIT as much they want to hit someone. They savor their own humiliation.
Scorsese changed La Motta’s life story, giving Jake’s brother Joey a larger, more unsettling role. This brought on a lawsuit from the real life Joey, who was displeased to see himself depicted in a film doing unsavory things which he’d never done. But changing the story improved the movie.
A turning point for Scorsese in committing to “Raging Bull” was the moment when he realized: a boxer is like a filmmaker. Like a filmmaker, a boxer does all this training, goes through months of workouts which the public never sees. Then comes the big night: the boxer’s in the ring with nowhere to hide. The fickle public is sitting just outside the ring. They’ve paid their money and want to be entertained. Some of them will enjoy seeing you get your brains beat out.
That’s how Scorsese felt about opening night for a filmmaker.
Scorsese took some real chances — he shot the film in black and white; cast two unknowns, Joe Pesci and Cathy Moriarty, in leading roles; and had the film cover the years from 1941 when La Motta was young and in lean fighting trim, to 1964 when La Motta was a paunchy has-been, bloated by food, corroded by time and money.
All of it paid off. The black-and-white cinematography by Michael Chapman is mesmerizing and immerses you in the period. Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing is also remarkable. Pesci and Moriarty played their parts very well. De Niro was able to gain 70 pounds in a few months and play both the lean young La Motta and the fat older La Motta. The film, both ugly and beautiful, was a brave work of art.
Always there was Scorsese’s reverence for the great directors of his youth, the John Fords, the Alfred Hitchcocks. So in 1990 when the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa won an Honorary Oscar, no one was more delighted than Martin Scorsese.
But Scorsese was puzzled when Kurosawa accepted the award in a melancholy mood. Through an interpreter, Kurosawa confessed that night that, ‘I really don’t feel that I have yet grasped the essence of cinema.’ There was a sense from this Japanese master filmmaker that he was only starting to learn — and it was too late.
‘WHY is he saying that?’ thought Scorsese.
In 1990, Scorsese made “Goodfellas,” one of the greatest ever crime movies. Based on a book by Nicholas Pileggi, who worked on the screenplay with Scorsese, it stars Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta playing Henry Hill, a young man who becomes a mobster and barely survives it, ends up in a witness protection program but still missing the life, feeling how much has been taken away from him.
This was a chance to write about the mafia not from the top down, like “The Godfather,” not by focusing on the Don and his three very different sons, but by showing the life of the average mafioso, under the protection of the Don. These were the guys little Marty Scorsese had seen only out the window as a boy. Now, he got to explore their lives, their joys, and how their desires were tinged with resentment.
With voiceover, long tracking shots, sardonic humor, and perfectly-chosen period music, the film had all of the Scorsese trademarks. It did good business when it came out, has fanatic admirers, and has steadily risen in critical circles. Ask Scorsese if it’s his best film and he squirms. He will say that “Goodfellas” has the most style, but he’s careful to distinguish between excellence and a strong style.
Scorsese is fascinated by every aspect of film making: the cinematography, the editing, the production design, the musical score. Again and again, he finds songs that convey exactly what he wants in a scene. He works very, very hard on his films.
When people told Scorsese they were surprised he would direct “The Age of Innocence,” a film portraying wealthy New Yorkers in 1900, he replied that the clothes they wore meant nothing to him; what he needed to know was how the characters were FEELING, and to convey that to his audience. Though he’s profoundly interested in history, in period detail, he insists that he is not a realist, “not at all, not ever. Every film should look the way I feel.”
By 2019, Scorsese had become a legend in the film industry. He was an executive producer; he was interviewed for documentaries; he lobbied to preserve old films. Pressed for comment about recent films, Scorsese got in hot water for saying that Marvel movies like “Avengers” are not cinema, only well-made theme parks for actors. He still yearned for films to be the intensely personal vision of a director.
He tells people “intrigued” by filmmaking as a possible career to give up — the film business is too rough. You should only become a filmmaker, Scorsese says, if you NEED to make a movie, if you’re burning to tell a story on film and won’t be able to rest until you do.
And he will tell people that he understands now what Kurosawa meant in 1990. Scorsese says that he’s only now beginning to see the full possibility of cinema, when it’s too late.
On the other hand, when people ask him which of his films he’s disappointed with, he’ll say a diligent director can’t be disappointed with any of his films — because every film project stretches you, teaches you history you didn’t know, allows you to work with new talent, new actors and actresses, new music, new lighting techniques or camera movements. So you can’t be disappointed.
But ‘If I watched my films again, I’d probably be disappointed.’