The two directors who changed Martin Scorsese’s life: “What if you did make a film like that?”
No one from the New Hollywood era is still directing features with such essentiality as Martin Scorsese.
If we’re being honest, Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster magic has long ebbed, Francis Ford Coppola’s grandiose visions have become caught in cumbersome dead ends like Megalopolis’ sci-fi clunk, and Brian De Palma, while boasting a commercially successful parallel to Spielberg’s box office success well into the 1990s, has lapsed into a string of mediocre projects lacking the old finger on the pulse he once effortlessly wielded.
Yet Scorsese’s work still crackles with energy and a God-given gift for wringing out a scene for all its narrative juices with undimmed captivation. One watch of 2013’s cutthroat The Wolf of Wall Street’s big finance whirlwind leapt off the screen at dizzying pace, with the same rush as Goodfellas’ mob drama over twenty years previously, no sign of any slowing down from the old master.
Following the focused, intimate spirituality of Silence three years later, Scorsese’s storytelling antenna remains fiercely switched on when many of his contemporaries have long floundered into the 2020s.
Perhaps it’s his unerring personal relationship with film that has seen him through his nearly 60 years in the business with ideas and energy fully intact. It’s the auteur in him that has proved a constant thread across his filmography, always avoiding glib mistruths or hollow cash grabs to ensure a vitality in every project he steps behind the camera for. Raised on the genre films of old, yet entering adolescence as the big studios began to lose their once mighty power, Scorsese looked to American cinema’s interim fringes as a formative pointer towards personal filmmaking.
“I caught a moment when movies were breaking down,” Scorsese revealed in Mary Pat Kelly’s 1991 biography. “Hollywood was breaking down. John Cassavetes’ Shadows and works like Shirley Clarke’s films showed you could make a narrative film about your own life or about things that ordinarily would not be made in Hollywood. So that was new. I remember my father telling stories and saying, ‘But they’d never make a film like that.’ And I’d think, ‘what if you did make a film like that?’
Cassavetes and Clarke’s channelling of street-level realism and the raw intimacy captured behind closed doors struck a serious chord with the young Scorsese. As well as both hailing from his home city, New York, the independent blossoming weeding through the fractures in the upended Hollywood system would prove consequential for the next generation of eager filmmakers, in love with the big screen heroes of their youth but soaking up the countercultural explosion around them to subvert and critique through their personal narrative lens.
Highlighting the immense influence of New York University’s film professor Haig Manoogian, the road paved by Cassavetes and Clarke would be afforded one final push for the budding cinema student.
“It’s not that he said to me, ‘Go make a film about trying to live a decent religious existence in a world run by gangsters,’ as I would do in Mean Streets and other movies,” Scorsese stated on his old tutor. “No, he didn’t say that. He helped me express myself on film using the new alphabet that was being created in cinema in the late ’50s and early ’60s. The French New Wave, the Italians, the British, the American Underground were taking cinema apart and starting all over again. So in a sense I found my vocation through cinema”.
