50 Fun Facts About Martin Scorsese

In which New York neighbourhood did Scorsese grow up?

Little Italy is also where, in 1974, he filmed his parents over dinner in their Elizabeth Street flat for Italianamerican; his mother's meatball recipe runs in the end credits.

Scorsese's family name was Scozzese until a transcription slip; what does Scozzese mean in Italian?

Scottish is what Scozzese means. When Scorsese first visited his grandfather's home town in Sicily in 1979, the mismatch meant his search for relatives at the town hall drew a blank.

Which childhood condition kept Scorsese from sports and sent him to the movies instead?

Asthma kept him off the streets and in cinema seats, where he saw The Red Shoes as a small boy; decades later he led the drive to restore that very film.

The only other teenager renting The Tales of Hoffmann as often as Scorsese later directed which film?

Night of the Living Dead was the debut of George A. Romero, who travelled in from the Bronx to hire the 16mm print and called the opera fantasy his favourite film of all.

Which career did the teenage Scorsese first set his heart on?

Priest was the plan: he entered a junior seminary but was out within a year, and enrolled at New York University's film school instead.

Raging Bull closes with a dedication to Haig P. Manoogian, who was Scorsese's what?

Film professor at NYU: Haig Manoogian pushed Scorsese to rework his first feature and helped produce it, and Raging Bull's credits thank him 'with love and resolution'.

Scorsese's short The Big Shave was his response to America's involvement in what?

The Vietnam War: the short, also known as Viet '67, simply shows a young man shaving on and on until his face and the white bathroom are red with blood.

Scorsese's first feature, Who's That Knocking at My Door, introduced which two lifelong collaborators?

Harvey Keitel and Thelma Schoonmaker: he made his screen debut in the lead and she edited. The film first screened in Chicago as I Call First, then was reworked and retitled before its release.

Which fellow 'movie brat' introduced Scorsese to the actor who became his most frequent leading man?

Brian De Palma had already directed the young actor in his comedy Hi, Mom!, and he later handed Scorsese the script for Taxi Driver as well.

Which low-budget producer gave Scorsese his first Hollywood feature, the Depression-era Boxcar Bertha?

Roger Corman wanted a follow-up to his Bloody Mama. When John Cassavetes saw the result, he urged Scorsese to stop making other people's pictures and film what he knew; Mean Streets came next.

Where was the majority of Mean Streets, the archetypal gritty New York film, actually shot?

Los Angeles stood in for Manhattan because the budget was tiny: most of the film was shot in disguised California locations, with only a short stint of location work back home.

Which actress chose Scorsese for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and won Best Actress for it?

Ellen Burstyn was sent the script by her agent and took it to Warner Bros. herself; asked who should direct, she said she wanted somebody new, young and exciting.

Which prize did Taxi Driver win at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival?

The Palme d'Or went to Taxi Driver even though its screening drew boos and walkouts, and jury president Tennessee Williams had spoken out against films that revel in bloodshed.

Which screenwriter began his long collaboration with Scorsese by writing Taxi Driver?

Paul Schrader wrote it in under a fortnight as a kind of self-therapy: he had lost his job and his marriage and had spent weeks living in his car.

The Last Waltz documented the 1976 farewell concert of which group?

The Band got their director through Jonathan Taplin, their former road manager: he had raised the money for Mean Streets and suggested Scorsese film the farewell show.

Scorsese directed the 1977 Broadway musical The Act as a vehicle for which star?

Liza Minnelli won a Tony for the show, though Scorsese, new to musical theatre, had been quietly replaced by a veteran stage director before it reached New York.

Who is credited with saving Scorsese's life by persuading him to quit cocaine and return to directing?

Robert De Niro had been pressing a boxer's memoir on him for years; after his collapse Scorsese finally said yes, and the film they made from it was Raging Bull.

Raging Bull is the story of which real middleweight boxing champion?

Jake LaMotta's own memoir supplied the story. Scorsese, convinced he would never direct again, called it a 'kamikaze' film and put everything he knew into it.

For which 1985 black comedy, shot cheaply in SoHo, did Scorsese win Best Director at Cannes?

After Hours was a deliberate step down in scale: Paramount had just shelved his long-planned The Last Temptation of Christ, so he turned to a small independent script instead.

The Color of Money won Paul Newman an Oscar for reviving Fast Eddie Felson, his character from which earlier film?

The Hustler introduced Fast Eddie in 1961. Playing him again 25 years on finally won Newman a competitive Oscar, a year after the Academy had handed him an honorary one.

Which Michael Jackson video did Scorsese direct in a Brooklyn subway station in 1986?

Bad was made as a short film with a script and a story, and its choreographers have said the gang's dance through the station drew on West Side Story.

David Bowie played Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ, but which singer had the part in the cancelled 1983 version?

Sting was set to play Pilate until Paramount pulled out weeks before shooting; Scorsese made the film four years later at Universal, on a far smaller budget.

Which first-time director beat Scorsese to the Best Director Oscar for Goodfellas?

Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves beat Goodfellas to both Director and Picture, yet when the AFI revised its list of the 100 greatest American films in 2007 it kept Goodfellas and dropped the western.

Whom did Scorsese play in Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (1990)?

Vincent van Gogh appears in the episode called Crows: an art student steps inside the paintings and finds Scorsese's bandaged painter hard at work in a field.

Goodfellas follows the rise and fall of which real-life mob associate, played by Ray Liotta?

Henry Hill turned FBI informant after a 1980 drugs arrest, and his testimony helped put his old associates in prison before he told his story to a crime reporter.

Scorsese's Kundun (1997) tells the early life of which figure?

The 14th Dalai Lama: China froze Disney's business there over the film, and in 1998 the studio's chief told China's premier that releasing it had been 'a stupid mistake'.

Which blacklist-era director's Honorary Oscar did Scorsese controversially present in 1999?

Elia Kazan had named former colleagues to a congressional committee in 1952, so while part of the audience stood to applaud, dozens stayed seated and protesters picketed outside.

Gangs of New York (2002) was shot on vast sets built at which studio?

Cinecitta in Rome is where designer Dante Ferretti rebuilt the Five Points slum for real: more than a mile of buildings, standing in for several blocks of Lower Manhattan.

Which eccentric aviation tycoon is the subject of The Aviator (2004)?

Howard Hughes gave Scorsese the most-nominated film of its year, and it won more Oscars than any rival that night, yet Best Director went to Clint Eastwood instead.

On accepting his first Best Director Oscar for The Departed, what did Scorsese joke?

'Could you double-check the envelope?' was his opening joke after years of losing the prize, which was handed to him by three fellow directors and old friends from the 1970s.

The Departed was based on which Hong Kong film?

Infernal Affairs was transplanted from Hong Kong's triads to Boston's Irish mob, with Jack Nicholson's crime boss loosely modelled on the real gangster Whitey Bulger.

Shine a Light (2008) filmed which rock group at New York's Beacon Theatre?

The Rolling Stones were an obvious match: Scorsese had already used their song Gimme Shelter in three of his crime films, Goodfellas, Casino and The Departed.

For directing the pilot of which HBO series did Scorsese win a 2011 Emmy?

Boardwalk Empire opened with an $18 million pilot, for which the crew built a 300-foot stretch of 1920s Atlantic City boardwalk on a vacant lot in Brooklyn.

Which 2011 3D film won Scorsese a Golden Globe for Best Director?

Hugo, his first film in 3D, turns on a reversal: the grumpy toy seller in a Paris station proves to be Georges Melies, a forgotten pioneer of cinema thought long gone.

DiCaprio plays swindler Jordan Belfort in which Scorsese film?

The Wolf of Wall Street began with a bidding war: DiCaprio's company won the rights to Belfort's memoir in 2007, and the result became his fifth feature with Scorsese.

Which 2016 Scorsese film follows two Jesuit missionaries searching for their mentor in 17th-century Japan?

Silence adapts Shusaku Endo's 1966 novel, which Scorsese first read in 1989 on a trip to Japan; it then took him more than 25 years to get the film made.

The Irishman was based on which book?

I Heard You Paint Houses is, in the telling of Frank Sheeran, the film's Irishman, the first thing Jimmy Hoffa ever said to him: code for killing people, the 'paint' being blood.

Which composer wrote the brooding jazz score for Taxi Driver?

Bernard Herrmann, the composer of Psycho, finished recording the music just before Christmas 1975 and died in his sleep within a day; the score brought him a posthumous Oscar nomination.

Scorsese's second wife, Julia Cameron, later wrote which best-selling guide to creativity?

The Artist's Way grew out of the creative-unblocking classes she taught after getting sober; published in 1992, it went on to sell millions of copies.

Which actress, the daughter of a famous director and a film star, did Scorsese marry in 1979?

Isabella Rossellini, daughter of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini, travelled with him to Sicily in 1979, when he went looking for his grandparents' home town for the first time.

Which body did Scorsese set up in 1990 to rescue decaying films?

The Film Foundation grew out of a crusade he began in 1980, after learning how fast colour film stock fades, which was one reason he shot Raging Bull in black and white.

Which Scorsese film is set among the oil-rich Osage Nation of 1920s Oklahoma?

Killers of the Flower Moon first had Leonardo DiCaprio cast as the federal agent who cracks the case; he asked to play the guilty husband instead, and the script was rebuilt around the marriage.

In 2013 Scorsese was chosen for which US government honour, the highest in the humanities?

The Jefferson Lecture took him to the Kennedy Center, where he argued that schools should teach pupils to read images and that old films deserve the care we give ancient tablets.

Which lifelong friend and his wife funded NYU's Martin Scorsese Institute in 2021?

George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson made what the school called the largest gift in its history, paying for a virtual production centre and scholarships in their friend's name.

Which Bob Dylan tour is the subject of Scorsese's 2019 Netflix film, part documentary and part invention?

The Rolling Thunder Revue of 1975 is real, but several of the film's talking heads are not: actors play people who were never on the tour, and nothing tells the viewer which is which.

Which writer and New York wit is the subject of Scorsese's Public Speaking and Pretend It's a City?

Fran Lebowitz has had writer's block for decades and has not published a book since 1994, so both films simply let her talk, prompted by her old friend Scorsese.

Scorsese voices an alien fry cook and shopkeeper in which 2026 film?

The Mandalorian and Grogu cast him as an Ardennian whom the hero visits for information, a surprise from a director long known for his sceptical remarks about blockbuster franchises.

Which actress co-stars with DiCaprio in Scorsese's What Happens at Night, shot in 2026?

Jennifer Lawrence and DiCaprio, who both also produce, play a married couple who travel to a small, snowbound European town to adopt a baby, in a story taken from Peter Cameron's novel.

Which 1962 thriller did Scorsese remake in 1991, with Nick Nolte's family stalked by ex-convict Max Cady?

Cape Fear reached him through a swap: Steven Spielberg had been developing it and handed it over, taking back Schindler's List, which Scorsese had been attached to direct.

Which Edith Wharton novel did Scorsese film in 1993, with Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer?

The Age of Innocence hides its director in plain sight: Scorsese turns up as the fussy photographer who takes the wedding portraits, and his parents have walk-on parts too.