Martin Scoorsese Biography Essay

Martin Scorsese is amongst the most recognizable names in Hollywood. His success as a director can be attributed to many things, such as his postmodernist style and his amazing cinematography skills, but what his success as a director truly hinges on is the development of characters, and relationships amongst them, within his movies. Like any great director, Scorsese pulls inspiration for his movies from his own life experience, and as an Italian-American growing up in 1940s and 50s New York, he has a great source of characters and environments to pull from. This essay will examine Martin Scorsese’s life and show how he uses his life to create great movies. The unique environment Scorsese was raised in led him to pursue a career in film …show more content…
Many of his movies are about Italian-Americans in unpleasant situations, many of which involve the mob. Despite not personally being in the mob, a fact many conspiracy theorists may dispute, Scorsese did grow up in an environment where it was a large presence. Because of this exposure, Scorsese creates many of his stories around issues regarding the mob. Perhaps his most famous mob movie is his 1990 hit, Goodfellas. Goodfellas focuses on the life of Henry Hill, and Irish-Italian-American who worked for the mob. Nearly every character in the movie is Italian and is set in New York. Unlike most mob movies, Goodfellas focuses more on the relationships and social expectations of Italian-Americans than the actions of the actual mob (Goodfellas). Scorsese, however, does not only use the environment around him, but his own hardships as a child to create believable and interesting characters. Many of the main characters in his movies have strange things about them that make them different than the rest of the characters. Henry Hill in Goodfellas is part Irish, meaning he can never become a full member of the mob. Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver is a depressed ex-marine whose problems drive him to become a vigilante. Hugo Cabret in Hugo is an orphan who lives in a train station clock tower unbeknownst to anyone else charged with the mission to keep the clocks running. The reason why so many of Scorsese’s characters are social outliers is due to Scorsese himself being an outlier due to his sever asthma. Scorsese could not play sports or engage in any sort of exhausting activity, so he was not able to make the connections amongst his peers properly. The problems that Scorsese faced as a child are the reason why his characters are so believable and