Martin Scorsese
Martin Charles Scorsese (/skɔːrˈsɛsi/, Italian: [skorˈseːze; -eːse]; born November 17, 1942) is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and actor. One of the major figures of the New Hollywood era, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential directors in film history. Scorsese’s body of work explores themes such as Italian-American identity, Catholic concepts of guilt and redemption,faith, machismo, nihilism,[6] crime and sectarianism. Many of his films are known for their depiction of violence and the liberal use of profanity. Scorsese has also dedicated his life to film preservation and film restoration by founding the nonprofit organization The Film Foundation in 1990, as well as the World Cinema Foundation in 2007 and the African Film Heritage Project in 2017.
Scorsese studied at New York University (NYU), where he received a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1964, and received a master’s degree in fine arts in film from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1968. In 1967 Scorsese’s first feature film Who’s That Knocking at My Door was released and was accepted into the Chicago Film Festival, where critic Roger Ebert saw it and called it “a marvelous evocation of American city life, announcing the arrival of an important new director”. Scorsese’s mentors included John Cassavetes, whose chatty, improvisational style did much to influence Scorsese’s scripts and production work, and who told him to “make films about what you know”. While attending New York University, Scorsese met and became good friends with director Michael Wadleigh. They were both passionate about rock music, and came up with the idea of documenting a rock concert, which ended up becoming the Oscar Award winning documentary Woodstock.
Scorsese served as the assistant director and editor for it. In 1971 Scorsese moved to Hollywood, where he associated with some of the young directors who defined the decade, including Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, and George Lucas.[11] He directed Boxcar Bertha (1972), a cut-rate Depression-era film for Roger Corman, and Mean Streets (1973), a personal film about faith and redemption shot in New York’s Little Italy, starring Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro.
