Martin Scorsese
Martin Charles Scorsese is an American filmmaker. One of the major figures of the New Hollywood era, he is widely considered one of the greatest and most influential directors in the history of cinema. He has received many accolades, including an Academy Award, four BAFTA Awards, three Emmy Awards, a Grammy Award, and three Golden Globe Awards. He has been honored with the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1997, the Film Society of Lincoln Center tribute in 1998, the Kennedy Center Honor in 2007, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2010, and the BAFTA Fellowship in 2012. Four of his films have been inducted into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".
Scorsese received a Master of Arts degree from New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development in 1968. His directorial debut, Who's That Knocking at My Door, was accepted into the Chicago Film Festival. In the 1970s and 1980s, Scorsese's films, much influenced by his Italian-American background and upbringing in New York City, centered on macho-posturing men and explore crime, machismo, nihilism and Catholic concepts of guilt and redemption. His trademark styles of extensive use of slow motion and freeze frames, voice-over narration, graphic depictions of extreme violence and liberal use of profanity were first shown in Mean Streets.
Scorsese won the Palme d'Or at Cannes with Taxi Driver, which starred Robert De Niro as a disturbed Vietnam veteran. De Niro became associated with Scorsese through eight more films including New York, New York, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, Casino and The Irishman. In the following decades, he garnered box office success with a series of collaborations with Leonardo DiCaprio, including Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, Shutter Island, and The Wolf of Wall Street. He worked with both De Niro and DiCaprio on Killers of the Flower Moon. He also directed After Hours, The Color of Money, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Age of Innocence, Kundun, Hugo, and Silence.
On television, he has directed episodes for the HBO series Boardwalk Empire and Vinyl, as well as the HBO documentary Public Speaking and the Netflix docu-series Pretend It's a City. He has also directed several rock documentaries including The Last Waltz, No Direction Home, and Shine a Light. He has explored film history in the documentaries A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies and My Voyage to Italy. An advocate for film preservation and restoration, he has founded three nonprofit organizations: The Film Foundation in 1990, the World Cinema Foundation in 2007 and the African Film Heritage Project in 2017.
Early life and education
Martin Charles Scorsese was born in the Flushing neighborhood of New York City's Queens borough on November 17, 1942. He grew up in the Little Italy neighborhood of the city's Manhattan borough. Both of his parents, Catherine Scorsese and Charles Scorsese, worked in the Garment District. Charles was a clothes presser and actor, while Catherine was a seamstress and an actress. All four of Scorsese's grandparents were Italian immigrants from Sicily, hailing from Polizzi Generosa on his father's side and Ciminna on his mother's side. The original surname of the family was Scozzese, meaning "Scot" or "Scottish" in Italian, and was changed to Scorsese because of a transcription error.Scorsese was raised in a predominantly Catholic environment. As a boy, he had asthma and could not play sports or take part in any activities with other children, so his parents and his older brother would often take him to movie theaters; it was at this stage in his life that he developed a passion for cinema. He has spoken of the influence on him of Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes. As a teenager living in Brooklyn, he frequently commuted to the Bronx to rent Powell and Pressburger's film, The Tales of Hoffmann, from a store which had only one copy of the reel. He was one of only two people who regularly rented it; the other, George A. Romero, who then lived in that borough, also became a director.
Scorsese has named Sabu and Victor Mature as his favorite actors in his youth. He recalls his father taking him to see Jean Renoir's The River and being fascinated by its depiction of India. He became "obsessed" with Renoir's La Grande Illusion when it was rereleased. He names John Ford's The Quiet Man and The Searchers as formative influences. In a documentary on Italian neorealism, he commented on how Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves inspired him and influenced his view of his Sicilian roots. In his documentary Il Mio Viaggio in Italia, Scorsese noted that the Sicilian episode of Rossellini's Paisà, which he first saw on television with his relatives who were themselves Sicilian immigrants, had a significant impact on his life. He remembers responding "very strongly" to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. He acknowledges owing a great debt to the French New Wave and has stated that "the French New Wave has influenced all filmmakers who have worked since, whether they saw the films or not." He has also cited the works of Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, Andrzej Wajda, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Ishirō Honda and Eiji Tsuburaya as major influences on his career. Although there was no habit of reading at home, towards the end of the 1950s, Scorsese began to approach literature, being marked in particular by Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter.
Scorsese attended the all-boys Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx, graduating in 1960. He had initially desired to become a priest, attending a preparatory seminary, but failed after the first year and was unable to attend Fordham University. This gave way to cinema and consequently Scorsese enrolled in New York University's Washington Square College, where he earned a bachelor's degree in English in 1964. He went on to earn his Master of Arts from NYU's School of Education in 1968, a year after the school was founded.
Career
1963–1972: Short films and feature debut
While attending the Tisch School of the Arts, Scorsese made the short films What's a Nice Girl like You Doing in a Place like This? and It's Not Just You, Murray!. His most famous short of the period is the darkly comic The Big Shave, which features Peter Bernuth. The film is an indictment of America's involvement in Vietnam, suggested by its alternative title Viet '67. Scorsese has mentioned on several occasions that he was greatly inspired in his early days at New York University by Armenian-American film professor Haig P. Manoogian, calling his teachings “the most precious gift I have ever received”. Scorsese's first professional job was when he was at NYU he was the assistant cameraman to cinematographer Baird Bryant on the John G. Avildsen directed short film Smiles. Scorsese stated: "It was really important because they were filming on 35mm". He stated he was terrible at the job because he could not judge the distance of the focus. He also worked as a gaffer for Albert and David Maysles and as an editor for CBS News, the later of whom offered him a full time position, but Scorsese declined due to his pursuit in film.In 1967, Scorsese made his first feature-length film, the black and white I Call First, later retitled Who's That Knocking at My Door, with his fellow students actor Harvey Keitel and editor Thelma Schoonmaker, both of whom were to become long-term collaborators. Roger Ebert saw the film at the 1967 Chicago International Film Festival and wrote, in Scorsese's first published review: "it brings together two opposing worlds of American cinema. On the one hand, there have been traditional films like Marty, View from the Bridge, On the Waterfront and David and Lisa -- all sincere attempts to function at the level where real lives are led and all suffering to some degree from their makers' romantic and idealistic ideas, about such lives. On the other hand, there have been experimental films from Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke and other pioneers of the New York underground. In The Connection, Shadows and Guns of the Trees, they used improvised dialog and scenes and hidden and hand-held cameras in an attempt to capture the freshness of a spontaneous experience... I Call First brings these two kinds of films together into a work that is absolutely genuine, artistically satisfying and technically comparable to the best films being made anywhere. I have no reservations in describing it as a great moment in American movies."
Scorsese became friends with the influential "movie brats" of the 1970s: Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. It was De Palma who introduced Scorsese to Robert De Niro. During this period, Scorsese worked as the assistant director and one of the editors on Michael Wadleigh's documentary Woodstock and met actor–director John Cassavetes, who became a close friend and mentor.
Scorsese met Roger Corman after coming to Hollywood to edit Medicine Ball Caravan and Corman, who had seen and liked Who's That Knocking at My Door, asked Scorsese to make a sequel to Bloody Mama. This came to be Boxcar Bertha. It was Corman who taught Scorsese that entertaining films could be shot with very little money or time, preparing the young director well for the challenges to come. Following the film's release, Cassavetes encouraged Scorsese to make the films that he wanted to make, rather than someone else's projects.