Martin Scorsese: The Amazing Graphic Novel

I was worried that a graphic novel about the essence of 81-year-old Martin Scorsese was too insurmountable a task even for the great French cartoonist Amazing Ameziane.  Thankfully, he does not disappoint us.  His stunning new work, “Scorsese,” the final volume in a trilogy about modern master filmmakers, reveals him to be a rare talent who somehow manages to channel the filmmaker’s psyche in a way traditional biographical telling would never allow.  That is the magical beauty of the graphic art form; it offers the author unprecedented freedoms in interpreting his subject’s inner self.

Ameziane’s drawings vibrate with energy that ripples off the page and is accompanied with what he imagines to be Scorsese’s first-person narrative voice.  We feel he’s giving us access to a secret realm; slowly picturing in our own minds what it might feel like to actually be Scorsese, who seems to be a man ridden with all sorts of long-term anxieties.  He rarely laughs or smiles and his most consuming passion seems to be his own relentless drive to keep doing what he is doing without interruption.

When Ameziane depicts Scorsese with one of his four ex-wives, the exquisitely beautiful Isabella Rossellini, he doesn’t appear happy or smitten with her, or even in love, but walks alongside her looking for an escape route. We learn Scorsese has two grown daughters, and a third daughter with his current wife, who was once a prestigious book editor, and who is now in the throes of Parkinson’s disease. This last marriage has lasted over 20 years and his youngest daughter, Francesca, has followed in her father’s footsteps.

Ameziane presents Scorsese as very much a man’s man, living in what he still perceives to be a man’s world, and not very different from many other men born like he was in the early 1940’s.  One of our first impressions of Scorsese in Ameziane’s rendering is of a nervous man who only looks vaguely satisfied when someone’s praising him for one of his iconic films.  Most readers will be familiar with these: Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Casino, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Irishman, and Killer of the Flower Moon.

Being Scorsese seems to be a difficult endeavor.  One illustration seems to capture his angst.  We see a drawing of a tired and beleaguered looking Scorsese sitting in a small chair with headphones wrapped around his neck looking like a noose of sorts.  The accompanying text says only this: “I get the sense that everyone is ready and raring except for me.  I spent the whole day sailing across a sea of giants.”  We understand what Ameziane is trying to tell us.  Life is hard for Scorsese.  He has trouble getting up in the mornings sometimes.  He feels a heaviness surrounding him even when things are going well.  His temperament is such that the ordinary interruptions of daily life throw him off balance.

When one reads the interviews, Scorsese has given over past decades there is an enormous amount of repetition present.  He tells his life story as if he is on autopilot, repeating himself and unaware his recitations have become stale.  He speaks of being a sickly child with asthma who grew up in a tough Italian neighborhood in New York where he spent a lot of his childhood bedridden due to his weak lungs, watching the action on the streets from his bedroom window, becoming a keen observer of how people interacted with one another.

Marty had a special fascination with the tough guys, the mafioso, who wore sharp suits and had fancy cars. Ameziane shows Scorsese’s father telling his young son he must steer clear of them, yet admitting that his job at the dry cleaners was a gift they arranged for him, leaving him somewhat bound to them forever. The young Scorsese tries to find solace in the Roman Catholic church, impressed with the theatricality of it all, as well as the church’s preachings about good, evil, right, and wrong. He was an altarboy for a short time but couldn’t get up early enough to make the 7am mass, and eventually drifted away from the church. But he never lost his interest in Catholicism and still identifies himself as such.

His parents, worried about their youngest boy, started taking him to the movies on the weekend to cheer him up. He became transfixed.  Soon enough, he was sitting on the floor of the living room with colored pencils drawing elaborate storyboards filled with action scenes and accompanying dialogue. One day, he told his shocked parents he wanted to make movies. After much yelling and shouting, they somehow found the money to send him to college to study filmmaking.  There would be no turning back.

When the book begins, we see an exhausted Scorsese arriving on a movie set.  We see him in subsequent panels, usually from behind, and in the throes of being accosted by countless people with questions for him or needing decisions he must make on the fly.  We see Scorsese in one panel seemingly step away from everyone and speaking to himself softly saying “Breathe, Marty, Breathe.”  On the following page we see three panels of a glum Scorsese seeming to fade before our eyes.  The voiceover has him tell us that “As far as I can remember…I always wanted to be…a director.”  But the face remains joyless, as we marvel at Ameziane’s ability to show us Scorsese’s interior self.  He remains in Ameziane’s mind an insecure unhappy many who was able to accomplish great things despite his vulnerabilities; or perhaps because of them.

We learn about Scorsese’s grandfather, Franchesco Scozzose ( authorities changed his name upon arrival because of a transcription error), who hailed from the Palermo region of Italy, and arrived in New York at 21 in 1901.  He would meet and marry his wife within a year, and they had seven children. We see aerial shots of their tenement on Elizabeth Street. On a separate page, we see a huge head shot of his grandfather, who appears to us as a proud-looking and strong Italian patriarch. But we notice immediately that Scorsese has his same tortured eyes.

Scorsese tells us through Ameziane that his grandfather cherished family above all else. But the poverty they lived in surely caused tensions that bordered on unbearable. We learn “There was no furniture, just beds in each room—including the kitchen—that could be stored away each day.” We see little Marty amidst the chaos, and he is almost always coughing. A few pages later, Ameziane depicts a young Martin Scorsese wandering the streets of his childhood neighborhood one night and coming upon a dead body, and later, two men having sex in an alleyway. This early indoctrination into the seamier side of life clearly clung to him always.

Scorsese mumbles “People have often criticized me for making too many gangster movies, but what do they expect?  You’re supposed to write what you know, right?”  But these words speak to something that has been nagging at us. Despite the enormity of his successful films, one always gets the feeling it hasn’t been enough for him. There is some cinematic masterpiece he didn’t produce that he should have or could have; a masterwork that was within his reach that got away. He seems haunted by the sense there was something astonishing he missed out on for reasons he can’t put his finger on. Yet he knows he is to blame. Marty castigates himself for many things, and carries guilt and regret for others, but we sense his biggest heartache lay here.

Francis Ford Coppola of Godfather fame serves as a mentor for Scorsese and encourages him to become adept with the technical side of filmmaking if he wishes to convince the suits at the movie studios that he was a worthwhile risk. Steven Spielberg has a walk-on where he seems to encourage Scorsese to compromise. John Milius, who wrote Apocolypse Now, as well as George Lucas became part of their group as well as film critic Paul Schrader. All of them understood that it was the 1970’s and they were changing the way people made movies: “We knew it was our moment. And we were hungry.” Scorsese managed to complete his first film, Boxcar Bertha, a story about Bertha Thompson, a robber during the Great Depression.  It cost $65,000 and grossed $650,000. In a surprise moment, we see Brian De Palma introducing Marty to Robert De Niro. Their chemistry was kinetic.

 Scorsese respects Paul Schrader’s assertion that to produce a great film “you had to be ready to die for it.” Schrader kept a loaded gun near his typewriter and pressed it against his temple every day before beginning to work. He’d written Taxi Driver and Robert De Niro wanted to play Travis Bickle.  He wanted Scorsese to direct it. But getting sufficient funding proved difficult. Scorsese turned to Mean Streets, which he realized later “was the story of my family, and of my friends-above all, the one who had been shot behind the wheel,” referring to a tragedy that occurred when he and his friends were out on a joy ride.

Scorsese eventually has a breakdown that has to do with sloppily using all sorts of drugs. He lies alone in the hospital given a 50-50 chance of surviving. What strikes the reader is that the few pages that cover this incident, we see Scorsese alone with his pain and fear and realize this is how he lives his life. But someone finally comes for him. Robert De Niro visits and begs him to get better so they can finally make Taxi Driver. De Niro loved working with Scorsese, who let him improvise  and encouraged his input to whatever film they were making. Like the most famous line in Taxi Driver, when Travis Bickle looks into his bedroom mirror and keeps repeating in an increasingly menacing tone “You talkin’ to me.  You talkin’ to me. You talkin’ to me.  Then who the hell else are you talkin’ to?…”

Ameziane captures the inner life of a man for whom the chase is everything. Pursuit replaces self-knowledge, love relationships, the joys and worries of children, and even friendships.  In Scorsese we see a man possessed by something he can’t identity, yet it rules his waking moments. We can’t picture him praying or mourning, despite his professed affinity for Catholicism. There is an absence of self-awareness; nor is there any burning desire to pursue the self-introspection necessary to understand himself better. Everything channels into the compulsion to keep going. We grow accustomed to a low-boil simmering rage that seems to rest beneath all he does. And soon enough, he disappears from our view, leaving us awed and somewhat saddened by the intensity that continues to shadow him into his ninth decade.