Do we like Martin Scorsese?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decades of film-preservation work and a clean record on harm, marked down for the AI backlash and a settled contract fight.
Scorsese is the ultimate New York film nerd made good. His first feature came out in the late 1960s, Mean Streets and Taxi Driver made him a name in the 70s, and he finally won Best Director for The Departed in 2007. He is now in his 80s and still making films.
The big story this year is AI. In June he was announced as an advisor to Black Forest Labs, and he called its tool helpful for showing his crew what he sees in his head, saying that “time costs money” in pre-production. Storyboard artist Karla Ortiz said he “throws every single storyboard artist he's ever worked with under the bus”. Boots Riley also hit out, and others pointed to his old swipes at Marvel films. Defenders say using it to visualise ideas is not the death of art, and the report found no sign he plans to use AI-generated images in his next film.
On the courtroom front, there is not much. A screenwriter and his production company sued him in 2023, alleging he took a $500,000 fee as executive producer on a WWII film and did nothing. Scorsese's cross-complaint said he approached several filmmakers but none were interested, and his lawyers pointed out that The Irishman took over a decade to get made. The case settled in March 2024 on private terms, so nobody decided who was right.
On the harm check, the record is clean. He was an executive producer on Port Authority, a romance with a trans lead that went to Cannes, and its director described him as a mentor keen to learn about gender identity. In 2018 he said Trump's immigration policy ran against the basic idea of America and that his own Sicilian immigrant family would not have been let in. I found nothing on him and the climate either way, and that's the honest gap.
He gets some heat for a male-heavy filmography. In 2019, asked about it in Rome, he called the premise “not even a valid point” and said female leads belong where the story calls for them. That's a fair argument or a dodge, depending on who you ask, but it's not harm.
The good stuff is big. He founded The Film Foundation in 1990, a nonprofit that works to preserve historic cinema, and he keeps using his clout to open doors for younger filmmakers. He also made a documentary featuring Pope Francis's final in-depth on-camera interview, about a youth education and short-film project.