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Guilt is a prominent theme in many of his films, as is the role of Catholicism in creating and dealing with guilt (Who's That Knocking at My Door, Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Bringing Out the Dead, The Departed, Shutter Island, and The Irishman). In a similar manner, Scorsese considered Silence a "passion project": it had been in development since 1990, two years after the release of his film The Last Temptation of Christ, which also contained strongly religious themes. When asked why he retained interest in a project dealing with strong theological themes for over 26 years, Scorsese said, |
As you get older, ideas go and come. Questions, answers, loss of the answer again and more questions, and this is what really interests me. Yes, the cinema and the people in my life and my family are most important, but ultimately as you get older, there's got to be more ... Silence is just something that I'm drawn to in that way. It's been an obsession, it has to be done ... it's a strong, wonderful true story, a thriller in a way, but it deals with those questions. |
Political corruption |
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More recently, his films have featured corrupt authority figures, such as policemen in The Departed and politicians in Gangs of New York and The Aviator. He is also known for his liberal usage of profanity, dark humor, and violence. |
Scorsese's interest in political corruption as depicted in his films was expanded further in his 2019 film The Irishman. Richard Brody writing for The New Yorker found the main interpretation of the film to be a dark allegory of a realist reading of American politics and American society stating: |
The real-life Hoffa... (was) a crucial player in both gangland politics and the actual practical politics of the day, and the movie's key through line is the inseparability of those two realms. The Irishman is a sociopolitical horror story that views much of modern American history as a continuous crime in motion, in which every level of society—from domestic life through local business through big business through national and international politics—is poisoned by graft and bribery, shady deals and dirty money, threats of violence and its gruesome enactment, and the hard-baked impunity that keeps the entire system running. |
Frequent collaborators |
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Scorsese often casts the same actors in his projects, particularly Robert De Niro, who has collaborated with Scorsese on ten feature films and one short film. Included are the three films (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas) that made AFI's 100 Years ... 100 Movies list. Scorsese has often said he thinks De Niro's best work under his direction was Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy. After the turn of the century, Scorsese found a new muse with younger actor Leonardo DiCaprio, collaborating on six feature films and one short to date. Several critics have compared Scorsese's new partnership with DiCaprio with his previous one with De Niro. Frequent collaborators also include: Victor Argo (6), Harvey Keitel (6), Harry Northup (6), J. C. MacKenzie (5), Murray Moston (5), Illeana Douglas (4), Joe Pesci (4), Frank Vincent (3), Barry Primus (3), and Verna Bloom (3). Others who have appeared in multiple Scorsese projects include Daniel Day-Lewis, who had become very reclusive to the Hollywood scene, Alec Baldwin, Willem Dafoe, Ben Kingsley, Jude Law, Dick Miller, Liam Neeson, Emily Mortimer, Jesse Plemons, John C. Reilly, David Carradine, Barbara Hershey, Kevin Corrigan, Jake Hoffman, Frank Sivero, Ray Winstone and Nick Nolte. Before their deaths, Scorsese's parents, Charles Scorsese and Catherine Scorsese, appeared in bit parts, walk-ons or supporting roles, such as in Goodfellas. |
For his crew, Scorsese frequently worked with editors Marcia Lucas and Thelma Schoonmaker, cinematographers Michael Ballhaus, Robert Richardson, Michael Chapman and Rodrigo Prieto, screenwriters Paul Schrader, Mardik Martin, Jay Cocks, Terrence Winter, John Logan and Steven Zaillian, costume designer Sandy Powell, production designers Dante Ferretti and Bob Shaw, music producer Robbie Robertson, and composers Howard Shore and Elmer Bernstein. Schoonmaker, Richardson, Powell, and Ferretti have each won Academy Awards in their respective categories on collaborations with Scorsese. Elaine and Saul Bass, the latter being Hitchcock's frequent title designer, designed the opening credits for Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence, Casino and Cape Fear. |
Personal life |
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Marriages |
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Scorsese has been married five times. |
In 1965, Scorsese married Laraine Marie Brennan. They have a daughter, Catherine, who was named after Scorsese's mother. The couple remained together until 1971. |
In 1976, Scorsese married writer Julia Cameron. They have a daughter, Domenica Cameron-Scorsese, an actress who appeared in The Age of Innocence. After one year of marriage, the couple had an acrimonious divorce which served as the basis of Cameron's first feature, the dark comedy God's Will, which also starred their daughter. The latter had a small role in Cape Fear using the name Domenica Scorsese and has continued to act, write, direct and produce. |
In 1979, Scorsese married actress Isabella Rossellini. The couple divorced in 1983. |
In March 1983, Scorsese met Dawn Steel (then-junior executive at Paramount) at an annual ShoWest Convention (in Las Vegas, Nevada), after which the pair began a romantic relationship. Scorsese moved from New York to live in her Sunset Plaza residence while his Last Temptation of Christ was initially in development at Paramount (Steel reportedly recused herself from her boyfriend's passion project). In her 1993 memoir, Steel discussed their relationship, including attending the Cannes Film Festival premiere of The King of Comedy and later location scouting in Tunisia together. The two would reconnect professionally in 1987, jump-starting the restoration of Lawrence of Arabia (shortly after Steel's installation as president at Columbia Pictures). |
In 1985, Scorsese married producer Barbara De Fina. The couple divorced in 1991. |
From 1989 to 1997, Scorsese was romantically involved with actress Illeana Douglas. |
In 1999, Scorsese married Helen Schermerhorn Morris. They have a daughter, actress and filmmaker Francesca, who appeared in his films The Departed, Hugo, and The Aviator, and had a leading role in HBO/Sky's miniseries We Are Who We Are in 2020. |
Politics |
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Scorsese was an opponent of the Iraq War, wearing a white dove pin to the 75th Academy Awards in 2003 and clapping for Michael Moore's acceptance speech wherein he criticized President George W. Bush and the invasion. In June 2025, Scorsese said of Donald Trump's administration: "I do not see compassion in this administration. Indeed, it seems that it takes pleasure in the opposite: hurting, humiliating." |
Legal issues |
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In March 2024, Scorsese settled a lawsuit with aspiring screenwriter Simon Afram. Afram accused him of pocketing $500,000 to help handle casting, production and postproduction of his screenplay about World War II's Operation Fortitude, which was titled Operation Fortitude, only for Scorsese to then do nothing. |
Religious beliefs |
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Scorsese previously identified as a lapsed Catholic, declaring "I'm a lapsed Catholic. But I am Roman Catholic; there's no way out of it." In 2016, Scorsese identified himself as a Catholic again, saying, "my way has been, and is, Catholicism. After many years of thinking about other things, dabbling here and there, I am most comfortable as a Catholic. I believe in the tenets of Catholicism." |
As of 2025, Scorsese has directed 26 full-length narrative films and 16 full-length documentary films. |
Other work |
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Film preservation |
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Scorsese had been at the forefront in film preservation and restoration ever since 1990, when he created The Film Foundation, a non-profit film organization which collaborates with film studios to restore prints of old or damaged films. Scorsese launched the organization with Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Clint Eastwood, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Sydney Pollack, Robert Redford, and Steven Spielberg, who all sat on the foundation's original board of directors. In 2006, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Curtis Hanson, Peter Jackson, Ang Lee and Alexander Payne joined them. In 2015, Christopher Nolan also joined the board. Recent members include Spike Lee, Sofia Coppola, Guillermo del Toro, Barry Jenkins, Lynne Ramsay, Joanna Hogg and Kathryn Bigelow. |
The foundation has restored more than 800 films from around the world and conducts a free educational curriculum for young people on the language and history of film. Scorsese and the Foundation spearheaded fundraising for the film restoration of Michael Powell, and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948). For his advocacy in film restoration he received the Robert Osborne Award at the 2018 TCM Film Festival. The award was given to Scorsese as "an individual who has significantly contributed to preserving the cultural heritage of classic films". |
In November 2020, The Criterion Channel released a 30-minute video titled, 30 Years of The Film Foundation: Martin Scorsese and Ari Aster in Conversation, celebrating the "mission, evolution, and ongoing work of The Film Foundation". Scorsese stated as of 2020, the Foundation has helped restore 850 films. |
On April 20, 2024, Scorsese partnered with Seth MacFarlane to showcase Back From the Ink: Restored Animated Shorts at the 2024 TCM Classic Film Festival. Macfarlane and Scorsese funded the restoration, and worked with the UCLA Film and Television Archive and The Film Foundation with Paramount Pictures Archives. |
The World Cinema Project |
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In 2007, Scorsese established the World Cinema Project with the mission to preserve and present marginalized and infrequently screened films from regions generally ill-equipped to preserve their own cinema history. Scorsese's organization has worked with the Criterion Collection to not only preserve the films but to allow them to be released on DVD and Blu-ray boxsets and on streaming services such as The Criterion Channel. Films in the WCP include Ousmane Sembène's Black Girl (1966), and Djibril Diop Mambéty's Touki Bouki (1973). |
The Criterion Collection so far has released four Vol. boxsets on DVD and Blu-ray, titled, Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project. The first Volume includes 6 titles, Touki Bouki (1973), Redes (1936), A River Called Titas (1973), Dry Summer (1964), Trances (1981) and The Housemaid (1960). The second volume also includes 6 titles, Insiang (1976), Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), Revenge (1989), Limite (1931), Law of the Border (1967), and Taipei Story (1985). The third volume includes 6 titles as well: Lucía (1968), After the Curfew (1954), Pixote (1980), Dos monjes (1934), Soleil Ô (1970), and Downpour (1972). The 6 films included in the fourth set are Sambizanga (1972), Prisioneros de la tierra (1939), Chess of the Wind (1979), Muna Moto (1975), Two Girls on the Street (1939), and Kalpana (1948). |
The African Film Heritage Project |
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In 2017, Scorsese also introduced The African Film Heritage Project (AFHP), which is a joint initiative between Scorsese's non-profit The Film Foundation, UNESCO, Cineteca di Bologna, and the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI). The project aims to locate and preserve 50 classic African films, some thought lost and others beyond repair, with hopes to make them available to audiences everywhere. In an interview with Cinema Escapist in 2018, Scorsese talked about the ambitious collaboration saying, "Our first goal is to launch and conduct a thorough investigation in film archives and laboratories around the world, in order to locate the best surviving elements—original negatives, we hope—for our first 50 titles." He also stated that "Restoration is always the primary goal, of course, but within the initiative, it's also a starting point of a process that follows through with exhibition and dissemination in Africa and abroad. And of course, our restoration process always includes the creation of preservation elements." |
In 2019, the AFHP, announced that they would screen restorations of four African films on their home continent for the first time as part of the 50th anniversary of the Pan African Film Festival of Ouagadougou. The movies in question are Med Hondo's Soleil Ô (1970), Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina's Chronique des années de braise (1975), Timité Bassori's La Femme au couteau (1969), and Jean-Pierre Dikongue-Pipa's Muna Moto (1975). |
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