The filmmaker who showed Martin Scorsese how to be a director: “I was too young to understand”
The old saying suggests that nobody should ever dare try and teach their grandmother how to suck eggs, but as it applies to Hollywood, it’s probably unwise to try and teach Martin Scorsese how to direct when he’s forgotten more than most filmmakers will ever know.
That’s not calling his mental acuity into question, but when the bushy-browed titan seems to have seen almost every feature that’s ever been made, there’s bound to be a few things that slip his memory. After all, ask somebody to name their guilty pleasure flicks, and they’ll rattle off a couple, but Marty? Never one to do things by half, he named 130 of them.
While that’s patently ludicrous because it’s much more of a curated selection of unheralded gems than a list of titles he’d be embarrassed for anyone to catch him watching, it speaks volumes to his love of cinema. Scorsese eats, sleeps, lives, and breathes celluloid, but once upon a time, he was just a kid who didn’t have the first clue about what went on behind the camera.
Of course, children don’t sit in the multiplex with steepled fingers and wonder about the who, what, when, where, and why of the mise-en-scène, or at least they don’t, for the most part. Scorsese eventually became that precocious youngster, but when he first started visiting the theatre, he was there for the magic of the movies and nothing else.
Eventually, though, a lightbulb went off. Instead of experiencing them as nothing more than escapist entertainment, Scorsese began to wonder how these wonderful images came together and who was responsible for collating them. The fan became the student, who eventually became the professional, and these days, it would be fair to call him the master.
Directing one of the greatest films ever made is something an infinitesimally small percentage of directors ever manage to accomplish, but Scorsese has laughed in the face of such notions by doing it several times over. His influences are vast and all-encompassing, but there are two auteurs who helped shape him into the era-defining artist he was to become.
“The first director I can remember liking, and I was too young to understand what a director did, was John Ford,” he told Ana Maria Bahiana. “I just saw his name in all the movies I like.” The mastermind behind many of the great ‘Golden Age’ westerns was his entry point, but he was still an audience member first and foremost.
There had to be somebody else who came along, blew Marty’s mind, and opened his eyes to what goes into the making of a movie. Perfectly in keeping with everything he’d go on to accomplish, it was a maverick and wunderkind who opened that door. “Then there was Orson Welles,” he reflected. “When I learned about what a director really does.”
Not so much bursting onto the scene but completely and utterly laying waste to it, Welles was nothing short of a phenomenon. He wrote, directed, produced, and played the lead role in Citizen Kane, with his first feature arriving on the big screen when he was only 26 years old. If anything, it was unfair to every single filmmaker in the industry for one man to prove so precocious and master the art form at the first hurdle.
Everybody wants to learn from and emulate the best, but for Scorsese, Citizen Kane was nothing short of transformative. He’d been enamoured by Ford’s pictures from an aesthetic and narrative standpoint like almost everybody of his generation, but he didn’t give a second thought to the writers, editors, actors, assistants, and crew members who all played their part behind the scenes.
He knew who Ford was as a director, sure, but he didn’t know why he was that kind of director. When he discovered the work of Welles, the dots began connecting, the synapses started firing, and Scorsese knew without a shadow of a doubt what he wanted to be.
