Martin Scorsese Names Two Filmmakers Who Transformed His Career

Few directors from the New Hollywood generation continue to work with the same urgency as Martin Scorsese, who remains active nearly sixty years into his career. While Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster instincts have mellowed and Francis Ford Coppola’s late-career projects have become more unwieldy, Scorsese consistently finds new creative avenues. From the frenetic energy of ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ to the contemplative spirituality of ‘Silence’, his filmography has maintained a dynamic quality that many of his contemporaries lack.

This remarkable consistency can be traced back to two influential filmmakers who reshaped Scorsese’s perspective on personal filmmaking. In a recently resurfaced excerpt from Mary Pat Kelly’s 1991 biography of Scorsese, the director credits John Cassavetes and Shirley Clarke with expanding his understanding of what a narrative film could be. He recalls watching Cassavetes’ ‘Shadows’ and Clarke’s work, realizing that it was possible to create a narrative film that reflected one’s own life—something that Hollywood was not equipped to support at the time.

Scorsese remembers his father dismissing the idea that a studio would ever greenlight such a raw project, which only fueled his desire to explore the possibility of making a film like that himself. This pivotal question ultimately defined his entire career. Scorsese has often spoken about Cassavetes, noting that after the release of ‘Shadows’, filmmakers had no excuses for not pursuing personal stories, asserting that if Cassavetes could do it, so could they.

Cassavetes, who financed most of his films independently and produced ‘Shadows’ on a budget of around forty thousand dollars, became a patron saint for the independent movement that Scorsese would later be associated with, particularly with ‘Mean Streets’. Similarly, Clarke’s groundbreaking work complemented Cassavetes’ in the New York scene, demonstrating that low-budget, guerrilla storytelling could resonate just as profoundly as studio productions.

Scorsese also acknowledged his NYU professor Haig Manoogian as a crucial influence, crediting him with helping him articulate his vision using the innovative cinematic language emerging from the French New Wave, Italian neorealism, and the American Underground movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

This lineage is particularly relevant today with the release of ‘Mr. Scorsese’, a five-part Apple TV+ documentary by Rebecca Miller that chronicles the filmmaker’s journey from an NYU film student to the visionary behind classics like ‘Taxi Driver’, ‘Goodfellas’, and ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’. The series, which features unrestricted access to Scorsese’s private archives and interviews with collaborators such as Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Steven Spielberg, delves into the formative influences that guided him toward personal storytelling.

It serves as a reminder that even a singular filmmaker like Scorsese was influenced by others who dared to defy Hollywood’s conventions. Does understanding the impact of Cassavetes and Clarke change your perception of the threads that run through Scorsese’s own body of work?