Martin Scorsese

So fun fact, I was the person who filled out the paperwork with our beloved web designer saying what we were all about as a concept. One of the questions was which celebrity would be our theoretically ideal audience, and without hesitation, I said, “Martin Scorsese.” Martin Scorsese would be in many ways the perfect Media Magpies reader, though he and I would disagree a lot on the MCU. But you know, the great joy of this site since its inception has been that there is no one true opinion on anything. We, the Magpies, are a multitude of voices and opinions. What we share is a love of, well, media, and Martin Scorsese is so much a lover of pure film that I think he would fit in here with us.

I mean, he’s a hair older. As in, I’m one of the oldest writers here, and he’s a year and change older than my mother, who wasn’t young when she had kids. Like my mother, he was raised Catholic—but while my grandmother was raised in New York, my mom was raised in California, and our family was Irish Catholic, not Italian Catholic. My mother was not the world’s most athletic child, but Scorsese had asthma severe enough to basically keep him shut up in his house all the time. Where he watched movies.

I mean, we are talking a kid who rented movies on film in the days when that meant having your own projector at home. Apparently the only other person who rented The Tales of Hoffmann from the place he rented it was that local Romero kid, who went on to make a movie or two people have heard of. Something about creating the modern concept of the zombie? Anyway, he was already watching foreign films. And not just Italian ones, but having your exposure to Italian neorealism being watching the movies on TV with your Sicilian immigrant relatives is quite a lot.

An altar server as a child (my mother was in the era where that was strictly boys, but I was one myself), young Scorsese initially planned to be a priest. He failed the first year at his seminary, however, and instead of attending Fordham he went to NYU and studied English. He then went on to get a Master of Arts. While in film school, he met Harvey Keitel and Thelma Schoonmaker, a beneficial acquaintance for all three. He made a movie for Roger Corman, and he helped edit the massive Woodstock.

I could list every movie he’s ever made, go through his career in meticulous detail. I don’t think you need me to. You know his movies, and if you don’t, I’d like to introduce you to the concept of film I guess. Oh, don’t get me wrong—it’s okay if you haven’t seen them. A lot of them aren’t really my thing, honestly. (I do love that Hugo was a movie he made so his daughter could watch one of his movies.) But you must know that they exist and that he directed them, right?

Now, his Last Temptation of Christ did come up in my conversation with Dr. Kipp Davis about his favourite Bible movies, and since Dr. Kipp’s a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, that’s high praise. And I also quite liked it myself. I like a fair number of his movies, but I think the ones I like are the ones that are thought of as atypical. The only two movies of his I’ve seen in the theatre are Hugo and The Wolf of Wall Street, and I liked the first one far more than I liked the second one. I like The King of Comedy and Bringing Out the Dead and okay Taxi Driver—at least more than Leonard Maltin, who gave it two stars.

But whether you like his movies or not, there’s the film preservation. Oh my, the film preservation. Quite possibly he’s done more for it than any other single individual in the world. He created the Film Foundation and the World Cinema Project. The African Film Heritage Project—his championing of film outside the expected is one of the best things about him. He uses his connections wisely, bringing in other directors and the Criterion Collection and anyone else he can to make sure that the world’s film history is preserved. Not just the US. Not just the US and Italy. Not just the films that are talked about. The world’s films.

There’s so much to talk about when it comes to Scorsese. His relationship with Catholicism. How it informs the themes of his movies—you don’t have to be a film scholar or a theologian to be aware of the Catholicism inherent in his work, especially the guilt. (So much guilt.) How the women in his films have changed and what he should have done differently when it comes to issues of gender and race. His frequent collaborations—the entertaining detail that he and Robert DeNiro used to see one another around when they were kids but didn’t meet until 1972.

I would love to sit down and have a conversation with him. Dinner, if he would refrain from commenting on my food issues. There’s a reason the films of his that I love most are his documentaries where he just talks about movies. There is something about him that makes him feel like a man you’d want to learn from, to talk to. So much to say. As you may notice from the fact that this article is about twice as long as the usual ones in this spot. Such a great director, and by all accounts a really genuinely sweet man. Who doesn’t himself swear much at all, regardless of what people do in his movies.