Bold Influences: Martin Scorsese and the Weight of a Guilty Conscience

Part 1 of 6

Before Martin Scorsese ever picked up a camera, he came close to picking up a collar. Raised in Little Italy in the 1940s and 50s, an asthmatic kid who spent more time in church and cinemas than on the street, he served as an altar boy and seriously considered the priesthood before choosing film school instead. He didn't leave that upbringing behind when the decision was made. He built an entire career inside it. Six decades on, his films are still circling the same question a teenager in a Catholic parish might ask in confession: is someone who has done terrible things still capable of grace? Scorsese has never answered it cleanly, and that refusal is a large part of why we keep returning to his work.

Look across his filmography and the pattern holds. Travis Bickle isn't written as a hero cleaning up the streets of New York; he's a man unravelling in real time, and Taxi Driver never fully lets the audience decide whether his violence is righteous or symptomatic of something much darker. Jake LaMotta destroys every relationship he has across Raging Bull, and the film doesn't soften a single blow on his way down. Henry Hill spends the entirety of Goodfellas seduced by a life he already knows is rotten, narrating his own corruption with something close to nostalgia rather than regret. Even Colin Sullivan and Billy Costigan in The Departed are built from the same material: two men whose identities are so entangled with deception that neither can locate where the lie ends and the person begins. None of these characters are likeable in any conventional sense. All of them are unmistakably human.

What makes the approach work isn't only the writing. It's a set of deliberate craft decisions built to keep an audience inside a flawed person's head rather than observing them from a safe moral distance. The voiceover in Goodfellas and Casino doesn't explain a character to the audience, it exposes how that character explains himself to himself, self-justification included. Scorsese has worked with editor Thelma Schoonmaker for over fifty years, and that partnership has produced a rhythm that mirrors thought itself: frantic when a character is spiralling, unusually patient in the rare moments he's forced to sit still with what he's done. Even his use of music works against easy readings, pairing violence with buoyant, upbeat needle-drops rather than ominous scoring, so the audience feels the seduction of the moment before they're allowed to feel its cost. The camera rarely moralises on his behalf. It watches, closely, and leaves the moral work to whoever is watching.

That trust is the part we find most instructive. Scorsese has spent a career proving that sin, guilt and the pursuit of redemption aren't obstacles to a compelling character, they're the engine of one. His people are rarely punished in a way that resolves neatly, and rarely forgiven in a way that feels fully earned. They're left, like most of us, somewhere in between: aware of what they've done, uncertain whether awareness is enough to change anything about who they are. Silence, his most explicitly religious film, spends over two and a half hours refusing to say whether its central act of apostasy is a betrayal of faith or the truest act of mercy in the story. Sustaining that kind of discomfort across an entire feature takes nerve. It would be considerably easier, commercially, to pick a side and let the audience off the hook.

There's a broader lesson in that choice, beyond any single film. A lot of storytelling defaults to reassurance, characters who are ultimately good people who did one bad thing, or bad people who get what's coming to them by the credits. Scorsese has built a body of work on refusing that shortcut, and audiences have kept showing up for over fifty years, which suggests the shortcut was never actually necessary. People don't need a character to be good in order to stay invested in what happens to them. They need that character to be true.

We think about that distinction often. Authentic storytelling, to us, means writing characters whose flaws aren't a problem the plot exists to solve, they're the reason the story is worth telling in the first place. It's the question sitting at the centre of our own upcoming short film, The Pretender: a man laying claim to a stolen throne in the final days of the Wars of the Roses, whose battle isn't only with Henry Tudor's armies but with his own past and his own faith in who he says he is. History has never settled whether that claim was true. We're not trying to settle it either. We're interested in what it costs a person to insist it is, whether or not he can still believe it himself.

Scorsese didn't invent the morally complicated protagonist. But few filmmakers have spent as long, or dug as deep, making the case that flawed and false are not the same thing, and that an audience will follow a character through almost anything, as long as what they're watching is honest.

That's the first of six. Next week, we're looking at a director who takes a very different route to the same kind of honesty: Kathryn Bigelow, and what happens when you put a person under enough pressure that pretending stops being an option.

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