Martin Scorsese
Martin Charles Scorsese (/skɔːrˈsɛsi/ skor-SESS-ee, Italian: [skorˈseːze, -se]; born November 17, 1942) is an American filmmaker. One of the major figures of the New Hollywood era, 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 honoured 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 (1967), 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, centred on macho-posturing men and explored 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 (1973). Scorsese won the Palme d'Or at Cannes with Taxi Driver (1976), 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 (1977), Raging Bull (1980), The King of Comedy (1982), Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995) and The Irishman (2019). In the following decades, he garnered box office success with a series of collaborations with Leonardo DiCaprio, including Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004), The Departed (2006), Shutter Island (2010), and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). He worked with both De Niro and DiCaprio on Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). He also directed After Hours (1985), The Color of Money (1986), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), The Age of Innocence (1993), Kundun (1997), Hugo (2011), and Silence (2016). On television, he has directed episodes for the HBO series Boardwalk Empire (2010–2014) and Vinyl (2016), as well as the HBO documentary Public Speaking (2010) and the Netflix docu-series Pretend It's a City (2021). He has also directed several rock documentaries, including The Last Waltz (1978), No Direction Home (2005), and Shine a Light (2008). He has explored film history in the documentaries A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies(1995) and My Voyage to Italy (1999). An advocate for film preservation and restoration, he has founded three nonprofit organisations: The Film Foundation in 1990, the World Cinema Foundation in 2007 and the African Film Heritage Project in 2017.
| Known for | Directing |
|---|---|
| Born | 17 Nov 1942 |
| Place of birth | Queens, New York City, New York, USA |
Favorite films
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He did something that no one could have anticipated at the time. He took his own artistic and life situation — that of a filmmaker who had eight and a half films to his name … 8½ has always been a touchstone for me, in so many ways — the freedom, the sense of invention, the underlying rigor and the deep core of longing, the bewitching, physical pull of the camera movements and the compositions.
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He made three pictures — The Life of Oharu, Ugetsu, and Sansho the Bailiff — that stand at the summit of cinema. … I love all three of these pictures and many other Mizoguchi films as well … but Ugetsu has the most powerful effect on me.
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Contempt is one of the most moving films of its era … over the years Contempt has grown increasingly, almost unbearably, moving to me. … it cuts very deep … it is a profound cinematic encounter with eternity, in which both the lost marriage and the cinema seem to dissolve. It’s one of the most frightening great films ever made.
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For me it’s always been one of the very greatest ever made, and every time I go back to look at it — about once a year — it’s new: it reveals another side, another level, and it goes deeper. … it’s beautiful, one of the most beautiful Technicolor films ever made … there’s no other picture that dramatizes and visualizes the overwhelming obsession of art, the way it can take over your life.
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For me, it really was the beginning. I saw it for the first time on television with my grandparents, and their overwhelming reaction to what had happened to their homeland since they left at the turn of the century was just as present and vivid for me as the images and the characters. … I was also seeing that cinema wasn’t just about the movie itself but the relationship between the movie and its audience.
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I realize that L’avventura is supposed to be about characters who are “alienated” from their surroundings, but that word has been used so often to describe this film and Antonioni’s films in general that it more or less shuts down thought. In fact, I see it, more than ever, as a movie about people in spiritual distress: their spiritual signals are disrupted, which is why they see the world around them as hostile and unforgiving. Visually, sensually, thematically, dramatically, in every way, it’s one of the great works of cinema.
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This was Jean Renoir’s first picture after his American period, his first in color, and he used Rumer Godden’s autobiographical novel to create a film that is, really, about life, a film without a real story that is all about the rhythm of existence, the cycles of birth and death and regeneration, and the transitory beauty of the world.
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I saw Ashes and Diamonds for the first time in 1961. And … it shocked me. It had to do with the look, both immediate and haunted, like a nightmare that won’t stop unfolding … The film has the power of a hallucination: I can close my eyes and certain images will flash back to me with the force they had when I saw them for the first time over fifty years ago.
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Francesco Rosi’s great historical and political mosaic … it’s an extremely complex film: there’s no central protagonist … it shifts between time frames and points of view … it’s also a picture made from the inside, from a profound and lasting love and understanding of Sicily and its people and the treachery and corruption they’ve had to endure. … it’s shot in black and white that is absolutely electrifying.
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When I got to see the whole thing, I was astonished by the picture and by Lancaster, who gives all of himself to the role and to the world of the film. Visconti had wanted Laurence Olivier, and he was initially very curt with Lancaster, but the actor won him over and they became lifelong friends … It’s a film that has become more and more important to me as the years have gone by.