Martin Scorsese

Martin Charles Scorsese

17 November 1942

An American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. His initial desire to become a priest while attending Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx gave way to cinema and consequently, Scorsese enrolled in NYU’s University College of Arts and Science, (now known as the College of Arts and Science). He went on to earn his M.F.A. from NYU’++s School of the Arts (now known as the Tisch School of the Arts) in 1966, a year after the school was founded. 

Part of the New Hollywood wave of filmmaking, he is widely regarded as one of the most significant and influential filmmakers in cinema history. In 1990, he founded The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation. Scorsese's body of work addresses such themes as Italian-American identity, Roman Catholic concepts of guilt and redemption, machismo, modern crime, and gang conflict. Many of his films are also notable for their depiction of violence and liberal use of profanity. 

As director, producer, writer

• Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967)
• Boxcar Bertha (1972)
• Mean Streets (1973)
• Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)
• Taxi Driver (1976)
• New York, New York (1977)
• Raging Bull (1980)
• The King of Comedy (1983)
• After Hours (1985)
• Amazing Stories (1986)
• The Color of Money (1986)
• The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
• Goodfellas (1990)
• Cape Fear (1991)
• The Age of Innocence (1993)
• Casino (1995)
• Kundun (1997)
• Bringing Out the Dead (1999)
• Gangs of New York (2002)
• The Aviator (2004)
• The Departed (2006)
• Shutter Island (2010)
• Boardwalk Empire (2010-2014)
• Hugo (2011)
• The Family (2013)
• The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
• Vinyl (2016)
• Silence (2016)
• The Irishman (2018)

Quotations

* * *

When I was growing up, I don't remember being told that America was created so that everyone could get rich. I remember being told it was about opportunity and the pursuit of happiness. Not happiness itself, but the pursuit.

* * *

The cinema began with a passionate, physical relationship between celluloid and the artists and craftsmen and technicians who handled it, manipulated it, and came to know it the way a lover comes to know every inch of the body of the beloved. No matter where the cinema goes, we cannot afford to lose sight of its beginnings.

* * *

You make a deal. You figure out how much sin you can live with.

* * *

If I'm not complaining, I'm not having a good time, hah hah!

* * *

People have to start talking to know more about other cultures and to understand each other.

* * *

There's no such thing as simple. Simple is hard.

* * *

Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.

* * *

I would ask: Given the nature of free-market capitalism - where the rule is to rise to the top at all costs - is it possible to have a financial industry hero? And by the way, this is not a pop-culture trend we're talking about. There aren't many financial heroes in literature, theater or cinema.

* * *

Now more than ever we need to talk to each other, to listen to each other and understand how we see the world, and cinema is the best medium for doing this.

* * *

Alcohol decimated the working class and so many people.

* * *

I love studying Ancient History and seeing how empires rise and fall, sowing the seeds of their own destruction.

* * *

People want to classify and say, 'OK, this is a gangster film.' 'This is a Western.' 'This is a... ' You know? It's easy to classify and it makes people feel comfortable, but it doesn't matter, it doesn't really matter.

* * *

And as I've gotten older, I've had more of a tendency to look for people who live by kindness, tolerance, compassion, a gentler way of looking at things.

* * *

It seems to me that any sensible person must see that violence does not change the world and if it does, then only temporarily.

* * *

Howard Hughes was this visionary who was obsessed with speed and flying like a god... I loved his idea of what filmmaking was.

* * *

Our world is so glutted with useless information, images, useless images, sounds, all this sort of thing. It's a cacophony, it's like a madness I think that's been happening in the past twenty-five years. And I think anything that can help a person sit in a room alone and not worry about it is good.

* * *

You don't make pictures for Oscars.

* * *

My father had this mythological sense of the old New York, and he used to tell me stories about these old gangs, particularly the Forty Thieves in the Fourth Ward.

* * *

There are two kinds of power you have to fight. The first is the money, and that's just our system. The other is the people close around you, knowing when to accept their criticism, knowing when to say no.

* * *

Death comes in a flash, and that's the truth of it, the person's gone in less than 24 frames of film.

* * *

Popular music formed the soundtrack of my life.

* * *

A lot of what I'm obsessed with is the relationship and the dynamics between people and the family, particularly brothers and their father.

* * *

I didn't realize there are generations who do not know about the origins of film.

* * *

There was always a part of me that wanted to be an old-time director. But I couldn't do that. I'm not a pro.

* * *

Food tells you everything about the way people live and who they are.

* * *

There must be people who remember World War II and the Holocaust who can help us get out of this rut.

* * *

Any film, or to me any creative endeavour, no matter who you're working with, is, in many cases, a wonderful experience.

* * *

You gotta understand, when moving images first started, people wanted sound, color, big screen and depth.

* * *

If it's a modern-day story dealing with certain ethnic groups, I think I could open up certain scenes for improvisation, while staying within the structure of the script.

* * *

I mean, music totally comes from your soul.

* * *

I still dislike phones, yeah!

* * *

People say you should do it this way, someone else suggests that, yes, there's financing, but maybe you should use this actor. And there are the threats, at the end - if you don't do it this way, you'll lose your box office; if you don't do it that way, you'll never get financed again... 35, 40 years of this, you get beat up.

* * *

As you grow older, you change.

* * *

I always say that I've been in a bad mood for maybe 35 years now. I try to lighten it up, but that's what comes out when you get me on camera.

* * *

I'm going to be 60, and I'm almost used to myself.

* * *

I'm re-energized by being around people who mean a lot to me.

* * *

It's hard to let new stuff in. And whether that admits a weakness, I don't know.

* * *

Part of making any endeavour is that each one has its own special problems. It's the nature of the process.

* * *

Some of my films are known for the depiction of violence. I don't have anything to prove with that any more.

* * *

You never know how much time you have left.

* * *

If we just sit and exist, and understand that, I think it will be helpful in a world that seems like a record that's going faster and faster, we're spinning off the edge of the universe.

* * *

I know that I come from mid-20th century America, urban, specifically downtown New York, specifically an Italian-American area, Roman Catholic - that's who I am. And a part of what I know is there's a decency to people who tried to make a living in the kind of world that was around us and also the Skid Row area of the Bowery; it impressed me.

* * *

Every year or so, I try to do something; it keeps me refreshed as to what's going on in front of the lens, and I understand what the actor is going through.

* * *

I think all of us, under certain circumstances, could be capable of some very despicable acts. And that's why, over the years, in my movies I've had characters who didn't care what people thought about them. We try to be as true to them as possible and maybe see part of ourselves in there that we may not like.

* * *

I think when you're young and have that first burst of energy and make five or six pictures in a row that tell the stories of all the things in life you want to say... well, maybe those are the films that should have won me the Oscar.

* * *

I was saying as a joke the other day that I love film editing, I know how to cut a picture, I think I know how to shoot it, but I don't know how to light it. And I realize it's because I didn't grow up with light. I grew up in tenements.

* * *

I'm sad to see celluloid go, there's no doubt. But, you know, nitrate went, by the way, in 1971. If you ever saw a nitrate print of a silent film and then saw an acetate print, you'd see a big difference, but nobody remembers anymore. The acetate print is what we have. Maybe. Now it's digital.

* * *

Being a father at a later age is different from when I had my other two daughters when I was in my 20s and 30s. If you're in your 60s and you're with the kid every day, you're dealing with the mind of a child, so it opens up that childishness in you again.

* * *

I certainly wasn't able to get it when I was a kid growing up on the Lower East Side; it was very hard at that time for me to balance what I really believed was the right way to live with the violence I saw all around me - I saw too much of it among the people I knew.

* * *

We can't keep thinking in a limited way about what cinema is. We still don't know what cinema is. Maybe cinema could only really apply to the past or the first 100 years, when people actually went to a theater to see a film, you see?

* * *

On every film you suffer, but on some you really suffer.

* * *

When I'm making a film, I'm the audience.

* * *

I love the look of planes and the idea of how a plane flies. The more I learn about it the better I feel; while I still may not like it, I have a sense of what is really happening.

* * *

It's interesting that these themes of crime and political corruption are always relevant.

* * *

I'd like to do a number of films. Westerns. Genre pieces. Maybe another film about Italian Americans where they're not gangsters, just to prove that not all Italians are gangsters.

* * *

I know there were many good policemen who died doing their duty. Some of the cops were even friends of ours. But a cop can go both ways.

* * *

I go through periods, usually when I'm editing and shooting, of seeing only old films.

* * *

Young film makers should learn how to deal with the money and learn how to deal with the power structure. Because it is like a battle.

* * *

I can't really envision a time when I'm not shooting something.

* * *

I don't really see many people... don't really go anywhere either.

* * *

My whole life has been movies and religion. That's it. Nothing else.

* * *

The best I can do is to make a film every two years.

* * *

Very often I've known people who wouldn't say a word to each other, but they'd go to see movies together and experience life that way.

* * *

The most important thing is, how can I move forward towards something that I can't articulate, that is new in storytelling with moving images and sound?

* * *

I think there's only one or two films where I've had all the financial support I needed. All the rest, I wish I'd had the money to shoot another ten days.

* * *

Film in the 20th century, it's the American art form, like jazz.

* * *

I've seen many, many movies over the years, and there are only a few that suddenly inspire you so much that you want to continue to make films.

* * *

I don't like being in houses alone.

* * *

I loved the idea of seeing the world through a boy's eyes.

* * *

I make different films now.

* * *

I wish I could do everything in 3D.

* * *