Born November 17, 1942 in Queens and raised in Little Italy by Sicilian-immigrant grandparents, Martin Scorsese had asthma as a boy and could not play sports, so his family took…
Born November 17, 1942 in Queens and raised in Little Italy by Sicilian-immigrant grandparents, Martin Scorsese had asthma as a boy and could not play sports, so his family took him to movie theaters -- where his passion for cinema was born. ◦ He served as an altar boy, entered a preparatory seminary intending to become a priest, failed after the first year, then enrolled at NYU, earning a BA in English (1964) and an MA in 1968. ◦ He called his NYU film professor Haig P. Manoogian's teachings "the most precious gift I have ever received." ◦ His 1967 debut *Who's That Knocking at My Door* brought together actor Harvey Keitel and editor Thelma Schoonmaker, both lifelong collaborators. ◦ His trademark style -- extensive slow motion and freeze frames, voice-over narration, graphic violence and Catholic themes of guilt and redemption -- was first shown in *Mean Streets* (1973). ◦
Scorsese's cinema is oriented toward "revelation, aesthetic, emotional and spiritual," and toward "characters -- the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves." ◦ Charlie's opening voice-over in *Mean Streets* distills Scorsese's lifelong theme: "You don't make up for your sins in the church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit, and you know it." ◦ Penance, for Scorsese, is lived in the world, not absolved at the altar. ◦ He returns over and over to the struggle with faith amid brutality, asking what religion might have to offer the world as it actually exists, with all its cruelties, greed and despair. ◦ His films embrace the painful questions that accompany belief: what it means to hold on to religious commitment in a world where God can seem absent. ◦ He frames the sacred and profane as compelling but competing forces of human desire. ◦ He describes film festivals like the New York Film Festival as a "spiritual home" where commercial considerations have no place. ◦ He laments the obsession with opening-weekend statistics, international box office and view counts over narrative, arguing this emphasis "is really killing a lot of original storytelling and stopping us from developing new voices and people from having careers." ◦ He asks what happened to "just being happy you made something good, and letting it leg out and find the people who connect with it." ◦
Recalling his battles with producer Harvey Weinstein over the length and budget of *Gangs of New York*, Scorsese said: "I realized that I couldn't work if I had to make films that way ever again. If that was the only way that I was able to be allowed to make films, then I'd have to stop. Because the results weren't satisfying... I'd be dead." ◦ On *The Departed*, Warner Bros. asked whether one of the two leads could live because "What they wanted was a franchise," and the film nonetheless earned him his first and only Academy Award for Best Director. ◦ He founded three nonprofit organizations for film preservation and restoration: The Film Foundation in 1990, the World Cinema Foundation in 2007, and the African Film Heritage Project in 2017. ◦
He frames the sacred and profane as compelling but competing forces of human desire. ◦ Penance, for Scorsese, is lived in the world, not absolved at the altar. ◦ He argues the major studios no longer support "individual voices that express their personal feelings or their personal thoughts and personal ideas and feelings on a big budget," and that they have pigeonholed such work to what they call indies. ◦ He calls effects-driven tentpoles "manufactured content." ◦ He assesses franchise cinema by what is absent: "What's not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes." ◦
Scorsese is a filmmaker whose trademark style includes extensive slow motion and freeze frames, voice-over narration, graphic violence and Catholic themes of guilt and redemption. ◦ He is an advocate for film preservation and restoration. ◦ He regards film festivals like the New York Film Festival as a "spiritual home" where commercial considerations have no place, and he praises the absence of awards because the lack of competition allows a purer love for the film to emerge. ◦
He told GQ, "Well, the industry is over... In other words, the industry that I was part of, we're talking almost, what, 50 years ago? It's like saying to somebody in 1970 who made silent films, what do you think's happened?" ◦ He argues the major studios no longer support "individual voices that express their personal feelings or their personal thoughts and personal ideas and feelings on a big budget," and that they have pigeonholed such work to what they call indies. ◦ He calls effects-driven tentpoles "manufactured content." ◦ He frames his taste generously, noting that franchise films "are everything that the films of Paul Thomas Anderson or Claire Denis or Spike Lee or Ari Aster or Kathryn Bigelow or Wes Anderson are not." ◦ He warns that "If people are given only one kind of thing and endlessly sold only one kind of thing, of course they're going to want more of that one kind of thing." ◦ His plea to filmmakers is direct: "There's just cinema. So please keep it that way." ◦
Even films seemingly remote from religion -- *Casino*, *The Aviator*, *The Wolf of Wall Street* -- elaborate the same basic question as *Mean Streets*: what is important in a world that so often feels dominated by absence, money and violence? ◦ He told The New York Times before the release of *Silence*: "I never left. In my mind, I am here every day." ◦ His films embrace the painful questions that accompany belief: what it means to hold on to religious commitment in a world where God can seem absent. ◦ He has called St. Patrick's Old Cathedral a spiritual alternative to the violence of the streets around his Little Italy neighborhood. ◦ He told GQ, "Well, the industry is over." ◦ He won his first and only Academy Award for Best Director on *The Departed*, a film the studio wanted to turn into a franchise. ◦
He responds to cinema that offers "revelation, aesthetic, emotional and spiritual" dimensions and that explores "characters -- the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures." ◦ He values environments like film festivals, which he calls a "spiritual home" where commercial considerations have no place and where the absence of awards allows a purer love for the film to emerge. ◦ He is critical of approaches that prioritize opening-weekend statistics, international box office and view counts over narrative. ◦