The Moviemakers: Scorsese

What is cinema?

For me, there's only one answer.

Cinema is necessary.

- Martin Scorsese is, I think, one of the best of the best.

He really is one of the quintessential American directors.

- He's somebody that all filmmakers look to

as a master of the art.

Scorsese has become almost this curator

of America's film archive.

There's almost no film that Scorsese

doesn't have a print of.

- What's so interesting about Scorsese's mafia pictures

is that, you know, for us, the idea of the mafia

and the mafia life is very exotic.

But what we forget is that for Martin Scorsese,

he was growing up in Little Italy.

These movies are about his life and his experience.

And that's partially what has made them so good

because there's an authenticity there

that no one else could really recreate.

- It would've been an easy option

for the young Martin Scorsese to join the mob

and pursue the life of crime

that's so often depicted in his films.

However, severe asthma kept him away

from living a normal life.

- So he was just kind of staying at home a lot,

probably peering out the window,

like looking at these mafiosos

going around their business being like.

Hey, Teroni, that big shot Follette

gonna shoot square with us?

- His family were surrounded by the mob.

These people were often friends, neighbors,

and sometimes even family.

They'd come for dinner one night and go missing the next.

But growing up, Scorsese and his parents

embraced a quieter, family-oriented lifestyle.

- My parents, you know, were working class people

who never had, we never had a book in the house.

No books.

Just the Daily News and the Daily Mirror in New York.

Newspapers, and, you know, I mean, he took me to movies,

my father, basically.

- That's how he was exposed to all of these greats

of the Golden Age of Cinema.

Directors like Willie Wyler, who I think he always admired

just because of the diversity of what he was making.

And you see that a little bit in Scorsese's career.

Like, he's a pretty like diverse guy.

I know we like to think of him as the "Goodfellas" man,

but he's dipped his toe in a lot of different genres.

So maybe his movies are a way

of imagining what his life could have been.

Growing up in and around New York,

Scorsese not only went to film school.

He actually taught at film school.

He taught at NYU at the end of the 1960s.

But Scorsese, right from the very beginning,

was ambitious to make it in Hollywood.

He went to Los Angeles in the early 1970s.

He went as a film editor in the first instance.

Just keen to get a foot in the door, really.

And from there, he hooked up with a lot

of the New Hollywood movie brats.

They started hanging out with each other in various houses

and locations around Los Angeles

as they tried to plot their way into the industry.

And from there began touting round his script

for "Mean Streets," which he'd already written at NYU.

- "Mean Streets" was really I think the first

outing of the Scorsese that we know.

- It talked about, you know, rage of young men.

It painted New York as this dirty, gritty,

difficult place.

- "Mean Streets" has that archetype of the guy

who gets involved in the criminal world.

And he chases the high, and then there's a conflict.

And then that summons the downfall.

And obviously if you look at everything Scorsese made

afterwards, that theme just keeps coming up again and again.

And so I think a lot of the success of "Mean Streets"

and the doors that it opened for Scorsese just came to that,

that little recognition of, "Oh, okay.

"He sort of found himself in cinema."

- So Scorsese wasn't actually the first one

to work with Robert De Niro.

It was Brian De Palma who actually discovered him

and worked with him on two films and sort of introduced him

to Scorsese and said, "Hey, look at this great actor."

You know, he's young and he's got this sort of like

very masculine anger and vulnerability to him,

which is so perfect for everything that Scorsese does.

And I think they,

there's something about it that just clicked.

De Niro and myself, Bob,

we worked on so many films together that we were like,

we grew together creatively.

Like we grew up together in the same,

in the business in a way.

So we didn't think of each other as stars

and that sort of thing.

- Sometimes when directors find actors that really

just speak, speak their mind through their characters.

And I think the De Niro, that's so true.

He captures everything of that Scorsese rise

and downfall structure, like in one guy.

And that guy is Robert De Niro.

- I mean, they've been making films together for decades.

They have a shorthand, and they have a sensibility

that's the same in terms of what they want from a character.

They both want to get really deep inside a character

and on why they behave the way they do.

And De Niro is extremely good at that.

I don't think De Niro is better directed

by anybody but Scorsese.

Three years after the success

of "Mean Streets," Scorsese and De Niro

joined forces again with "Taxi Driver,"

a film that is often highlighted

as their best collaboration.

De Niro plays Travis Bickle,

a disturbed and lonely Vietnam veteran

who works as a taxi driver in New York.

De Niro's character is drawn to the worst,

sleaziest and most dangerous areas of town,

where his clientele includes pimps and prostitutes.

Everywhere he goes, he sees violence, degradation, insanity,

and filth, which fuels the madness in Bickle's mind.

Scorsese himself cameos in the film

in one of the darkest moments as a passenger

who plans to murder his cheating wife.

And I'm gonna kill her.

There's nothing, there's nothing else.

I'm just, I'm gonna kill her.

Well, what do you think of that?

- The appeal of "Taxi Driver" is to me so interesting

because it's such a, it's such an unpleasant movie.

And there's this sort of like restrict, like gross,

like sheen to it.

And it's like the pure ugliness

of New York City exposed onscreen.

And yet at the same time

because Scorsese is such a soulful filmmaker,

we get put in this really strange position

where we're repulsed by him,

but also we empathize with him a little bit.

And we're constantly being like tussled

between these two extremes of the actions

that he perpetuates are so immoral,

and yet what he represents,

the sort of the loneliness and the sense of bitterness

and feeling forgotten in your own life,

like that is something that everyone can associate with.

You talking to me?

You talking to me?

- "Mean Streets" and "Taxi Driver" were incredibly visceral

and immersive movies that quickly attained that cult status

because they seemed very much in line with the way

in which the new Hollywood ethos was working.

Violent, quite jarring, anti-heroic characters,

people on the margins of society.

Filming really a post-Vietnam society

that American audiences coming through into the theaters

were beginning to see themselves outside,

but they weren't seeing it on screen

up until Scorsese's films, I think.

They were very, very kind of important and templates

in a way of that alternative scene that Scorsese

had really helped build up since the turn of the '70s.

- A lot of these, like the movie brat filmmakers,

felt so indebted to the studio age,

to the films of the 1940s,

because that's, that's what they grew up on,

and that's what inspired their love of movies.

So I think a lot of these directors like Scorsese

have a really great love of musicals.

And so his attempt to make "New York, New York"

was very earnest to me.

But the reason that it didn't do well

I think is really down to "Star Wars."

So "Star Wars" changed the whole shape

of the industry after 1977.

Hollywood had been looking for a way back in

in commercial terms of how to make big blockbuster movies

that were family orientated,

that people were gonna see not just once,

but actually come out and see again and again.

With "Star Wars," overnight,

like the appetite of the audience changed.

And they're like, "We only want these sort

"of like sci-fi fantasies, overblown spectacles."

And there almost wasn't really a place

for something like "New York, New York" anymore.