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Mini Bio
Martin Charles Scorsese ( 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 is widely considered one of the greatest and most influential directors in the history of cinema. He has received numerous accolades including an Academy Award, four BAFTA Awards, three Emmy Awards, a Grammy Award, and three Golden Globe Awards. Scorsese has also been honored 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. Five 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, centered on macho-posturing men and explore 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), Cape Fear (1991), 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).
In television, Scorsese 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 organizations: The Film Foundation in 1990, the World Cinema Foundation in 2007 and the African Film Heritage Project in 2017.
Backstage
- Taught both Oliver Stone and Spike Lee at New York University.
- He took a cameo in his film Taxi Driver (1976) (as a man about to kill his wife)
- Admits he made Hugo (2011) so he would have at least one film his daughter could watch.
- Says he was happy with the fact that it took so long for him to win Best Director, because if he had won it earlier, it would have affected his directing and films.
- Of the three films he has been trying to make since the mid-1970s, he has done two: The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Gangs of New York (2002). The third film, a biopic of Dean Martin called "Dino", has been on hiatus at Warner Brothers since the late 1990s. Scorsese has a very specific all A-list cast in mind, probably why this has yet to be produced. He wants Tom Hanks to star as Martin, Jim Carrey to play Jerry Lewis, John Travolta to play Frank Sinatra, Hugh Grant to play Peter Lawford, and Adam Sandler to play Joey Bishop.
- He was one of three major directors to have been offered the opportunity to direct Schindler's List (1993) by producer Steven Spielberg, the other two being Roman Polanski and Billy Wilder. Scorsese thought a Jewish filmmaker should direct this; Polanski was not yet ready to deal with the painful subject (having lost his mother in the Holocaust); and Wilder (who was retired and who lost his mother and grandmother in the Holocaust) finally told Spielberg that he should do this himself.
- He directed Michael Jackson's music video Michael Jackson: Bad (1987). The full length video runs 16 minutes and is in both black and white and color. It is usually shortened down to just the color segment for television.
Movies
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