A Life Framed By the Movies

"Sunset Boulevard": "It's like a monster movie in a way. You feel compassion for the monster (Norma Desmond); it's also the truest film there is about what it's like to be in front of the camera."

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Italian neorealism: "I was very attracted to neorealism, 'Paisan,' 'Open City,' 'The Bicycle Thief,' because I felt the reality. It was as close to my world as possible. So I was beginning to see how to make a movie -- over here -- but make it about my world -- over there. Then there was 'On the Waterfront,' which was somehow both: a real movie, but not about cowboys or monsters or spaceships, but about recognizable New York reality. That told me it was possible to combine the two. It could be done."

A certain part of Scorsese felt a deep religious impulse. In fact, to this day, he credits priests from the early '50s with suggesting to him and his peers that the "cycle" could be broken, that they didn't have to have the same kind of service jobs in the garment industry their parents did. "They liberated my mind," he recalls.

They also liberated his butt. After a year in the seminary, someone found him watching Bergman's "The Seventh Seal."

"You're not for us," he was told.

After failing to get into Fordham ("My grades were too low!") he went to New York University, but not "the film school." There was no film school. "It was the film department," he says. He stayed for six years, got a master's, became an instructor. He made his first film there, "Who's That Knocking at My Door," which took three years.

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His next film took 24 days. It was "Boxcar Bertha," a Roger Corman exploitation film, the sequel to "Bloody Mama," itself an imitation of "Bonnie and Clyde," which horrified his friends. He had gotten to Hollywood as an editor on "Woodstock," the concert documentary. Brian De Palma, who would in some ways prove to be Scorsese's mentor, introduced him to Corman, and 10 months later he found himself in Arkansas with tommy guns and Barbara Hershey.

"I learned how to make a movie."

Then a big thing happened: He met Robert De Niro and began one of the great collaborations in movies.

De Niro had starred in "Hi, Mom!," De Palma's first notable film, and the actor had been off in the South making a biggish film called "Bang the Drum Slowly," which would also win him great notice.

"We really connected," recalls Scorsese. "I met him at dinner in New York, small apartment, and after dinner, De Niro called me over and said, 'When you grew up, were you friends with so-and-so?'