Martin Scorsese: Hollywood's most consistent and passionate auteur

There is a certain irony in Martin Scorsese's double Oscar for The Departed. This was not one of those passion projects that he battled for years to make, such asGangs of New York or The Last Temptation of Christ. It was an assignment - a remake of a Hong Kong thriller. Yes, it's bravura filmmaking and the highest-grossing movie he has ever made, but as Scorsese's erstwhile collaborator Paul Schrader asked, will it last? In 30 years' time, it's a fair bet that we will still be talking about GoodFellas, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver and Mean Streets, but where will The Departed sit in the Scorsese canon?

Perhaps the question is an irrelevance. Hollywood has a habit of lavishing Oscars on the right film-makers... for the wrong films. The main feeling among Scorsese admirers will be relief that he finally got his gong. No longer will his name be an answer to those movie trivia questions about the greatest living directors never to have won Academy Awards.

Besides, one of the keys to Scorsese's enduring success in Hollywood is his pragmatism. Many of the film-makers he most admires have been destroyed or spurned by the studio system. Figures such as DW Griffith (who died forgotten) or Orson Welles (who was cast out of the kingdom after Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons), or even B-movie meisters like Sam Fuller were far less successful in staying at the heart of Hollywood than Scorsese has been over the past three decades. He is a student of their battles and he has learnt from their mistakes.

"As early as I can remember, the key issue for me was: what does it take to be a film-maker in Hollywood?" he wrote in his book, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies.

"Even today, I still wonder what it takes to be a professional or even an artist in Hollywood. How do you survive the constant tug of war between personal expression and commercial imperatives? What is the price you pay to work in Hollywood? Do you end up with a split personality? Do you make one movie for them, one for yourself?"

The hook-up with Leonardo DiCaprio is an example of Scorsese's pragmatism in action. Maybe we should even give thanks to Titanic for the director's belated Oscar success this week. Back in the late Nineties, it would have been unthinkable for him to finance Gangs of New York without DiCaprio as its star. It was DiCaprio's name that enabled the film's British producer, Graham King, to pre-sell Gangs for a fortune in Japan and elsewhere around the world, and thereby enable it to be completed. After working with DiCaprio on The Aviator and now The Departed, Scorsese may see the actor as a muse to rival the young Robert De Niro, but it also helps that DiCaprio remains eminently bankable.

The Hollywood establishment has never quite known what to make of Scorsese. On the one hand, he first appeared to be one of those ferocious, bearded, Seventies movie brats who were going to bring the system down. On the other, right from the outset, when he was working for Roger Corman on Boxcar Bertha (1972), it was also apparent that he saw himself as a craftsman in the tradition of the studio directors who made movie after movie after movie without anyone necessarily paying much attention to their names. The Cahiers du Cinéma critics of the Fifties may have noticed that Raoul Walsh, Allan Dwan, Budd Boetticher, Jacques Tourneur and Phil Karlson were auteurs, but this was an observation that had passed by many in Hollywood.

Indeed, Scorsese has always been a paradoxical figure. In those Warner Bros movies of the Thirties he so admired, films such as Angels with Dirty Faces and The Roaring Twenties, there would be a street hoodlum (usually played by James Cagney) and a long-suffering, altruistic priest from the same background (usually played by Pat O'Brien). With Scorsese himself, it is as if both characters have been moulded into one.

He was born in November 1942 in Long Island, New York, in a strict Catholic family. Growing up in Little Italy, he was frail and asthmatic and used to dream about becoming a priest. He may have flunked out of seminary school, but he has always approached his film-making with the same zeal that he might have brought to the priesthood. At the same time, he has become the greatest chronicler of Italian-American street culture and of the goodfella scene.

It is instructive to unpick the metaphors he uses to describe his passion for cinema. The religious references are predictable, but he also has some more disturbing points of comparison. One of his favourite quotes is from Frank Capra: "Film is a disease - when it infects your bloodstream, it takes over as the number one hormone, it bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to film is more film." These lines have a double edge when one remembers Scorsese's drug problems of the Seventies. These are well-chronicled in Peter Biskind's book, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, with its memorable description of Scorsese and rock musician Robbie Robertson holed up together in a house on Mullholland Drive, living by night like vampires. " Outside of watching movies and doing drugs, Marty's only relaxation was playing with his toy soldiers," Biskind writes of this period in Scorsese's life. In light of the director's turbulent private life, it was easy to understand his affinity with characters as wired and as full of self-loathing as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver or Jake La Motta in Raging Bull.

There was also the sense that Scorsese saw every incident in his own life through the prism of cinema. "He just loves to talk with people about film," says Graham King. "Everything he talks, he talks in film language. You'll ask him, 'How are you feeling today?' and he'll reply that he is feeling like that guy in that 1935 movie so and so. If you enjoy film, he is the greatest guy to be around." In interviews, when asked about key formative moments in his life, Scorsese always refers to movies. In the book Scorsese on Scorsese, he talks about how his father - a big movie buff - used to take him to the cinema when he was an ailing, asthmatic kid and of how the Scorseses were one of the first families on their block to buy a television (as early as 1948). On one seismic day during his childhood, his mother took him to see King Vidor's Duel in the Sun, a film that had been condemned by the Church (which only seemed to add to its allure in his eyes). "I couldn't watch the end, it was all so frightening," he recalled. "The sun beating down, the woman's hands bleeding and these two people who were so much in love they had to kill each other."

Many of the films he lapped up on TV in this period were British. (The Hollywood studios wouldn't sell their wares to the small screen.) One of the more surprising aspects of Scorsese's cinephilia is his abiding passion for British movies. His admiration of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger is well-chronicled. Their expressionistic dance movies The Red Shoes and Tales of Hoffmann were particular favourites. His editor Thelma Schoonmaker (also an Oscar winner) is Powell's widow. Powell wrote a wonderful description of Scorsese after meeting him for the first time in the mid-Seventies in Ladbroke Grove, London. As far as the elderly British director was concerned, Scorsese was "a gifted porcupine... a pale fanatic with eyes that burn." Bumping into him was akin to encountering "a twister in Kansas... he talked a mile a minute, his mouth full of exclamations, explanations, opinions, questions and contradictions. He had eyes like a snake, seeing everything, adopting and discarding in the same moment." Intriguingly, Scorsese's passion for British cinema stretches into areas that are esoteric even for British film scholars. Several years ago, it was announced that he planned to make a documentary about the British film-makers he admired. This project (which he is still actively working on) is in the vein of My Voyage to Italy (1999), his celebrated documentary about Italian movies. Scorsese's passion for Brit movies extends to such (seemingly journeymen) figures as British horror director John Gilling (best known for Plague of the Zombies) and Anthony Asquith. One of the likely dividends of Scorsese's Oscar success is that he will now find it easier to get his more personal projects into production.

There is a very good chance, for example, that he will be able to make Silence, his long-gestating adaptation of Shusaku Endo's 16th-century-set novel about religious persecution. Following his success two years ago with No Direction Home (his Dylan documentary), he is at work on a film about The Rolling Stones. Meanwhile, in Variety last week, it was announced he was looking at making a film of Brian Selznick's 1930s-set children's novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, about a 12-year-old kid who lives in the walls of a Paris train station. There are rumours of a sequel to The Departed - although how this will be contrived, given that so many of the original protagonists died in the first film's extraordinarily bloody final reel, remains to be seen. Maybe he will also get to make his long-planned film about Dean Martin.

Some critics have suggested Scorsese simply made The Departed as a gun for hire. "I don't think he really thinks about that," says King. "A man of his level just makes a film when he really gets attracted to the material - and he did with this. He loved the characters and the whole cat-and-mouse chase of it. He called me up after he had read it and said it was like an old-fashioned Cagney movie: a cross between that and a British noir-type gangster film." King paints a rosy portrait of the director on set. Yes, Scorsese is a hard-driving perfectionist, but he is also accommodating. "I have a lot of press asking me what is it's like being the boss of Martin Scorsese. No-one is the boss of Martin Scorsese. He is his own boss. But he is such a great collaborator with producers, actors and everybody, that it makes it a joy to work with him. He doesn't look down his nose at anyone. He listens to everyone's opinion."

All that diehard Scorsese devotees will hope now is the Oscars don't blunt his filmmaking. In the past, he has had an attritional relationship with the studios. He has played their games - but only to be able to make his own movies in his own way. (He frequently talks about his favourite Hollywood directors as "smugglers" who cheated and somehow got away with it.) Now that he has received awards that rightfully should have come his way years ago, the only danger is that he will lose that streak of ferocity and perversity that has always set him apart.

Geoffrey Macnab is the author of The Making of 'Taxi Driver', published by MQ Publications

Growing up in Little Italy: Scorsese on his formative years

'Organised crime figures would tip their hats to a priest and watch their language, and they would have their cars blessed'

Martin Scorsese was born in 1942 in Flushing, Long Island, the second son of Charles and Catherine Scorsese. His parents were both children of Sicilian immigrants who had settled in New York around 1910. The centrality of the family in Italian immigrant culture, its emphasis on the struggle for success, its close ties with the Roman Catholic Church and the everyday proximity of organised crime - these were to dominate Scorsese's formative years. The alternative to remaining within this closed society with its strong sense of pride, yet equally deep feeling of isolation, was, for young Martin, to immerse himself in the fantasy world of cinema. And life on the streets of Little Italy was to shape the style as well as the narrative content of Scorsese's own films:

I used to hang out with a guy named Joey, on whom Mean Streets was partly based. We went to see practically everything together. Whenever there was a fight, everyone would shout, "Come on over, quick!" We'd say, "Right," and then we'd take our time walking so that when we got there it'd be all over. Guys at one end of a block weren't too friendly with guys from the other end, and naturally there was always one man controlling the whole area, but you never knew who or where he was. So you had to develop a sense of survival. For a long time, wherever I went, I tried to sit with my back against a wall!

Joey and I had a very close brush one night, and I based the ending of Mean Streets on it. It was three in the morning and we were sitting in the back of a guy's red convertible, which was a big deal, since none of us had cars. He already had a young teenage kid sitting in the front seat with him and he said he'd drive us around for a while, but we thought he was acting a little too wise. He might have been a cop - in that area there wasn't much difference between them and the hoods! Eventually, since there wasn't much going on, we got bored and he dropped us off. Three minutes after we left there was a shooting. The wise guy in the convertible got angry with another driver blocking his path and flashed his gun. A few blocks later, the other driver pulled alongside them and fired a load of bullets. The teenage kid was hit in the eye, though he lived. It could very easily have been us. Just two months later, as it happened, President Kennedy was killed.

In my neighbourhood, the people in power were the tough guys on the street, and the Church. The organised crime figures would tip their hats to a priest and watch their language, and they would have their cars and pets blessed. This may have had something to do with my decision, when I was eight or nine, that I wanted to become a priest. At any rate, it lasted right up until the time I made my first movie.

The first Mass I attended, in St Patrick's Cathedral, just after I entered the Catholic school, made a deep impression, with its pageantry and theatre, and all those old Italians singing hymns in Latin. I learned to write script at St Patrick's School, and the Irish nuns seemed to like me because I wanted to be a missionary. I remember a visiting missionary who told us how he had exorcised a boy possessed of devils in the Philippines. The main thing, we learned, was the vocation: "Many are called, few are chosen."

Listening to the story of Father Damien, who had devoted his life to lepers and died of leprosy himself, it was difficult to grasp that these were real people who tried to live their lives according to God's word and were approaching sainthood. I thought a lot about salvation, and it seemed the best guarantee of being saved was to become a priest, which would be like being able to pick up a phone any time and talk to God. Around 1953 a young priest, in his early twenties, came into the neighbourhood and played classical music to us, took us to the movies and involved us in sports. I wasn't too keen on sports, but I began to pattern my life on his and he became a stronger role model than the local gang chiefs. Of course, he was against rock'n'roll - we'd try to play records to him and he'd get angry and put on Tchaikovsky or Beethoven - but the main thing was my getting an insight into his views, which was a new experience. He felt that On the Waterfront was a very important film, because of the scene where Karl Malden, as the priest, tries to force Brando to get up and walk that last stretch up to the fellow who says, "All right, let's go to work." It's a kind of Calvary, except that Brando doesn't die; and the priest believed that, while it wasn't at all realistic in terms of how the docks were run, it was important that a film like this should be made, because life does continue. This strongly influenced my sense of what could be done in a film, as did hearing my family say, "Yes, but it doesn't happen like that; in reality the guy would do such and such."

At the age of 14, I went to Cathedral College, a junior seminary on the Upper West Side. But I was expelled after a year, because I didn't really have my mind on my work: I had met a young lady with whom I fell in love, and I was extremely distracted. Celibacy was really setting yourself aside from the people, forcing yourself to live in an unnatural way. The old Italian people in the neighbourhood didn't take it seriously at all, in fact they were constantly debunking it.

Rock'n'roll was another big distraction - Little Richard, Elvis Presley and all those guys. I used to listen to the radio constantly and buy all the records (some of which I've had to use in my films because I couldn't find new copies). This period was the height of gang warfare and black leather jackets. I wore a leather jacket, but I was made fun of because the gangs in our area wore sharkskin suits! The one thing you couldn't wear was the colour red. I remember wanting a red jacket, and my father said, "Only pimps wear red, you're not having one and that's that." Wearing red was also a sure way to attract police attention.

By this stage, I was a real film buff: I even remember saving up ten dollars to buy Paul Rotha's The Film Till Now. I went to Cardinal Hays, a high school in the Bronx, for the rest of my schooling and I planned to go to the Jesuit University at Fordham, where my friends were. But I couldn't make it because of my grades: I was in the lowest quarter of my graduating class.

I went to New York University specifically because they had film classes there, along with the more general courses. I read the catalogue and realised that I could just afford to take film as a major and English as a minor. I had started to read a lot, beginning with Thomas Hardy, and I even had some idea of going back to the seminary afterwards, until I saw Professor Haig Manoogian, who took the first film class. It was a three-hour course, once a week, called "The History of Motion Pictures, Television and Radio." Most of the kids took the class because they thought they wouldn't have to do anything much except watch films and get two credits for it. But Haig was brutal! He would talk so fast - even faster than me - and he described everything in great detail from the very beginning. He wasn't the head of the department because he hated administration, but he really inspired the film-makers.

You can learn how to use a camera in two minutes from anybody, but Haig would come on stage, hit you with a lecture for one-and-a-half hours, and then show a film. Once he showed Stroheim's Greed and a student asked why there was no music. Back came the answer, "Do you think this is a show? Get the hell out!" He would weed people out, semester after semester. The idea was to be as serious about it as possible - serious in the sense that you could argue, laugh and joke about the films, but you really had to be there for the love of cinema.

This is an edited extract from 'Scorsese on Scorsese', published by Faber and Faber

A life in movies: from 'Mean Streets' to 'The Departed'

TAXI DRIVER, 1976

This twisted parable starred Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle, and marked a glorious flowering of Scorsese's talent. Gifting such iconic scenes as " Are you looking at me?" to posterity,

Taxi Driver made the Big Apple look more rotten than ever.

THE DEPARTED, 2006

The 2007 Best Picture Oscar winner is, by no stretch, Scorsese's greatest film. But it does pack a punch. The Departed features all the old Scorsese favourites: the mafia, police snitches, and the word "fuck" (or its derivatives) an impressive 237 times.

MEAN STREETS, 1973

Scorsese's feature about growing up in the mob enclave of New York's Little Italy was a dry run for his first masterpiece, Taxi Driver. Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel took the leads, but the real star was Scorsese's direction and the street-level, hand-held photography.

GANGS OF NEW YORK, 2002

Scorsese wanted to make this film, about the power struggle for 19th-century New York, for two decades. But it was an overblown turkey (despite a powerful performance from Daniel Day-Lewis). The film marked the start of Scorsese's partnership with Leonardo DiCaprio.

THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, 1988

"My whole life has been movies and religion," the director once said. Nowhere was that symbiosis more difficult for Scorsese than in this stern, devout film, an alternative take on Christ's final days. Unsurprisingly, it garnered lashings of ecclesiastical brimstone on its release.

THE AVIATOR, 2004

Leonardo DiCaprio took the title role in this biopic of the early years of Hollywood's most enigmatic mogul, Howard Hughes. Charting Hughes's career from the 1920s, the film won five Oscars - but not for its star or director.

CASINO, 1995

The definitive Las Vegas movie, and the role in which Sharon Stone resurrected her career with her performance as the self-destructive Ginger McKenna. The St John Passion plays as gangsters punch, shoot and double-cross each other out of a Nevadan fortune.

RAGING BULL, 1980

De Niro shadow-boxing to Pietro Mascagni's string music is one of the great cinematic moments in this biopic of the middleweight Jake La Motta. Joe Pesci broke a rib when De Niro hit him during filming.

GOODFELLAS, 1990

A return to what Scorsese does best: gangsters. GoodFellas tells the story of three generations of Mafia. Ray Liotta joined De Niro and Joe Pesci in this violent, at times hilarious masterpiece.