Martin Scorsese does not mince words when asked how he feels about Donald Trump. “A disappointment,” he says. The director himself cares about compassion, “and what’s important in life between human beings. I don’t find this administration under Trump to have any of that. In fact, they relish in the opposite—to hurt people. And this is sad. Tragic. They say they aren’t, but they do.”
Scorsese returned—as he prefers to say—to Sicily this week to receive a lifetime achievement award at the Taormina Film Festival. (Scorsese’s grandparents are all from Sicily; they emigrated to New York in the early 20th century.) He participated in masterclass with film students, the red carpet with daughter Francesca, the awards ceremony, and then a screening of one of his most iconic films, Taxi Driver, in the middle of the night at the Teatro Antico.
In Taormina, Scorsese talked about his roots, vocation, and religion, as well as democracy in peril in a divided America. “My father was from Polizzi Generosa, my mother from Ciminna,” he told the students,.”For me to be here is not a visit—it’s a return. I learned so much from my family.” And again, “I grew up in New York immersed in Sicilian culture, in a very tough environment. Two opposite worlds coexisted around me: on the one hand, faith, compassion; on the other, organized crime. And perhaps therein lies the origin of everything I tell in my films: faith and gangsters.”
Scorsese’s new projects all have to do with religion. He’s making a new film about Jesus, a series on the lives of the saints, and a documentary on the late Pope Francis. Scorsese smiles often, even when he’s arguing.
“I’m still working on an approach to the story on Jesus in the contemporary work,” he tells a small group of Italian journalists. “And I think it’ll take me into next year before I have the proper approach.
“This goes back to the early ‘60s, where I wanted to make a film based on the gospels in the lower east side of New York—in the tenements and the slums where I grew up. I had it planned out, and I was beginning to be involved with some kind of filmmaking based in NYU—which are very small at the time, only 30 students. Now there’s thousands. We were going to do it in black and white, of course. And then I saw The Gospel According to St. Matthew. And I had to find another way.”
Scorsese met Pope Francis several times, he says, and is currently finishing his film nabout the pontif: Aldeas—A New Story. Naturally, the project was shot partially in Sicily—but also in Gambia, the Amazon rainforest, and other places. “It’s really about storytelling,” says Scorsese, “getting to be acquainted with other cultures, other ways of thinking and learning about people, learning about each other.” He was inspired in part by the Netflix miniseries Stories of a Generation – With Pope Francis, released in 2021, a project in which Scorsese also participated. “It was about advice from the elderly. I was one of the elderly.”
He objects to the focus on the new pope’s national origins. “The fact that it’s ‘American,’ I dont’t see it,” says Scorsese. “Whomever becomes pope, I see as the pope of all. It’s not Argentinian, Nigerian, Filipino: it has to be the pope of all.” Which is key to the entire enterprise. “The church at this point in time has to retain its soul and its heart, but at the same time include the world,” says Scorsese. “And I think from what I’ve read about him, I think he has the right approach.”
The most urgent issue is working for peace. “Peace is about knowledge, too. Peace is about knowing where the people are, and lessening greed. In a way, one doesn’t just make peace,—one has to deal with the problems of each person. You may not agree politically, but each one has to live. And so this begins the possibility of peace.”
Spirituality, Scorsese explains, has always been a key theme for him, not least because of the way he grew up. “When I was very young, one of the places that I found some kind of solace was in the cathedral downtown—St. Patrick’s. And there was a priest who was really good with us, a young priest who was very tough and strong and introduced us to literature like Graham Green, James Joyce, James Baldwin.”
He also introduced Scorsese to certain films, and a different way of life. “We were living in an old world, really. We were living in the world of Sicily. Which is very nice. But that was for the older immigrants, who had arrived in 1910, in 1900. We were a new generation. The other part of the world was out there—was called New York. And so he would straddle both. I thought it would be a wonderful thing to be like that, to be able to be a teacher like that. And also, I was always sick. I had terrible asthma, and I had no sports, and I was always being put in a movie theater or in the church.”
Actually making films, though, seemed like an impossibility. “What are you going to do—make movies from New York? It’s insane. There’s no way to do that. That’s California.” So instead, Scorsese thought he would join the priesthood. “I only lasted about a half a year in this little seminary. And I realized it wasn’t for me.
“But I also think that I began to understand vocation. A vocation is a calling. So the calling has to be stronger than just wanting to be like somebody. And it’s not about yourself—it’s about others. And I just couldn’t do it.”
So he let go of the priesthood—but continued grappling with the idea of religion in his work.
“Religion, it’s a different thing,” says Scorsese. “The nature of mystery, of God’s love, has never left me. And so I was dealing with it in Mean Streets. It’s about hubris, pride, it’s about greed—it’s about ignorance in that sense. But also, it’s mainly about my brother’s keeper—the love between the two of them,” the characters played by Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel. “And it’s also about living a life of sin. And maybe you’re not the worst sinner in that world, but you’re in a ‘world of sin,’ unquote, and then expected to expiate your sins just by going to a building and praying for an hour. I’m wondering, how is that done?
“And they were the regular people who had a grocery store. They were oppressed by the organized crime groups—good people. So the religious aspects are always there. Even in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull. The stories I was attracted to, characters always seem to have some sort of a background with Christianity and Catholicism, and that search for the spiritual.”
Does Scorsese believe that history repeats itself? “Well, it always repeats,” he says. “There was a quota put on Italians at a certain point. Any new group that comes to this experiment of a democracy is going to be resented at first because they’re different. I don’t recognize half of New York now; I don’t know how to get anywhere. I know only certain streets; everything else has changed.” As he shows in his 2002 film Gangs of New York, in his home city, “the brunt was felt by the Irish. The Irish then settled. They were able to deal with politics and the police force. The Italians then were the ones who were on the outside.”
Scorsese remembers growing up in West Side Story-era Manhattan, when white New Yorkers resented having to share space with immigrants from Puerto Rico. “That story is very accurate, actually. Any group that comes in, it seems that they have to go through a kind of process of conflict before there could be assimilation.”
But to Scorsese, the greater conflict now is the threat to democracy posed by Trump. “I’m not a historian, but from reading a great deal of history, it just seems that it’s being stressed to the point now probably as closer to the American Civil War, 1860, because the split in the country is so clear,” he says. “Unfortunately, tragically, the wedge been smashed into all the different groups, and everybody’s at each other’s throat. And it’s going to take a generation—I hope only a generation—for it to become somewhat more at ease with each other.”
Michael Douglas, also while in Taormina this week, called the current age “the worst time that I can ever remember.” Scorsese also had his say on Trump’s government and his reelection. Some members of his administration may have good intentions, Scorsese said; “I’m not sure. I’m not a politician. But their style, for me, is the opposite of what I would sign up for. It’s anger and hatred.” And Trump is also testing the limits of presidential power. “This is going to have serious repercussions for generations to come. It’s the president; he wants what he wants. But how much can they do?”
He’s also not sure how long the American public will allow Trump’s actions to go unchecked. “What if it’s going to cost them a lot of money, and it’s going to really hurt them? How long are they going to be able to stand for that?”
Cinema and the search for truth
What can cinema do in such difficult times? “Well, one key thing is to keep trying to put the truth out there,” says Scorsese. “You may disagree with certain things, but how do we know what’s true? The problem is there are elements put in place now that are going to prevent that—bureaucratic elements, the way systems work. And I don’t think young kids realize it. Anger could consume you—it’s not always the greatest thing—but it could at least make you act.”
Original story in VF Italy.
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