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Creator / Martin Scorsese

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He could probably say all the words right next to this picture in under 10 seconds.
Influences:

"My whole life has been movies and religion. That's it. Nothing else."

Martin Charles Scorsesenote  (born November 17, 1942) is an American filmmaker of Italian descent, born in New York City and raised in the neighborhood of Little Italy. He began his career as part of the New Hollywood generation of film school students, and is regarded as one of America's (if not the world's) greatest filmmakers and one of the most influential in the latter half of the 20th century.

Scorsese gained fame in The '70s for his gritty urban dramas starring Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro, movies that were shocking for their visual invention, unconventional editing, intense performances, and graphic violence. They made him a critical favorite, culminating in Taxi Driver.

After the commercial setbacks of New York, New York and Raging Bull, he entered an uncertain and uneven period in The '80s, but returned to public and critical favor with Goodfellas, after which he entered a new prolific period where he has averaged one film every two years since 1990. He remains active well into the 21st century and won Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture for The Departed after being a notable case of Award Snub for more than 30 years.

Scorsese is best known for his films about The Mafia, but he has in fact made films in a wide variety of genres: documentaries, concert films, music videos (Michael Jackson's Bad), literary adaptations (The Age of Innocence), family films (Hugo, itself a literary adaptation), Black Comedy (The King of Comedy, After Hours, The Wolf of Wall Street), Biopics and religious films.

Scorsese is also well known in the wider media since the '80s for his advocacy of film preservation and restoration, serving as a founder and an active spokesman for The Film Foundation and the World Cinema Foundation. He raised attention to the decay of film stock and the preservation of film prints of several filmmakers, both well-known and obscure. He also champions cinema as an art form and has devoted considerable attention to restoring the reputations of forgotten filmmakers and supporting up-and-coming artists from across the world. He was also, along with Sydney Pollack, one of the most fervent advocates for presenting films on home media in their original aspect ratio long before the practice became standard. In 2023, he, Steven Spielberg, and a couple of other filmmakers strongly voiced out their concerns about the staff of Turner Classic Movies being gutted by Warner Bros. Discovery.

As much as he prefers having his films in cinemas, Scorsese has bowed to the market reality with the rise of video streaming. For instance, his expensive gangster film The Irishman, which was rejected by all of the major studios, was picked up by Netflix for its drive for Oscar credibility. Now, Scorsese has a first-look agreement with Apple TV+ for his future projects, starting with Killers of the Flower Moon.

He uses many of the same actors in his movies, including Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel, and Leonardo DiCaprio. Publicly, he's well-known for his big, bushy eyebrows, his breakneck rate of speech, and having a physical stature inverse to his standing as a filmmakernote . Aside from filmmaking, he occasionally acts in his own movies and others.

He's been married five times, including to Isabella Rossellini from 1979 to 1982.

Vote for your favorite Martin Scorsese film here!

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    Important books on Scorsese's career include: 
  • Martin Scorsese: A Journey by Mary Pat Kelly
  • The Scorsese Picture by David Ehrenstein (for early Scorsese from his student films to The Last Temptation of Christ)
  • Conversations with Scorsese, which consists of several long interviews from Scorsese by Richard Schickel in the style of Hitchcock/Truffaut
  • The long-running, constantly updated Scorsese on Scorsese oral interviews by Ian Christie and David Thompson (for middle Scorsese, between Goodfellas and Gangs of New York) note 
  • Scorsese by Ebert, a compilation by critic Roger Ebert of all his reviews of Scorsese's movies as well as additional essays, interviews, and analyses of his career

    Works of fiction he's directed: 

    Works of non-fiction he's directed: 
  • Woodstock (1970) — editor, assistant director
  • Italianamerican (1975, documentary where Scorsese interviews his parents)
  • The Last Waltz (1978, The Band rockumentary)
  • A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies (1995)
  • Il mio Viaggio in Italia (1999)
  • No Direction Home (2005, Bob Dylan documentary)
  • Shine a Light (2008, The Rolling Stones rockumentary)
  • A Letter to Elia (2010)
  • Public Speaking (2010)
  • George Harrison: Living in the Material World (2011)
  • The 50 Year Argument (2014)
  • Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story (2019 release, produced by Netflix).

Tropes common to Scorsese's works include:

  • 20 Minutes into the Past: Mean Streets released in 1973 is actually intended, by Scorsese, to be set in the mid-60s. Bringing out the Dead was released in 1999 but intended by him to be set in the early 90s before New York became entirely gentrified and is described as such in the opening title card disclaimer.
  • Adam Westing: Appeared in a highly amusing American Express commercial in which he nitpicks one-hour photos of his nephew's birthday party as if they were a poorly executed movie shoot. As the man would later claim, this is exactly how his actual movie shoots go.
  • Anti-Hero: The Nominal Hero and the Villainous show up a lot. Scorsese himself doesn't believe in conventional ideas of heroism with characters who want to be heroes like Travis Bickle proving themselves to be Knight Templar in their belief that they can pass judgment on the "scum".
  • Author Appeal: Religion is a major recurring theme throughout his films and his films are often examinations of morality and sin.
  • Ax-Crazy:
    • His more pervasively violent movies will no doubt have at least one character that qualifies.
    • He played as one in Taxi Driver.
  • All There in the Manual: A lot of Scorsese's ideas and influences and observations of his films can be discerned in books like Scorsese On Scorsese, Scorsese: A Journey, The Scorsese Picture as well as DVD Commentaries and interviews available on YouTube.
  • Banned in China: For making Kundun his film about the Dalai Lama. This is especially sad given that Scorsese has long championed Chinese cinema and films by Tian Zhuangzhuang, Jia Zhangke and several Chinese film-makers have testified to his influence on their works. Thankfully, Scorsese’s ban was lifted in 2012.
  • Being Good Sucks: Among the basic themes in his movies is that it's very hard and oftentimes punishing to be good. And those who try to be good or do good in Scorsese's movies, whether it's Frank in Bringing out the Dead, the Dalai Lama in Kundun, Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence, Fr. Rodrigues in Silence, or the FBI Agent Denham in The Wolf of Wall Street, often end up with very little reward, often lose, and at best can hope to survive to continue the struggle. His movie about Jesus, The Last Temptation of Christ, was controversial because it deglamorized Christ's story and merely brought out how painful and almost incomprehensibly heroic (and so divine) Jesus had to have been to make his sacrifice.
  • Being Evil Sucks: Scorsese often portrays the bad guys as being brought down by the same flaws and environment that allowed them to thrive and those with some kind of moral code often fall victim to those with none. In fact, the villainous characters of his films end up much, much worse than the good ones, whether brutally murdered, betrayed, arrested or losing everything, especially in his mafia films.
  • Biopic: Raging Bull, Kundun, The Aviator, The Wolf of Wall Street and even Hugo (albeit a Sidelong Glance Biopic).
  • Big Applesauce: New York is a common setting for his works.
  • Bittersweet Ending: Hugo and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore are the only two Scorsese films with happy endings. Indeed he mocked the concept in New York, New York in the famous Happy Endings number. Scorsese's movies are unusual in also ending on a note of irresolution (Mean Streets), the Gainax Ending (Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy, After Hours) and the full-fledged Downer Ending. Raging Bull is worth mentioning, given that it ends on a note of hope, even if the hero has lost everything, he has become Older and Wiser and presumably will be more peaceful now.
  • Black Comedy: Whatever comedy is in his films, it's gonna be this, and it's black.
  • Career Resurrection: Several:
    • Raging Bull was not a wide commercial success but on a personal and professional level was important in making Scorsese continue to commit himself to narrative film-making and also to make himself more disciplined in both his personal and professional life (such as kicking his drug habit). The Color of Money made in the middle of The '80s likewise became his first major commercial success since Taxi Driver and was important for his career which until had stalled with the first version of Last Temptation being canceled and his other movies getting mixed critical views (even if The King of Comedy is now considered a classic).
    • Cape Fear and GoodFellas more or less gave him Auteur License again and restored his commercial cache and critical reputation, allowing him to make films with bigger budgets and take on uncommercial subject matter like The Age of Innocence and Kundun and still continue to thrive.
    • Following the underperformance of films like Bringing Out the Dead and his decades-long passion project Gangs of New York, Scorsese took on The Aviator as something of a work-for-hire gig and even considered retiring after its completion. However, the success of Aviator and his following films ended up finally making him a commercially bankable director instead of one known for acclaimed films with mixed financial results.
  • Christianity is Catholic: Somewhat justified, in that most characters in his best-known films (i.e., the ones involving organized crime) tend to be Italian or Irish, two strongly Catholic ethnicities. Scorsese himself was raised Catholic and initially planned to become a priest.
    • Averted for two of Scorsese's religious films. The Last Temptation of Christ is an adaptation of a work by a Greek Orthodox writer, and its screenplay was written by Paul Schrader, who was a Dutch Calvinist. His film Kundun likewise is a biopic of the 14th Dalai Lama (the one we know today), exploring Buddhist concepts and culture with an eye for detail far beyond more simplistic portraits.
    • Played straight, however, with Silence, his 2016 adaptation of Japanese Catholic author Shusaku Endo, which deals with Portuguese Jesuits trying to preach in Japan.
  • Cluster F-Bomb: Raging Bull, Casino, Goodfellas, The Departed and The Wolf of Wall Street. Casino once held the record for most dropped F-bombs for a mainstream film until beaten out by his own film The Wolf of Wall Street.
  • Costume Porn: Scorsese was the son of parents who worked in New York's garment district, as such his movies are filled with detailed recreations and attention to suits, shirts and fittings. His movies have even inspired fashion designers such as Giorgio Armani, who was quite taken with the period costumes for New York, New York. For Goodfellas, his parents actually pressed the suits on-set solely to make it accurate to period stylings.
  • Creator Breakdown: He reportedly came very close to killing himself in the late '70s, having a cocaine addiction and depressed over the state of his career and the failure to get his dream project Gangs of New York off the ground (it ultimately wouldn't be made until 2002). He credits a phone call from Robert De Niro asking him to direct Raging Bull as stopping him from going through with it.
  • Creator Cameo: Scorsese did this quite a bit, especially early in his career. In Mean Streets he's the mobster that shoots up Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel's car. In Taxi Driver he's a passenger in Travis's cab that murders his wife. In The Last Waltz he interviews The Band. In Raging Bull he's the stagehand telling Jake La Motta that it's time for him to go on.
  • Creator Provincialism: He's born and raised in New York City and has lived there almost his entire life and many of his most famous films are considered to be among the definitive portraits of the city. Likewise two of his historical films (The Age of Innocence, Gangs of New York) are period films of Old New York from two totally different social classes.
    • Interestingly, Mean Streets which was seen, at the time, as the quintessential movie about tenement New York was largely shot in Los Angeles (since producer Roger Corman would only produce it if it was shot in LA). While New York, New York was done entirely on studio sets.
    • Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy, After Hours and Life Lessons are considered by some to be time capsules of New York, and regarded to be unusually accurate in general topography and city layout as opposed to the scattered touristy manner most films use New York locations.
  • Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Gangster!: When discussing films like the original Scarface (by Howard Hawks, not Brian De Palma's remake) and a Western like The Wild Bunch, Scorsese admits that audiences tend to root for the bad guys and overt Do Not Do This Cool Thing admonitions never work. In his movies, he shows gangsters more or less as they are, showing them as a kind of counter-culture with its own rules and what happens to people who step out of line and by and large leaves it to the audience to sort out their moral alignment.
  • Early-Installment Weirdness:
    • His debut film Who's That Knocking At My Door? is a Romantic Comedy. But it features a surprising number of what would become his trademarks (New York setting, a focus on the Italian-American community, Catholic guilt, awesome use of old rock songs on the soundtrack, Harvey Keitel).
    • Boxcar Bertha and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore are his only movies with female protagonists.
  • Epic Movie: Kundun, The Last Temptation of Christ, Casino, Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Irishman, and Killers of the Flower Moon, and to an extent Goodfellas, The Departed, and Shutter Island, are all shining examples, with their sprawling scope, huge casts, and considerable runtimes. When Marty wants to do a project at scale, he doesn't half-ass it.
  • Everyone Loves Blondes: From very early in his career onwards, Scorsese heroines tend to be blondes, starting from Zina Bethune in Who's that Knocking on My Door to Cybill Shephard in Taxi Driver, Cathy Moriarty in Raging Bull, Roseanna Arquette (After Hours, Life Lessons)note , Michelle Pfeiffer in The Age of Innocence, Sharon Stone in Casino, Vera Farmiga in The Departed, Michelle Williams in Shutter Island, and of course, Margot Robbie in The Wolf of Wall Street. In fact there are more blonde actresses in Scorsese's movies than in Alfred Hitchcock.
  • Family Versus Career: As a big fan of The Red Shoes, a running theme of some of his films is the sacrifices you need to make to follow your passion. His film New York, New York famously explored this and averted Always Female by showing this an equal conflict between the man and woman, showing a relationship between creative people who are both The Determinator in their field. His film is notable for its reality check showing that the relationship would never work, even if they were still very much in love.
  • The Film of the Book: Quite a number of his films are based on novels or non-fiction works: Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence, Casino, Bringing out the Dead, Gangs of New York, Shutter Island, Hugo, The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence and The Irishman.
  • Genre Roulette: Showed his versatility by making biopics (Raging Bull, The Aviator, The Wolf of Wall Street, Hugo), historical dramas (The Age of Innocence, Gangs of New York, Silence), comedy (The King of Comedy, After Hours), neo-noir films (Taxi Driver, the remake The Departed), musical (New York, New York), mafia films (Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Casino, The Irishman), bible movies (The Last Temptation of Christ), thrillers (Cape Fear), concert films (The Last Waltz, Shine A Light), documentaries (Italianamerican, A Personal Journey Through American Films, A Personal Journey Through Italian Films, Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues,...), psychological thriller (Shutter Island).
  • Glory Days: In the commentary on Casino, Scorsese discusses his identification with the nostalgia for the Vegas in the 70s (which he doesn't share) to his own lament for the end of the New Hollywood generation, the last time directors like him were given access to decent budgets.
  • Hair-Trigger Temper: Several of his characters display this and suffer as a consequence.
  • Hidden Depths: All his characters show this, even someone who is otherwise The Brute like Jake La Motta in Raging Bull.
  • Humans Are Bastards: He infuses his characters with realistic flaws. However, in his more cynical films (i.e., Goodfellas, The King of Comedy, The Wolf of Wall Street, etc.), good luck finding a character who isn’t an absolute Hate Sink.
  • The Hyena: Given the type of work he makes, it’s a bit contrasting to see him laughing a lot in his interviews.
  • Historical Fiction: It's often forgotten that very few of his movies are actually contemporary to the year they are released in (Who's that Knocking on My Door, Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy, The Color of Money, Life Lessons, The Departed). The vast majority of his movies are period films set either in the 40s-through-70s and some of them are straight up historical films (Silence, The Age of Innocence, Gangs of New York, Kundun).
  • Jerkass: A lot of his protagonists are like this, and Scorsese admits that he chooses them as a deliberate provocation against conventional good guys.
  • Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Then again, the main characters in his more dramatic works tend to be well-intentioned or have scruples underneath.
  • Laser-Guided Karma: His gangster films usually end badly for the Villain Protagonist.
  • Lighter and Softer: Hugo is easily the lightest, most cheerful film ever directed by Scorsese, which is quite rare considering the usual content of his films. While it still has its fair share of dark moments, it's PG and never goes beyond the PG range of content.
  • The Mafia: He's created perhaps the most iconic Mafia films outside of The Godfather. Growing up in Little Italy, he knew that culture and mentality very well, while The Godfather was not a realistic film by any means (as admitted by Coppola). His films show the Italian-American mob as merely a part of the larger immigration story and failure of assimilation into American society and the American Dream.
  • Magnum Opus Dissonance: Despite the acclaimed status of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas, Scorsese himself treasures Italianamerican, a documentary where he literally just spends an hour talking with his parents in their apartment. In Scorsese on Scorsese he has cited The Age of Innocence and Kundun as two films which he feels are productions where he had a free reign and achieved exactly what he had visioned and cites them as his favorites.
  • Meme Acknowledgement:
    • When his daughter brought up the existence of the Play-Along Meme of the imaginary mafia movie Goncharov to him, he played along and confirmed that he made it years ago. Tumblr promptly lost its mind.
    • His Letterboxd profile description says "This is cinema," which itself is a meme◊ he's often associated with.
  • Mockumentary: Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story caught a lot of people off-guard. Expecting a standard Rockumentary about Dylan's legendary 1975-76 concert tour, what they got instead was extensive concert footage framed by a story about a fictional filmmaker who allegedly filmed the original footage, along with interviews of Sharon Stone (who fictitiously claims to have joined the tour and become Dylan's mistress—she was actually still in high school at the time) and former congressman Jack Tanner (Michael Murphy reprising his role from Robert Altman's Tanner '88 and Tanner on Tanner television series productions, which similarly blended fiction and Real Life).
  • Money, Dear Boy: Some of his movies were commercial assignments intended to provide a platform for his more personal films. Nevertheless, he puts in good work on these projects and takes them as experiments.
    • The Color of Money and the remake of Cape Fear was by his own admission made to fund films like The Last Temptation of Christ, The Age of Innocence and even Goodfellasnote . Casino was also partly a commercial project since the studios were keen for the Goodfellas team to return and that paved the way for Kundun and later Gangs of New York. The Departed was intended as a commercial venture for Scorsese to eventually make his long-gestating adaptation of Silence, and Scorsese was surprised that what he considered a genre movie ended up winning a long-delayed Oscar.
    • It has also backfired occasionally. From his perspective, he expected New York New York to be a more commercial venture while Taxi Driver would be the art film made for the micro-budget that he expected no one would see. Then Taxi Driver was a hit and the other film was a flop. Likewise he thought Hugo would be a hit and a family friendly film, instead it barely recouped its loss and became an Acclaimed Flop, while The Wolf of Wall Street became the biggest hit of his career.
  • Motor Mouth: Noted for talking very fast, an aspect that shows up in many Scorsese spoofs and informed Robert De Niro's performance in Angel Heart. Scorsese's own cameos in his films and his performances in other films (like Round Midnight by Bertrand Tavernier and in Shark Tale) also has him play characters like this.
  • The Narrator: Makes frequent use of it in most of his films. In interviews, Scorsese has even argued against conventional wisdom about narrators by the screenwriting gurus who argue that reliance on this leads to an avoidance of Show, Don't Tell. In his movies, narrators never directly discuss or explain the plot or motivation, but merely add another layer of interaction and observation in his films.
    Scorsese: "I know that often when a film isn’t working, people say, ‘use a narrator’ and it can be a cheat, but that’s a simplistic interpretation of what narration does. I grew up watching movies like Kind Hearts and Coronets and Jules and Jim and I thought that narration was the voice of the storyteller. Does that tell rather than show? I don’t think so. For me, the storyteller’s voice is the entryway into the story."
  • Nothing but Hits: An example of the trope at its finest; Scorsese's movies possess some of the best soundtracks ever. Scorsese averts the extreme uses of this because of his extraordinary knowledge of music (nearly as extensive as his knowledge about cinema) and his music uses varies from the popular, to the unexpected and the Giant Space Flea from Nowhere such as the use of Georges Delerue's theme from Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt in Casino.
  • One for the Money; One for the Art: For much of his career, he's followed this rule. (He's also the source of the quote at the top of the relevant Trivia page on the subject.
  • The One That Got Away: Following his breakup with Isabella Rossellini, Scorsese couldn't bring himself to watch her films again, or even visit places where they had spent time together. In fact, he could no longer bear to watch anything made by studios that had employed his ex, even if she wasn't in the film in question.
    "I'd see the United Artists logo, and it would ruin the movie for me!" *nervous chuckle*
    • Of course many of his own characters are haunted by doomed romance. Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence especially.
  • The One Who Made It Out:
    • A favored theme for Scorsese, especially his early films, is the desire for his characters to be this, of getting out of the ghetto, but lacking the ruthlessness, commitment and drive to go ahead. This even extends to The Age of Innocence, a story about a man in a superficial society with a banal marriage who longed for a more intellectually fulfilling life. Scorsese's films generally show the tragedy of this experience and to what extent this is possible.
    • Scorsese is himself this in Real Life. Many of his friends were street hoodlums in Little Italy, but he became a rich, successful, famous artist. His commentaries and interviews often talks of the poignancy of this experience.
  • Overcrank: He was famous for popularizing this in his films, especially Raging Bull. Scorsese did this in-camera during production, moving the frame rate fast and slow in the middle of action, going from over-to-under crank (most prominently in the boxing scenes) and all his films since then use this in various ways, sometimes obvious (the close-up on Robert De Niro as "Sunshine of your Love" plays in Goodfellas), other-times quite subtle (such as in The Age of Innocence when Winona Ryder gives the climactic Wham Line, and the Wham Shot of the tracking shot where Newland realizes his crush on Ellen Olenska was an Open Secret).
  • Pigeonholed Director: He's known for his gangster films but he only made five films about the Mob: Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Casino, The Departed, and The Irishman. His other films vary in genre and style, from period epics to musical to biopic of the 14th Dalai Lama. This is lampshaded by Billy Crystal during the 84th Academy Awards in regards to Hugo. "Are you sure this is a Scorsese movie? No one's gotten whacked yet."
  • Playing Against Type: Or, directing against type. While not all of his films are dark or violent, Hugo is, thus far, the only pure family film he has made.
  • Playing with a Trope: Because of his wide knowledge of film history, Scorsese's movies frequently engage with genre conventions with and a wider historical and intellectual context.
  • Pride: A stated theme in a lot of his films, is identifying and arguing against all kinds of pride, which fits in with his Catholic background. Whether it's unsavory characters over-reaching on excess like in The Wolf of Wall Street or supposed good guys who think their moral crisis justifies a need to punish people like in Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Bringing out the dead.
  • Production Posse: For actors, the leads will most likely go to Robert De Niro or Leonardo DiCaprio, with Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel, Victor Argo and Harry Northup in other types of roles. His parents (Charles and Catherine) usually got cameo appearances in his movies until their respective deaths in 1993 and 1995, and with Daniel Day-Lewis, Liam Neeson, John C. Reilly, Ben Kingsley, Alec Baldwin, Ray Winstone, Nick Nolte, Dick Miller, and many others on multiple occasions. For crew, he's worked with:
    • Thelma Schoonmaker as editornote .
    • Michael Ballhaus, Robert Richardson, Michael Chapman, and Rodrigo Prieto as cinematographers.
    • Paul Schrader, Nicholas Pileggi, Jay Cocks, John Logan, Mardik Martin, and Terence Winter as screenwriters.
    • Irwin Winkler, Emma Tilling Koskoff, Barbara De Fina, and Rick Yorn as producers.
    • Dante Ferretti and Bob Shaw as production designers.
    • Sandy Powell as costume designer.
    • Howard Shore and Elmer Bernstein as composers.
    • Robbie Robertson as music producer.
    • Robert Legato as visual effects supervisor.
    • Joseph P. Reidy as assistant director and co-producer.
    • George A. Aguilar as stunt co-coordinator
    • Legato, Aguilar, Reidy, Vic Armstrong, Ellen Karus, and Phil Marco as second unit directors (Legato also served as second unit cinematographer).
    • and Saul Bass as title designer for Goodfellas, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence, and Casino (the last of which would also serve as his final project before his death in 1996).
  • Promoted Fanboy: As a young boy, Scorsese grew up seeing classic films on TV in the hope of becoming a great film-maker. He succeeded. Scorsese's understanding of this trope is what makes The King of Comedy so poignant, as he says in interviews, he identified with both the hungry crazy fan, who he was growing up, and the established comedian who was a Consummate Professional, which he had become when he made the film. This is also true for a lot of the actors in his later films, who were a generation or two younger when he made his mark in the '70s. Daniel Day-Lewis cited Taxi Driver as an inspiration for becoming an actor, and he later worked with Scorsese twice, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill were likewise fans of his growing up.
  • Pyrrhic Villainy: Scorsese will often give his antagonists what seem like victories but with some very heavy caveats, be it losing their life of glamour and privilege, losing the few they genuinely cared about or just ending up old and forgotten, their achievements not amounting to anything in the long run.
  • Reality Subtext: Scorsese doesn't share Casino's nostalgia for the decline of Las Vegas in the early 1980s. But, parallels can be drawn between this and the decline of the New Hollywood era of filmmaking, after which studios held directors on a much tighter leash. Scorsese, like many New Hollywood directors, views that era as the last time directors like him had access to decent budgets and creative freedom.
    Nicholas "Nicky" Santoro: It should have been so sweet, too. But it turned out to be the last time that street guys like us were ever given anything that fuckin' valuable again.
  • Redemption Quest: Some of his characters yearn for this, but Scorsese shows that it's hard to achieve in life and in fact his more religious films explore constantly what the idea of redemption actually means in everyday life.
    "You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it."
  • "Rise and Fall" Gangster Arc: Casino, GoodFellas and The Irishman are all straight examples of this trope in the context of The Mafia. The Departed uses it for The Irish Mob, and The Wolf of Wall Street applies it to White-Collar Crime.
  • Rockumentary:
    • The Last Waltz (1978) is about The Band's farewell concert in 1976, while Shine A Light (2008) captures The Rolling Stones in concert in 2006.
    • Early in his career, Scorsese was assistant director and editor for the Woodstock film.
  • Romanticism Versus Enlightenment: He's on the Enlightenment side on the whole, both in content (realistic and critical deconstructive approach to character and narrative) and style (documentary and detail-rich period recreations). Even Scorsese's religious films, largely grapple with how one can deal with spiritual questions in a meaningful way in the real world, subversive of conventional ideas of Redemption Quest.
  • Ruder and Cruder: While his films don't necessarily constitute an ongoing series, Scorsese's films deserve a mention under this trope. Scorsese is the only director to have three of the top 20 films with the highest usage of the F-bomb in film history: The Wolf of Wall Street is the third highest with a whopping 569 uses, Casino is sixth with 422 uses, and the profanity-peppered classic Goodfellas is ranked 16th at 300 uses.
  • Saved from Development Hell: When Scorsese is determined to make a film he follows through, and he is known for his persistence in following on his passion projects:
    • The Last Temptation of Christ was first recommended by actress Barbara Hershey (who eventually played Mary Magdaelene 19 years later) to Scorsese during the making of Boxcar Bertha. Scorsese had always planned on making a film about Jesus, and initially he even considered adapting Robert Graves' King Jesus before settling on Nikos Kazantzakis' unusual take. The Last Temptation actually entered pre-production in The '80s with Aiden Quinn as Jesus and Sting in key roles but Paramount pulled of and cancelled the film. Scorsese then made After Hours and followed with The Color of Money whose box-office success he parlayed, successfully, into getting The Last Temptation of Christ off the ground by the end of the decade.
    • Gangs of New York was planned since the 70s before finally entering production in the late 90s, and released in 2002. Scorsese's initial plans for Gangs of New York were considerably radical and ambitious. In the 70s, he planned to make it a collaboration with The Clash, making it a punk musical starring Robert De Niro. In the 90s, he considered making it a trilogy. He also stated that it was his hope that the film launch a new genre, a 19th Century Urban Western, with many films set in nascent conurbations.
    • Silence his adaptation of Shūsaku Endō's novel was planned since The '90s (after Cape Fear) and entered production in 2015 and set for a 2016 release. The film was always regarded as "uncommercial" and Scorsese has hinted in interviews that several films made in The Noughties were essentially Money, Dear Boy projects to finally give him the cache to make Silence. It was planned to be produced after The Departed with Benicio del Toro and Daniel Day-Lewis but finally had Andrew Garfield and Liam Neeson take over.
    • Scorsese and Mick Jagger had talked about making The Long Play in The '90s, a movie about the music business, its ups and downs. Eventually, the ideas behind it got repurposed for HBO and it became Vinyl, which has been cancelled after one season.
  • Self-Parody: He once parodied his fondness for dark, serious dramas in a commercial for AT&T.
  • Shout-Out: Martin Scorsese's movies are filled with numerous film and music references, only very subtle that careful viewers and cinephiles can recognize. It's not so much in dialogue as in compositions, gestures by characters, editing and cutting. The range of references in his movies in terms of variety as well as the subtlety with which it is done is a lesson in itself, in that they are there for a reason, suggesting like Alan Moore's Watchmen a deeper layer and connection. Any Scorsese movie will have references to American films, famous and obscure, Italian films, Japanese films or experimental works. Taxi Driver refers to Hitchcock's obscure film The Wrong Man, Michael Snow's experimental Wavelength and Jean-Luc Godard's 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. They are that dense.
    • A good example comes through this page detailing his homages to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's movies. And these are the ones Scorsese has acknowledged.
  • Shown Their Work : Scorsese's films are almost anthropological for the level of details and visual information that is placed in the frame and the background without having a direct impact on the plot. In fact, a good portion of his films are period films and set in different historical periods, and thus needing that level of research. He averts Hollywood History by a great margin, while still finding much visual invention and creativity in storytelling.
  • Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: His movies lean to the cynical side at least as conventionally understood. Being Good Sucks but Being Evil Sucks too, and even those characters who seem all powerful and secure have their problems and insecurities and vulnerabilities:
    • All of his love stories tend to be either Destructive Romance (Casino, Shutter Island), or Unrequited Love Lasts Forever (The Age of Innocence), and almost always the hero Did Not Get the Girl. Even when he's making movies about artists, he keeps highlighting how painful, difficult, and challenging it is, and how many sacrifices you have to make (as in New York New York, Life Lessons, The King of Comedy, Hugo).
    • His crime movies keep insisting that most of the time crime does pay, and that while some gangsters and criminals do get caught, it often has less to do with justice, and more because society changes and a new kind of crime has arrived (such as Casino showing organized crime being modernized and updated by a more corporate and bureaucratic crime). Most of the time, Society Is to Blame, and it's an achievement for Scorsese's characters not so much when they redeem themselves but feel they have something to redeem and feel remorse for, because most of them learn to stifle their conscience.
    • And of course no matter how good your intentions are, and how noble you want to be, whether you are the Dalai Lama and the head of Tibet, or a simple priest on a mission in Silence, or a romantic aristocratic in New York (The Age of Innocence), if you are weak, the strong will abuse their power and screw you over, morality and good sense be damned. As Ted Levine notes in Shutter Island, "There's no order as pure as the storm we have just seen. There is no moral order at all" and if people want morality, they have to make it happen.
  • Soundtrack Dissonance: Lots of oldies and classic rock. Lampshaded in Mean Streets.
    • Scorsese excels at mixing songs to the appropriate scene. Goodfellas is the perfect example.
    • Usage of The Rolling Stones' Gimme Shelter, usually as a subtle premonitory sign. Ironically, it does not appear in Shine a Light, his Rolling Stones concert film, because it wasn't on the set list, as noted by Mick Jagger.
  • The Cameo: Has plenty of film directors appear as characters in his movies.
  • Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: What makes his films so controversial is his willingness to strip his narrative of genre conventions and let things follow on as they do in real life. With select exceptions, his movies tend to be biopics or historical films or Based on a True Story. Unlike Hollywood History, he generally stays true to the facts and only makes changes for dramatic effect rather than audience considerations.
  • Thematic Series: Goodfellas, Casino and The Irishman are all historical dramas based around the modern mafia.
  • Three-Act Structure: Scorsese not only eschews this in his movies, but he has also said repeatedly that he loathes the very idea and concept of it. He feels that using terms like this conditions people to think of cinema as an extension of theater and not its own medium:
    "I like theater, but theater is theater and movies are movies. They should be separate. We should talk about sequences — and there are usually at least five or six sequences rather than three acts — which are broken up into sections and scenes"
  • Unabashed B-Movie Fan: Scorsese is just as vocal about his love of low-budget genre films as he is classic studio pictures and has cited them as being just as formative to his learning as well as speaking about how working under Roger Corman helped him learn crucial skills for his later career.
  • Viewers Are Geniuses: The content of his films is generally not incomprehensible, but by and large, they challenge narrative conventions and genre expectations that audiences are otherwise comfortable with. As a film historian, Scorsese has an eclectic taste and wide knowledge of cinema from around the world and fully believes that audiences can enjoy all kinds of films, even the ones that require some effort.
  • Villain Protagonist: The main characters in several of his films aren't nice people, to say the least. Martin Scorsese is unapologetic about this and notes his belief that Humans Are Flawed and that people who society deems as villains are not so different from more respectable people.
  • Villainous Gentrification: A repeated theme in his movies, is consistently portraying gentrification as more or less a conservative attitude to deny the ugliness of reality and human frailty, and simply pretend that physical cleansing is the same as cleansing in a moral, political, and historical sense:
    • Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver is a Mid-westerner who arrives to The Big Rotten Apple and develops a perverse love-hate attitude to the city whose scum he wants to wash clean of.
    • The end of Casino has Ace Rothstein criticize the "family friendly" Disney-fied Las Vegas that came in after the Mafia went bust. The Mafia were pretty bad but they didn't try to sell gambling to kids, nor did they operate in the legalized gambling of "junk bonds" that was used to rebuilt the pyramids.
    • In Kundun, the Chinese are imperialists who want to take over Tibet and get rid of its feudal and theocratic society, which the film doesn't deny is part of the fabric of Pre-Conquest Tibet. The Dalai Lama himself is an Internal Reformist, but ultimately the Chinese want to to be the ones who modernize Tibet because they are strong and Tibet is weak.
    • The coda of Gangs of New York has Amsterdam Vallon lamenting in voiceover the result of this:
    Amsterdam Vallon: "We never knew how many New Yorkers died that week before the city was finally delivered. My father told me we was all born of blood and tribulation, and so then too was our great city. But for those of us what lived and died in them furious days, it was like everything we knew was mightily swept away. And no matter what they did to build this city up again... for the rest of time... it would be like no one ever knew we was even here."
    • Scorsese in general has lamented the gentrification of New York in the Giuliani-Bloomberg era. His documentary Public Speaking has him interviewing Fran Liebowitz a noted critic of the phenomenon. He noted that he generally didn't like making films in contemporary New York because he barely recognizes the city. His most recent New York films Bringing out the Dead and The Wolf of Wall Street are period films about The '90s. Bringing out the Dead had a title card announcing it was set 20 Minutes into the Past precisely because the film chronicles an ambulance driver in the tail-end of The Big Rotten Apple era.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • Who's that Knocking At My Door was supposed to be the second installment of a trilogy of films based around the idea of crime and Catholic guilt. Mean Streets was the third part. The first part, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, would have involved the Harvey Keitel character going to a seminary retreat and would have been based around symbolism from the stages of the cross. No studio would fund it due to its overtly religious nature.
    • Dino a film about Dean Martin and his friendship with Jerry Lewis during their years as a stand-up act and eventual breakup. He planned the film with Tom Hanks in mind but the project fell apart because the studio wanted a more clear take on the rivalry. Scorsese wanted a Gray-and-Grey Morality situation where both Dean and Jerry (who was after all his friend since The King of Comedy) were in the right and compared the studio's simplistic focus to a film version of The Beatles where film-makers chooses sides between Lennon and McCartney.
    • Gershwin a biopic of the famous composer. A script was written by playwright John Guare and Scorsese discussed the film with David Bowie, who was going to play Fred Astaire, with Astaire's blessing no-less.
    • A planned biopic of Frank Sinatra also fell apart despite being a project Scorsese expressed repeated intention in doing. He planned an experimental approach where multiple actors play Sinatra at different ages and the movie flashes back and forth in time. The reason it fell apart is similar to Dino, Scorsese wanted a Warts and All approach but Sinatra's estate didn't want a movie that avoided the Biopic formula.
    • Scorsese considered adapting a few of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novels. He planned to do Notes from Underground before coming across Paul Schrader's screenplay for Taxi Driver (which he noted was inspired by Dostoevsky's book and in his mind counts as a Spiritual Adaptation). He also wanted to adapt The Idiot and discussed the project with John Guare. The only Dostoevsky story he ever adapted was The Gambler for his short film Life Lessons for New York Stories.
    • Believe it or not, Scorsese was even considered to direct, no joke, Little Shop of Horrors. It would even have Steven Spielberg attached as producer. This didn't fall through though and the film would instead be directed by The Muppets legend Frank Oz.

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