Martin Scorsese: A Life in Pictures

Martin Scorsese, legendary BAFTA-winning US filmmaker, shared how films can create “a magic fantasy state.”

At a Life in Pictures event Scorsese, who scored a BAFTA for Goodfellas, and directed classics Taxi Driver and Raging Bill, explained how he discovered cinema as a boy.

“My parents weren’t people who read books, so it was film or television,” he said.

“It was the golden age of the forties and fifties studio system and I remember this magic state of fantasy that one allows themselves to experience when they watch a film.”

“I remember the vivid trauma of seeing Duel in the Sun with my mother. It was condemned by the Church of America – a scandalous film! I liked it but I remember being frightened by the shoot-out at the end. That explains most of my life.”

As a young filmmaker Scorsese said he was inspired by the energy and ambition of French new wave and European cinema. He channelled that enthusiasm into his first feature, Mean Streets, which cost $650,000. This drew on his own experiences – and he said the film was about “downtown, people I knew, myself and my friends.”

After Mean Streets’ success he went on to make one of the most influential films of the nineteen seventies, Taxi Driver. He said it was influenced “among other things” by young people returning from the Vietnam war.

“It’s [about] the nature of what you are and the zealousness of believing a certain thing [and then] having it smashed completely,” he said.

“Then you’re left alone. We felt it was something we’d been living through – for lots of different reasons.”

Scorsese shared with the audience that music had always been important to his films: from Mean Streets’ rock and roll soundtrack to more recent documentaries like No Direction Home: Bob Dylan.

Music also helped him find his way into the rhythms of boxing for his acclaimed drama, Raging Bull.

‘As I didn’t like sports the only way I could approach the ring was through music,” he said.

“When I [first] saw the sparring I just didn’t know what to do. And I thought, you have to do it in the ring from the point of view of the fighters. So what would it sound like to you?”

“The blocking of the fighting became bars of music – so I shot it like I’d shoot musical numbers.”

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