Martin Scorsese, who celebrated his 80th birthday this week, is the greatest living American director - by a considerable margin.
He released his first feature, "Who is knocking at my door?", already in 1967.
55 years later, he is still at his creative peak, and shows no signs of fatigue.
His latest feature film, the historical crime epic "The Irishman", released in 2019, is a masterpiece for my taste and the taste of many other critics.
Scorsese signed two of the most prominent and influential films of the 1970s - "Angry Streets" and "Taxi Driver".
His seventh film, "The Raging Bull", released in 1980, was repeatedly chosen as the best film of the 80s.
"The Good Guys", released in 1990, has been chosen time and time again as one of the greatest and most influential films of the nineties.
And also at the beginning of the 21st century, when his close friends Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, William Friedkin and Brian De Palma began to lose their relevance and vitality and were forced into early retirement, Scorsese - along with his permanent creative partners, which include the legendary editor Thelma Schoenmaker and the gifted photographers Michael Ballhaus, Michael Chapman and Robert Richardson - continued to give heads from all directions with stormy, entertaining and full of vitality films such as "The Planters", "Shutter Island" and "The Wolf of Wall Street".
Scorsese's career has had ups and downs.
Some of his films failed miserably at the box office and were labeled in real time as colossal failures, and there were quite a few periods when he was unable to get financing for his projects.
He knew drug addictions and severe personal crises that threatened to break his spirit and end his life, and he was married five times (among other things to the Italian actress-model Isabella Rossellini).
Still, and despite that, none of the 25 full-length feature films he directed is a bad film (yes, even "Gangs of New York" and "Touch of Death" have breathtaking moments).
All of them are worth watching and all of them have interest, not to mention cinematic genius.
And all of them - even those made out of necessity (and not necessarily out of desire or interest) - contain his unique fingerprint.
They are all personal.
They are all "Martin Scorsese" movies.
Directing Robert De Niro in "Taxi Driver".
was always obsessed with the result,
Good education
Along with all these, for many decades Scorsese is also one of the great cinematic educators.
And for decades he has been working steadily and faithfully for the preservation and restoration of old films from the 30s, 40s and 50s through a dedicated fund he established.
He preaches with enthusiasm and passion thanks to the great classics and thanks to the cinematic experience, and he also makes sure to nurture young talents who find it difficult to realize their vision in the Hollywood climate (among other things he helped launch the careers of Wes Anderson, Ari Astor and the brothers Josh and Benny Safdi).
Today, countless scenes from Scorsese's films are burned into the collective memory.
Robert De Niro talking to himself in front of the mirror in "Taxi Driver";
De Niro, as the boxer Jake LaMotta, dances in black and white and in slow motion in the ring, against the background of the opening credits of "Raging Bull";
the virtuosic and impossible entrance to the Copacabana Club in "The Good Guys";
the scene with the clamps in "Casino";
The plane crash in "The Pilot";
The bullet-riddled DiCaprio crawls and writhes on the floor in a desperate attempt to get into his Lamborghini in The Wolf of Wall Street;
And there are no more examples.
Spike Lee and Oliver Stone studied with him when he was a lecturer at NYU.
Quentin Tarantino has often stated that "Taxi Driver" is one of his favorite movies.
Paul Thomas Anderson said he watched The Good Guys on loop while filming his second movie, Boogie Nights.
Guillermo del Toro stated very recently that he would be willing to shorten his life if as a result Scorsese's life would become longer.
South Korean director Bong Joon-ho thanked Scorsese and quoted him from the stage just after he won the Oscar for "Parasites."
All were his sons, and his influence is felt everywhere.
From the masterful mafia series "The Sopranos", which would not exist without him, to "Ted Lasso", which included in one of its episodes an amusing discussion during which the characters try to decide without success which is his best film.
Steven Spielberg is honored to be the only American director who rose to fame at the same time as Scorsese - and who still releases films that do not embarrass his youth.
Although he was always more successful and popular at the box office than Scorsese, even he admitted in the past that he could not direct a dark, brutal and punishing film such as "Raging Bull".
It is true that quite a few of Spielberg's films are very good, some even excellent, but unlike Scorsese's films, almost none of them take place in the "real world", and few of them go "to the end", in ways that Scorsese's films tend to do regularly .
While Spielberg has for many years made sentimental and commercial Phil Good films, designed to make viewers say "Wow!"
And to provide them with a good feeling about themselves and about life, Scorsese always made uncompromising films intended for an adult audience, which dealt with the really big and "heavy" issues.
Existential loneliness.
burning faith.
Guilt that eats the soul.
self destruction.
alienation
corruption.
violence.
jealousy.
Revenge.
madness
Scorsese once recounted a conversation he had with his friend, the director George Lucas, in the late seventies, just after showing him a nearly finished version of his ambitious period musical New York, New York.
Lucas told him that if the film ended with the pair of lovers at the center of the story (Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli) staying together, and not breaking up (as Scorsese intended it to happen), he would rake in at least $10 million more at the box office.
Scorsese knew his friend was right, but was unable to change the ending.
"Originally I thought it was my most commercial film," he said in an interview with "Playboy" in the 1990s.
"Still, a period romantic musical with two big movie stars. But as I delved into the characters, the film again became more and more experimental and more and more personal. There was no way the couple would stay together at the end, because that was not my experience with this kind of thing."
Finally, the financial and critical failure of "New York, New York" (along with the mountains of cocaine he branched out at the time) almost killed Scorsese, and the one who saved him from death was his good friend De Niro, who took him to the hospital, convinced him to stop using drugs and recruited him to direct "the raging bull".
Although Scorsese has calmed down since then and has become more settled and less wild over the years, his passion and commitment to the projects in which he invests his energy and talent have not waned at all.
He is still an adventurer who is not afraid to try new things (in 2012 he directed "Hugo", a wonderful children's film in 3D; he made "The Irishman" under the umbrella of the streaming giant Netflix and using modern computer effects that allowed him to "rejuvenate" his actors Seniors).
He is still the most obsessive, energetic and diverse director around.
And even at his extreme age, he repeatedly reminds us that he is far from saying the last word.
As evidence, as of today, Scorsese has half a dozen projects in development (as a director and producer, in film and television), and the film he is completing these days, "Killers of the Flower Moon", is produced with a budget of more than 200 million dollars - and will be his first western.
directs
specialized in ambitious, diverse and highly personal masterpieces,
Failures and loss to the studios
Scorsese's obsession with cinema began at a very young age.
The asthma he suffered from as a child prevented him from going out and playing with the children in the streets of the "Little Italy" neighborhood in New York, where he was born and raised, and to help him pass the time, his parents started taking him to see movies.
Italian neorealism.
Musicals by Vincent Minnelli.
Social dramas of Ilya Kazan.
John Ford's Westerns.
Hitchcock thrillers.
Soon Scorsese was swept into the world of cinema completely and watched every film that came his way (several times even, if it was possible for him).
At the same time, he watched the (sometimes violent) happenings in his neighborhood from the sidelines, served as an altar boy at the local church, and even flirted with the idea of becoming a priest.
Although his parents were not religious, the Catholic Church seemed to him like an escape hatch from the angry streets of his childhood, to life and to the world beyond the neighborhood.
"I trusted the church, because the things it preached and taught made sense," he later said.
"I realized that there is another way of thinking, that there is another world outside the harsh and fearful world in which I grew up."
In the end, the cinema - which offered Scorsese an alternative and more tempting escape route from the neighborhood into the world - is the one that won out.
But the neighborhood, the church and the family never stopped being present in his work.
His initial connection with De Niro, for example, stemmed from both growing up in the same area of New York, and at the same time.
Scorsese's most significant breakthrough as a filmmaker came when he realized that he should make films about the things he knows and the things that occupy him.
This happened right after he finished working on his second film, "Berta's Gang", which was a kind of cheap and uninspired imitation of "Bonnie and Clyde".
The film was produced by the king of cheap exploitation films Roger Corman, and it came after a five-year drought during which Scorsese didn't quite find himself.
"I showed 'Berta's Gang' to the director John Casbates, whom I admired," said Scorsese.
"He told me: 'Marty, you've just wasted a year of your life doing a piece of shit. It's a good movie, but don't do something like that again. You're better than that. Do your thing. Do something personal.'"
Scorsese listened to his mentor's advice and decided to make "Streets of Fury", the film that helped him find his voice and put him on the map.
The characters, the church, the violence, the neighborhood, the constant sense of danger - all of them were drawn by Scorsese from his own life.
"In 'Angry Streets' I tried to put myself and my friends on the screen," he said.
"To show our life in 'Little Italy'. It had a very strong anthropological and sociological dimension."
In "Angry Streets" Scorsese also decided to focus on the characters, the story and the atmosphere (rather than the plot);
He decided to use classic rock songs he grew up listening to as the soundtrack;
And he filmed the events with a dynamic camera, in a quasi-documentary style - all elements that would continue to star in his films and become some of the prominent hallmarks of his work.
Leonardo DiCaprio in Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street,
The first part of Scorsese's career took place at the same time as the flourishing of "New Hollywood" in the 1970s, and the production of masterpieces such as "The Godfather", "The Conversation", "Jaws", "Shards of Life", "Star Wars", and more.
During that decade, Scorsese teamed up with Robert De Niro to create a series of ambitious, varied and highly personal masterpieces - Streets of Madness (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), New York, New York (1977), Raging Bull " (1980) and "The King of Comedy" (1982) - and to make an eternal mark on American cinema.
The critics and fans worshiped him, but the general public and the Hollywood studios did not show similar loyalty, and amazingly, of all his films during this period, only "Taxi Driver" was a box office hit.
As a result, in the early 1980s, after three consecutive "failures" that lost money to the studios, Scorsese found himself in a bind, unable to get financing for the scandalous and ambitious dream project he wanted to make, "The Last Temptation of Jesus" (a slow and complex religious drama about a crisis of faith and spiritual conflicts).
Instead of throwing up his hands and retiring, Scorsese chose to make a sharp turn and make a small independent comedy, light and relatively cheap to produce called "Night Madness" (1985).
From there he went on to "The Color of Silver" (1986), a sequel to a previous hit and his first distinct commercial project - commissioned by the film's star, Paul Newman.
Following the critical and financial success of both films, Scorsese finally received the money needed to produce "The Last Temptation of Jesus" (never mind that the film later crashed at the box office and drew violent protests and death threats from Christian organizations in the US).
The "give and take" dynamic This was also repeated in the early 1990s, when Scorsese agreed to direct a remake of "Peak of Fear" on the condition that he be allowed to direct "The Good Guys." In both cases, it should be noted, the "commercial" films he directed included all the hallmarks its forms and quality.
The second half of Scorsese's career actually began in 2002, when he decided to replace Robert De Niro (with whom he has collaborated nine times to date) with Leonardo DiCaprio (with whom he has made five films so far).
The connection with DiCaprio solved at once Scorsese's constant difficulty in obtaining financing for his films (DiCaprio was then the biggest movie star in the world, thanks to the hysterical success of "Titanic"), and allowed him to focus on the one thing he still had not been able to achieve until then: an Oscar in the best director category (he was nominated for the award five times and did not win).
In 2007, thanks to the police thriller "The Planters" - another strictly commercial project that Scorsese managed to make "his" - the Oscar also arrived.
Since then he managed to accumulate three more nominations in the best director category.
Scorsese's status as a national treasure was no longer in doubt.
His personal life has become more stable (he has been married to producer Helen Morris since 1999).
He was finally freed from the "Oscar curse" that had befallen him, and was free to focus solely on what was important - that is, movies.
"the good guys".
Another masterpiece etched in memory,
Who sees him as a "troublesome old man"?
Despite the spectacular filmography and his high and undisputed status, for many young people these days Martin Scorsese is mainly the nagging old man who often complains that the Marvel movies are "less cinema" and more "amusement park facilities".
In this context, it is important to note that even the director James Gunn ("Guardians of the Galaxy", "Suicide Squad"), who made superhero films both for Marvel and for the competitors DC (and was recently appointed to head the DC cinematic universe), Agree with most of what he said (Gunn also added: "I admire Scorsese's films and learn from them, and I will continue to do so. He is one of the greatest directors ever").
Meanwhile, ironically, one of the more interesting comic book films produced in recent years, "Joker", starring Joaquin Phoenix, drew 99 percent of its inspiration from two Scorsese classics: "Taxi Driver" and "The King of Comedy".
Scorsese's young McTerregios tend to claim that he lives in the past, that he is detached from what is happening today and that he only knows how to make "Mafia movies".
Go tell them that "Mafia films" make up only 20 percent of his entire body of work.
Go tell them also that the man is responsible, among other things, for one of the best concert films of all time ("The Last Waltz" from 1978, which records the last performance of the legendary band The Band), for one of the best music documentaries of all time ("Bob Dylan : No Direction Home"), to a subdued, beautiful and heartbreaking costume drama ("The Age of Innocence"), to a romantic journey film centered on a young widow ("Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore"), to a biographical film about the spiritual leader of Tibet, the Dalai Lama ("Condon ") and a spectacular and thought-provoking religious epic about two Jesuit priests who embark on a dangerous journey in 17th century Japan ("Silence").
How did Guillermo del Toro write on Twitter, in response to a recent article that sought to criticize Scorsese's indisputable achievements?
"The man understands cinema, protects cinema and represents cinema to the full extent of his organs.
He always fights for the art of the thing and against the commercial side.
No one has been able to tame him, and his place in history is guaranteed."
Every word in stone. Good luck, king. Never stop.
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