How to make the perfect movie: A masterclass with Martin Scorsese

The room is choked with aspiring directors, febrile fans brandishing camera-phones and eager young actors who have turned out to hear the maestro of cinematic machismo divulge his secrets. At this week's Marrakesh Film Festival, no event has been as keenly anticipated as the masterclass with Martin Scorsese.

Unlike these fresh faces, I've already had my first insights into the man responsible for moulding a new genre of American Italian cinema, so I'm one lesson ahead. I was invited to a dinner in New York a few weeks ago, at which Scorsese, among others, was to be enlisted as mentor to a protg. I was at a table with the actor Aidan Quinn and a Swiss banker who loudly wondered who Quinn was. Another guest greeted Quinn as "Anthony" before confidently stating: "I'm very familiar with your work."

In some desperation, Quinn began recounting his best Scorsese stories, no doubt to salvage injured pride. "Marty and I go back some way... I was originally cast as Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ... What people don't realise is how funny Scorsese is, he's funnier than Woody Allen." As absurd as that sounded, his last sentence stuck. When Scorsese was announced, he stood up to take his bow as the room roared its ovation for this man, who suddenly appeared, if not exactly like Allen, then not unlike his hyperactive half-brother. He wore a dinner suit and bowed like an emperor penguin, shrugging his shoulders as the applause roared on. Even from my distance, I could see Scorsese's funny side.

Two weeks later, in his masterclass at Marrakesh, Scorsese again appears somewhat comical. He pads in, taking short rapid-fire steps, his jet-black, fuzzy eyebrows bouncing across his forehead, rather in the way a nervous performer might charge on screen in a black-and-white talkie, perhaps falling on his face in a comic pratfall after tripping over his shoelaces.

Scorsese doesn't trip up, but sits down and shakes his oversized glasses until the applause dies down. But then everything changes; when he begins to talk about film, he is transformed into the movie maverick who dazzled America's mainstream with Taxi Driver and Mean Streets, the celluloid revolutionary responsible for some of the most penetrating studies of masculine insecurity and paranoia in modern cinema.

Plot, in his opinion, is secondary or, at least, it has never much interested him. Character development is everything. "I don't know about plot," he says. "In The Departed, I didn't do plot because I got sidetracked by characters, even if I did get really mad at myself about it. There was no plot in Taxi Driver, The Last Temptation of Christ hardly had a plot, Aviator and Raging Bull didn't."

He sets out to reveal the inner worlds of his central characters, and these psychological interiors are what grips an audience, not the goings-on around them. In Raging Bull, the size of the boxing ring varies according to the emotions felt by Robert De Niro's character, Jake La Motta, which change with every fight. "You only get a sense of the fight inside his head," the director says.

While Scorsese is the master of showing us the workings of the male psyche, particularly in crisis, he is less comfortable with female protagonists. The last film he made with a woman as the lead was in 1974, after he was chosen by Ellen Burstyn to direct her in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (although 1993's The Age of Innocence had two dominant female characters, played by Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder). When I later ask him about this, he is uncharacteristically guarded, perhaps even surprised by the question. "I'm still looking for a script," V C he says, "but time is too short. There are too many films." He read George Eliot's Middlemarch while making The Departed. "Now she [Dorothea] is a great character. But it's a thousand pages... It's all about time now." Later, however, he concedes: "I've made films about the male psyche, so that must be what I'm comfortable with."

Scorsese was born in New York City to parents who lived in a three-room apartment in a tenement block and worked in a garment factory. The rituals of his childhood still, to some degree, define the way in which he works today. He spends days drawing storyboards as a way of exploring concepts for films, a technique that harks back to his childhood when he was forced to spend hours alone at home due to chronic asthma, watching the films of Fellini, Goddard, Truffaut and Satyajit Ray, and producing his own imaginary films on paper. "As a kid, I had terrible asthma. I couldn't go out on the streets like other children, and I wasn't athletic. So films were a place of refuge," he says.

"I don't think I was ever happier than when I was in the three-roomed tenement apartment on Elizabeth Street, with two hours to myself, before my parents and my brother came home, watching Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête or Renoir's The Diary of a Chambermaid on television, and I'd be doing drawings of my own movies."

He still checks into hotel rooms to recreate the focus he mastered as an asthmatic child, and spends hours drawing and designing scenes for films. "Sometimes I think perhaps it's an insecurity that I want to think out the scene by drawing it, but I enjoy doing it. When you get to the set, of course things change."

One of the stylistic elements that set Scorsese apart in the 1970s was the trademark violence that increasingly penetrated his films. He has been both criticised for glamorising violence and copied by film-makers who used his technique of setting scenes of gore or brutality to rock music.

But the violence in his gangster epics, best exemplified in Casino and Mean Streets, was, he says, copied from real life and often witnessed by him in his American Italian immigrant enclave on the streets of Manhattan. "Violence usually manifests itself in a very specific world. I come from Italian descendants. My grandparents' way of life was quite tribal. Living in Manhattan then was like being in an old Sicilian village. The nature of the violence in the world I was growing up in was not pointless. It was very serious. It was something that I experienced and objectively saw. Even a slap in the face was a very serious thing that had to be addressed. When I try to express it by showing it in my films, I'm not glamorising it to make it look great."

When he wasn't at home watching television, he was watching films at the cinema, such as The Big Heat. He saw that when he was 12, and it affected him so profoundly that he referred to it decades later in his own films. "We didn't have enough money for the first run, so I would see films for 15 cents on the second run at the theatre. I saw The Big Heat maybe three times and I thought it was the most beautiful, strong, stark film. It had a brutality to it, and an elegance. Years later, I felt it could be quoted in Mean Streets."

Scorsese, prevented from serving in Vietnam by his asthma, took a film class at New York University. By his late twenties, he was already well known for his highly individual filming style, which combined rapid editing with slow-motion scenes set against a distinctive soundtrack.

This mix led to the "Scorsese style", culminating in his most iconic film, Taxi Driver, a grim portrayal of a man's slow descent into insanity, made in 1976 in the direct aftermath of the Vietnam War. He wanted to use his camera emotionally in the film, particularly in the opening scene in which De Niro's character phones Betsy, played by Cybill Shepherd, only to be rejected. "It is the first shot of the movie, when he is at the phone calling Betsy and she won't talk to him. Out of the pain of his rejection, the camera cannot even watch him. It turns away as she is rejecting him and it reveals the hallway instead of him."

The film, which followed the critical success of Mean Streets, put him on Hollywood's radar. But Taxi Driver was the culmination of many years of hustling and wooing, Scorsese says. When he came to directing in the late 1960s, he was an outsider. Basing himself in Los Angeles, he spent the next decade making contacts. "I had to live in LA between 1970 and 1981 in order to get to make films, to get introductions to people who would allow me to make films. To make Mean Streets, I was very lucky to find access to the person with money who wanted to make the film."

A bold soundtrack is another Scorsese characteristic that has been imitated by directors such as Quentin Tarantino. He says his films reflect the sum of his early musical influences, which range from jazz to classical to rock; music he listened to over and over in the confines of the Elizabeth Street apartment, and everything that has moved him since, including Philip Glass, The Rolling Stones and Peter Gabriel, whose tracks have accompanied some of his most memorable scenes.

As an interlude to the wordiness of his Marrakesh masterclass, Scorsese turns to the screen to show us a clip from his 1978 concert documentary The Last Waltz, featuring Muddy Waters performing "Mannish Boy". Suddenly, Scorsese is transformed again; he is headbanging frenetically and pointing at the screen like an elderly gent roused by a jazz riff that no one else seems to appreciate. Music appears to inhabit an important part of Scorsese's life, just as it plays a vital role in his movies.

Since The Last Waltz, he has produced two more rock documentaries, starting with Bob Dylan in 2005 (No Direction Home), then The Rolling Stones (Shine a Light) and a future project on George Harrison, although Scorsese appears more intrigued by the Beatle's spiritual "search for inner peace" than by his music-making.

Scorsese is philosophical about his failures. It is perhaps from the experiments and the half-successes that you learn, he says. He followed Taxi Driver with his first big-budget project, New York, New York, a highly stylised musical starring De Niro and Liza Minnelli, which was so poorly received that it is believed to have driven Scorsese into depression.

In his masterclass, he suggests that the film's failings may have been born out of his desire to challenge his own movie-making style. It was the first and last film in which he left the actors to improvise. This produced some inspired dialogue, but it became unwieldy. "I tried to do something very different and improvise as much as possible. I've never had acting classes and I don't subscribe to any one acting method, and I decided to see how it would come out with improvisation and humour.

"We did 40 to 50 takes over five days, which took four months of editing and made one scene. I was experimenting, and I was allowed to do so by United Artists. But after this, I began to use improvisation in rehearsals with actors. I realised I had to have the film structured before I got in."

This blend of tighter structuring combined with some room for improvisation in rehearsal has produced some classic film moments. It was while Joe Pesci, as the psychopathic Tommy DeVito, was playing with the dialogue in GoodFellas that he came up with the inspired line: "You think I'm funny?"

In the midst of his depression after New York, New York, it was Scorsese's long-time collaborator De Niro who, by many accounts, got him back on track. In 1980, with Scorsese struggling with cocaine addiction, De Niro persuaded him to make Raging Bull. Scorsese admits that his actors have sometimes been creative forces in his film career, particularly De Niro, and now Leonardo DiCaprio, with whom he has made three films and is soon to make a fourth, Shutter Island.

Scorsese's professional intimacies with these men, and with Pesci and Harvey Keitel, who turn up time and again on his sets, reflect a collaboration that verges on mutual dependency. He admits that it was DiCaprio who gave him a "second wind" in making pictures.

Another Scorsese trait is his voiceovers, including men who narrate the film from beyond the grave, as in Casino, where De Niro becomes the dominant narrator in spite of being presumed dead from the opening sequence. Is it his lack of interest in plot that leads him to use voiceovers? He says the voiceover is not a tool to explain the story, but it can illuminate the character's inside world. It's a technique he traces back to another childhood film, the 1950 noir classic Sunset Boulevard. "I love voiceovers. Sunset Boulevard is narrated by a man who's dead, floating in a swimming pool. He's telling the whole story and there's a sense of irony in that. I'm not interested in the character describing what's going on, but what he is feeling."

After two hours, the masterclass, which has ranged from practical directing ("Do the hardest things first... editing is the most exciting moment of the film... scripting is the most important") to the emotional climate of his early family life and his quirk of giving his (now dead) parents cameos in his films, Scorsese exits the room just as rapidly and comically as he entered it. He's surrounded by a circle of men who appear to have stepped off the set of GoodFellas. He bows repeatedly before padding off, twitching his glasses and eyebrows as he goes. It's like Woody Allen on speed.

'Shine a Light', Scorsese's documentary on The Rolling Stones, is released next year

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