A Life Framed By the Movies

" 'That's right,' I said. He was 'Bobby from Hester Street,' and I was 'Marty of Elizabeth Street.' He knew the world I came from, the nature of that world. We both felt outsiders. We don't have to say what the reasons are. We just kind of feel it."

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Of course, the rest is pretty much legend. They astounded the world with their first film together, "Mean Streets" in 1973, a violent tale of small-time thugs scuffling along as minor Mafia players, as far from the magisterial political concerns of 1972's "The Godfather" as could be imagined. Old pal Harvey Keitel plays Charlie, heir to a restaurant who is simply biding time until he inherits; new pal De Niro is Johnny Boy, out-of-control, possibly nuts, someone whose mental vibrations of destruction threaten the whole system. As Pauline Kael wrote in a New Yorker review that changed Scorsese's life, "Martin Scorsese's 'Mean Streets' is a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking." And on and on and on.

Kael's remark "a triumph of personal filmmaking" could have been the hallmark of what became known as '70s cinema, which Scorsese himself came to represent.

The movies he made for years thereafter were rooted in the same psychology -- the out-of-control alpha male -- the same locale (New York City), the same formal technical elements of conveying emotional intensity with slow motion, superb lighting schemes. ("I know how to light for celluloid," he says matter-of-factly.)

Yet to represent his career as a perfect acceleration from the proto-greatness of "Mean Streets" to the success of last year's "The Departed" is to simplify considerably.

Failure and disaster, scandal and depression were as constant as success. "Sometimes a picture is considered 'special,' " he says now, almost ruefully, "and sometimes it's not."

"Taxi Driver" was considered special "but it only got made because of the combination of myself and De Niro. I'm glad I'd committed to it earlier."

About "New York, New York": "I felt the failure was mine. I felt I didn't succeed as a director. What happened next was the big version of 'Last Temptation of Christ' was canceled as a consequence, and that was the worst it ever got for me. Then someone called me to do 'The Last Waltz' [the 1978 documentary on the Band] and that got me back to making the kinds of films I was born to do."

As for "Raging Bull," considered by many to be his greatest film, "I put most of everything I knew into 'Raging Bull.' But it was really De Niro's film. He wanted to do it, and he talked me into it."

He says very little about some smaller films and commercial projects like "The Color of Money" and regrets only that when he finally got to make "The Last Temptation of Christ," it was on a small budget, unlike the grand version he'd wanted.

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Then came another "special" one, "GoodFellas."