Little Italy, a pool-hall brawl and a young man carrying his reckless friend's debts to a loan shark (1973)
Mean Streets — his breakthrough, with Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro.
Film · Hollywood
Martin Scorsese
born 1942 · American
New Hollywood
Martin Scorsese emerged from the New Hollywood of the 1970s as the great chronicler of Italian-American New York, guilt and violence. His films combine documentary-sharp street detail with restless camerawork, pop-song needle-drops and voice-over confession. He waited until his sixth nomination to win the Academy Award for Best Director, and has become cinema's most prominent advocate for film preservation.
How to spot them
- ▸Catholic guilt, male violence and criminal hierarchies, usually in New York
- ▸Long unbroken tracking shots, freeze-frames and rapid whip-pans, cut by Thelma Schoonmaker
- ▸Voice-over narration over a pop or rock record chosen with obsessive care — the Rolling Stones above all
- ▸Robert De Niro in the early films, Leonardo DiCaprio in the later ones; a director's cameo or his mother in a small part
- ▸A rapid, high-speed speaking voice familiar from film-history documentaries
Key films
An insomniac Vietnam veteran drives nights in New York, shaves a Mohawk and asks a mirror who it is talking to (1976)
Taxi Driver — Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1976; Jodie Foster was twelve when she played Iris.
A middleweight champion in black and white; the star gained around sixty pounds for the later scenes (1980)
Raging Bull — the life of Jake LaMotta; Thelma Schoonmaker won the first of her Oscars for editing it.
'As far back as I can remember...' — a Copacabana entered through the kitchen in one unbroken shot (1990)
Goodfellas — from Nicholas Pileggi's Wiseguy, about Henry Hill.
A crucified carpenter imagines the life he might have had, and a Paris cinema was set on fire in protest (1988)
The Last Temptation of Christ — from the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis.
An undercover officer and a mob mole hunt each other inside the Massachusetts State Police (2006)
The Departed — a remake of Infernal Affairs, and the film that finally won him Best Director.
A Long Island stockbroker, a sunken yacht and an office that throws dwarfs at a target (2013)
The Wolf of Wall Street — Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort.
Osage oil money and a string of murders in 1920s Oklahoma (2023)
Killers of the Flower Moon — from David Grann; it brought De Niro and DiCaprio together for him.
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Queens on 17 November 1942 and raised in Little Italy; severe childhood asthma kept him indoors at the cinema, and he spent a year in a seminary
- •The Departed (2006) is his only Best Director Oscar, won at his sixth nomination; it also took Best Picture
- •Taxi Driver won the Palme d'Or in 1976 from a jury presided over by Tennessee Williams
- •Thelma Schoonmaker has edited every one of his features since Raging Bull and has won three Academy Awards
- •He has directed Robert De Niro in ten features and Leonardo DiCaprio in six
- •He founded The Film Foundation in 1990 to fund film restoration, and later the World Cinema Project
- •The Last Temptation of Christ drew protests worldwide; an arson attack on a Paris cinema showing it injured more than a dozen people in 1988
- •The Irishman (2019) used digital de-ageing across a three-and-a-half-hour running time and was financed by Netflix
- •He began shooting the ghost story What Happens at Night, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, in early 2026
Drill it — 10 cards
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Sources
- Senses of Cinema — Great Directors: Martin Scorsese
- David Thompson and Ian Christie (eds) — Scorsese on Scorsese