Martin Scorsese, the director still working past the canon he was filed under

The question that has followed him around for the last twenty years is whether the next film will be the final one. Every release arrives with a retrospective, a season at Lincoln Center, a magazine inventory of the canonical works. The films keep being made anyway — a Gothic two-hander shooting in Europe right now, an eight-episode crime series for Netflix already cast, a documentary built around the last on-camera testimony of a dead pope — and the gap between the version of Scorsese the obituaries are pre-writing and the version booking next year’s calendar is by now the most interesting argument about him.

He was born in Queens and raised on Elizabeth Street in Little Italy, the son of Sicilian-American parents from Polizzi Generosa, both of them garment-trade workers. Severe asthma kept him out of the street games every other boy on the block was playing, so his parents took him to the cinema instead. He became an altar boy at Old St. Patrick’s on Mulberry, served the Latin Mass before Vatican II changed it, and entered a junior Jesuit seminary at fourteen with the intention of becoming a priest. He was expelled after a year — too restless, by his own account, not pious enough by anyone else’s — and went instead to NYU, where he picked up a film degree from what would become Tisch and a teaching post that briefly put him alongside Brian De Palma and the rest of what later got called the movie-brat generation.

Mean Streets, which he co-wrote with Mardik Martin and shot in 1973 on streets he had walked since he was a child, established the matter that would not leave him alone for sixty years: men who have inherited a code they did not write, who try to live inside it, who are punished by the gap between what the code demands and what the world will allow. Three years later Taxi Driver, with Paul Schrader’s script and Robert De Niro’s near-catatonic performance and Bernard Herrmann’s last score, won the Palme d’Or and made him, at thirty-three, a name that critics had to deal with whether they wanted to or not.

The seventies almost ended him. Cocaine and a near-fatal collapse after the commercial failure of New York, New York left him in a hospital with internal bleeding, his career as a major studio director apparently over. Raging Bull was the way out — De Niro showed up at the bedside with the Jake LaMotta book, talked him into making the film, and what came out the other end was the picture that most professional polls now name as the best American film of the eighties. He lost the directing Oscar to Robert Redford that year, the first of nine losses across forty years before The Departed finally broke the streak.

The arc from Raging Bull to Goodfellas to Casino is the one the canon files under “the De Niro years,” but the actual movement is harder to summarize. The Last Temptation of Christ — the project that began as a private faith argument and ended in lawsuits, picketed cinemas, a bomb threat at a Paris screening that killed an audience member — is the film he has always said is the one closest to him. The Age of Innocence, made the year after Cape Fear, is the one critics still get wrong: a movie about the violence of manners that he made because, he has said in interview after interview, he understood the social cage of Edith Wharton’s New York the same way he understood the social cage of his grandparents’ Sicily. Kundun, shot in Morocco about the young Dalai Lama, cost him entry into the Chinese market for two decades; he made it anyway and has refused, ever since, to walk back the politics of it.

The DiCaprio years — Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, Shutter Island, Hugo, The Wolf of Wall Street — are the commercial peak and the one most likely to be read by future viewers as the central Scorsese. The Departed delivered the directing Oscar he had been losing for thirty years. Hugo, his only family film, was also his first 3D film, and the one he has said he made for his youngest daughter Francesca. The Wolf of Wall Street drew the loudest debate of his late career — was it satire or celebration, did the camera love Jordan Belfort or hate him, and did the answer matter — and he has refused to settle the question on the grounds that the film does not.

The harder paragraph is Killers of the Flower Moon, in 2023, his second collaboration with Apple Studios and his most expensive film, a three-and-a-half-hour Osage Nation epic that he restructured late in development at Lily Gladstone’s suggestion to put the Osage point of view at the center of the picture. It received ten Oscar nominations and won zero. He is now the only director in the Academy’s history with three films — Gangs of New York, The Irishman, Killers of the Flower Moon — that received ten or more nominations without a single win. He has not litigated the matter publicly, but he has been more candid in the last two years about the gap between recognition and what the work is actually doing than he was at any earlier point in the career.

The current work is denser than most of his peers’ bibliographies. Mr. Scorsese, the five-part documentary by Rebecca Miller, premiered at the New York Film Festival and went out worldwide on Apple TV in October. Aldeas, the Final Dream of Pope Francis — shot across Italy, Indonesia, Gambia and the Vatican, built around a final on-camera testimony from Pope Francis recorded shortly before his death — had its private Vatican premiere on the first anniversary of the pontiff’s passing. What Happens at Night, a Gothic psychological thriller for Apple and Studiocanal with DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, Patricia Clarkson, Jared Harris and Mads Mikkelsen, began shooting earlier this year and will likely fill his calendar into 2027. The Roman, an eight-episode Netflix crime limited series with Oscar Isaac as a Las Vegas casino president, is in development with him as executive producer.

He has been married five times and lives now on the Upper East Side with his fifth wife, Helen Schermerhorn Morris, a book editor he met through a mutual friend and married in 1999. Helen has advanced Parkinson’s disease; he has said publicly, with no decoration around the sentence, that he is now her near-full-time carer. Their daughter Francesca, who appeared as a child in Hugo and now makes her own films, lives nearby. His two older daughters — Cathy from his first marriage to Laraine Brennan, Domenica from his marriage to Julia Cameron — both work in film. The Film Foundation, which he started in 1990 to preserve world cinema, has now restored more than a thousand films. The World Cinema Project, the foundation’s offshoot, has done the same for the national cinemas — Indonesian, Senegalese, Mexican, Cuban, Cambodian — that the canon mostly does not get to.

The argument the late films are making is that the canon was always a partial reading. Catholic guilt and male violence is one strand of him; the same person made Kundun, The Age of Innocence, Hugo, the Bob Dylan documentary, the rolling thirty-five-year project to keep other people’s films alive. The next picture is shooting now. The one after it is already in development. The version of him the obituaries are writing will eventually be the right version, but it is not the right version yet, and he seems determined to keep that gap open.

Tags: directors, Killers of the Flower Moon, Leonardo DiCaprio, martin scorsese, Raging Bull, robert de niro, The Departed, The Irishman