Martin Scorsese turns 80 – The Hollywood revolutionary who brought Mafiosi into the ring – Culture


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Martin Scorsese, director of modern classics like “Taxi Driver” or “Raging Bull”, is celebrating his birthday.

After graduating from film school at New York University and starting his own small film projects, Martin Scorsese went to Hollywood in the early 1970s. There he quickly made friends with other wild youngsters: Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

Figures in focus

Each of them would revolutionize Hollywood in their own way in the years that followed. Scorsese’s approach was probably the most radical.

While classic Hollywood was primarily about storytelling, Scorsese was much more interested in characters.

admiration for gangsters

Even as a young boy, Scorsese was fascinated by the mafia figures in his New York neighborhood of Little Italy. Again and again he told how much he not only feared the neighborhood gangsters, but also admired them.

He constructed his films primarily around ambiguous characters, such as “Taxi Driver” (1976) played by Robert De Niro.

Legend:

Martin Scorsese with Robert de Niro on the set of Taxi Driver in 1976.

IMAGO / Event Press

The fight for money

With his dirty, exaggerated realism, Scorsese revolutionized American auteur films, while Coppola, Lucas and Spielberg invented the modern blockbuster with The Godfather (1972), Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977).

Unlike his commercially successful blockbuster colleagues, Martin Scorsese had to fight for financing all over again for each of his films.

Late Oscar honor

And although he has been considered the greatest living American director of his generation since the late 1970s, he had to wait a long time for official Hollywood recognition – the Oscar.

He was nominated again and again for almost 30 years. But it wasn’t until 2007 that his colleagues at the Academy finally awarded him the director’s prize for “The Departed”.

Scorsese Scorsese delivering his first Oscar acceptance speech.

Legend:

Better late than never: Martin Scorsese in his acceptance speech for receiving the Oscar for best director in “The Departed”.

AP Photo/HFPA

“The greatest director of all time”

With regard to his 80th birthday, colleagues such as Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen, Lynne Ramsay and Kelly Reichardt proclaim the «greatest director of all times » their respect.

At the same time, Scorsese bumps controversial statement, Marvel superhero films are not “cinema” (cinema art), but rather amusement parks, especially among younger fans against wind. The outrage about this was so great in 2019 that the master in the New York Times explained in detail.

The cinema that he and his generation admired and wanted to make looked for the risk, the surprise: “It was about characters – the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical nature. The way they can hurt each other and love each other and suddenly be confronted with themselves.”

There he is again, the master who prefers to follow human figures into their contradictions than a story. A characterization that he also fulfills himself as a person and artist.

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