A Life Framed By the Movies

"I didn't see anything particularly different about it. But Michael Powell [the great British director who'd married Scorsese's longtime, multi-Oscar-winning film editor, Thelma Schoonmaker] urged me to do it. He saw it as so much more than a genre picture. But it was really the actors who brought it to life. When they got on the set, I realized we had something very special."

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His next two films were dazzlers, but they baffled critics who couldn't figure out the reason he chose them. "The Age of Innocence" took him, for some reason, from mean streets to stuffy parlors, a dramatization of an Edith Wharton novel of high society. Then came "Casino," which replicated many of the tropes in "GoodFellas," though some critics (including this one) admired it extravagantly.

He had one more ordeal to get through.

"I wanted to do 'Gangs of New York' in the '70s, and it was very much a '70s kind of movie. It was a sort of 'personal epic,' that is, a film made from one man's perspective on a vast social and historical situation. But by the time I finally got to make it, the market had changed. It was like there was a disconnect between what I was making and what they were expecting."

The movie wasn't helped by widely publicized fights between Scorsese and Harvey Weinstein, then the Miramax studio boss. At one point it was postponed for a year.

The last two pictures have been quite the opposite. Scorsese doesn't sound as if he was terribly eager to do either, and some have seen in them a kind of professional impersonality heretofore alien to his work. But they've happily delivered at the box office.

"I think of these as genre films," he says now.

" 'The Aviator' was a Hollywood spectacle. I read the script and I was thinking, I didn't know about that. It was a film I hoped would be entertaining to the audience and keep me in the running.

"As for 'The Departed,' I thought of it as a modern-day noir, a film that reflected society, of today's American excesses. But I got interested in the characters again and the relations between DiCaprio's and Damon's. Jack Nicholson was a man in power out of control. It was the ultimate noir: Everybody is killed. The lesson: You know nothing. It was simply a genre film. Somehow we came out of it better than we went in -- I don't know how. I don't remember finishing it, I remember leaving it."

As for the future, some projects have been announced, but it's unclear with the writers' strike what will happen next. There's also the uncertainty of the changing methods of making film, with the increase in digital video and CGI in movies. Martin Scorsese possibly glows a little less than he once did, but he hasn't given up.

"I don't know what else to do. I like making them."