David Thomson: Scorsese at 60

Meeting Martin Scorsese is an unsettling experience. He has restless, avid eyes. He wants to like you and to be liked, but his eyes never lose that desperation. Afraid of missing something, they slip across every surface like a scalpel. He reaches out with them, laughing too quickly at jokes, being affected too soon by gravity. You feel you cannot keep up with him, or that he is directing you and cannot quite mask his impatience that you are not right yet. He trusts his eyes more than he does other people. I can't forget that feeling when being with him that his eyes are knives defending his solitude.

As a boy, being raised in Little Italy, New York, he was torn between movies and the Catholic priesthood. You can feel that tension in Taxi Driver, where Travis Bickle is not just a psychotic reacting to all the scum of New York but a warped saint who needs to rescue a child from damnation. There were profiles of Scorsese then, in 1976, in the American press, and he was tiny, wild-eyed, mop-haired, dressed in jeans and torn corduroy jacket. It was hinted that he might not live long – not just because of his chronic asthma but because, like Travis, his head was full of perilous demons. He was the new age, a visionary talent from the rough streets, and so much truer than the older generations of Hollywood cynics.

The sickly kid didn't often play on the streets – his breathing was always at risk. But he observed gang life, the way he paid attention to the movies he was taken to see. In Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, you feel that the director must have known the street dangers personally, but Marty was just recreating the fearful dreams of a kid alarmed by life. One day as a boy he painted huge, bright eyes on the wall of his room. "They watch me while I'm sleeping," he told his mother. "Don't say that," she urged, but he insisted, "Ma, they watch me."

Today is his birthday – he is 60. His eyes are less wild, or naked, now. There is the smoke of irony when he speaks, and his mouth can curl with worldly sarcasm. He is well groomed. The slicked-back gun-

metal hair matches the smart suits (Italian, no doubt). Marty doesn't throw money around, but he has become a charcoal dandy – you feel it's a look he has decided on, as his own character. He could even be mistaken for a producer.

But perhaps it's more the restrained splendour of a padrone, or a godfather, which would be so much more appropriate. For just as the young Marty was the patron saint of the new cinema – going to New York University to study the art, and then making a series of films that captured the existentialism of the Seventies – so, three decades later, he remains the person most readily identified as the spirit of cinema.

It was that insistence, that film was the world, that made Scorsese exemplary among his generation and the legend he is today. You could always tell the film students who wanted to be Steven Spielberg or George Lucas from those who needed to be Marty. The Spielberg approach was about professional glory, but having to be Marty spoke to the passionate necessity of his films. Nothing stood for that on screen better than those three blazing portraits in self-destruction from Robert De Niro, the actor who seemed to have a symbiotic relationship with Marty: Johnny Boy, dazzling but crazy in Mean Streets (1973); Travis Bickle; and Jake La Motta, the paranoid boxer in Raging Bull (1980), beating his head against a wall when he was too old to have other men hurt him.

Add a fourth film: New York, New York, where De Niro plays a Stan Getz-like saxophonist in love with the band-singer (Liza Minnelli), but never brave enough to come far enough out of his solitude to admit it. New York, New York is part of the best of Scorsese, and it's the moment in his life where he was nearly destroyed – by cocaine and his love affair with Liza. For Marty was indeed once the uninhibited self-destructive he celebrated on screen. But the experience of New York ... frightened him, made him draw back. And maybe those bleak eyes have never quite forgiven him for that retreat, not even if he has made it to 60.

For his contribution is as passionate as ever. It's not just that he is still making his own films – pictures he is driven to make, personal statements. He spreads himself around to assist the large art of film. Whenever the forlorn task of film preservation comes into focus he is likely to be named to the committee. His enthusiasm for saving the classics is an extension of his life as a collector and viewer. He still knows no entertainment more compelling than sitting up late with the last print of a lost masterpiece.

Yet, at a time when lesser mortals are confronting retirement, Scorsese faces a determining moment in his career. His 60th birthday coincides with the opening of Gangs of New York, with Daniel Day-Lewis, Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz, plus a budget that has exceeded $100m (£63m).

Gangs ... is the kind of venture the young Scorsese promised he would avoid: top-heavy with production costs and investment risks, a picture on which the director and his money men were bound to quarrel. It is a year late already and, in that time, there has been a tricky dance in the press between Scorsese and Harvey Weinstein, whose Miramax company put up the bulk of the financing. Even now, a month away from final release, it is not clear whether the coming picture is truly Marty's or a compromise fought out with Miramax. As it is, Scorsese has already rolled back half of his six-million dollar fee to help the swollen budget.

So can Marty do popular? He is of the generation that contains Lucas, Spielberg, Francis Coppola and William Friedkin. Friedkin, who had massive hits with The French Connection and The Exorcist, as well as the best-director Oscar for the former, long ago fell away from the top of the mountain called talent. Lucas and Spielberg are prodigies of commercial success, with bowling alleys of Oscars. Coppola, with just The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, had massive monetary reward and every prize Hollywood can give. Martin Scorsese has never had a hit, and never won an Oscar. There are obvious reactions – initial incredulity, then the realisation that being overlooked hardly matters. No one in their right mind would think less of Scorsese's great work because he was not even nominated in 1976 for directing Taxi Driver (John G Avildsen won that year for Rocky).

But I think it matters to the lonely, insecure Scorsese, and has mattered increasingly in the years since Raging Bull, when there has been more room for critical debate over the quality of his films. Not that the directorial brilliance or the passion for film are ever questioned. But is it possible that GoodFellas and Casino, say, are the marking-time of a man who is obsessed with the rowdy male bonding of gangsters but has not really advanced that theme in 20 years? Was Cape Fear an improvement on the original, or a gloatingly cruel remake that had insufficient reason for being made. Did The Last Temptation of Christ or Kundun really uncover spiritual experience, or were they more notable for the attempt? Did Bringing Out the Dead seem like Scorsese, or a smart student imitating him? Was The Age of Innocence a masterpiece, or a plodding pursuit of Edith Wharton compelled to rely on voice-over narrative?

That last film in particular raised the question as to whether Scorsese has ever been fully interested in his female characters. He is a man who has been married and divorced five times (those wives included actress Isabella Rossellini and his own producer, Barbara De Fina). There are two children from early marriages and he seems to be a fond, if rather distant, father. Yet Marty has never managed to really escape his own solitude. It is a very large question and one that confronts more than just Scorsese: has the generation of movie-mad kids ever known enough about real life?

Gangs of New York could be a box-office blockbuster that wins a hatful of Oscars. It could be a profound study of the jungle that has produced modern cities (and New York is now unusually conscious of that history). Or it could be a very personal film masquerading as mainstream entertainment. For good and ill, Martin Scorsese is about to discover how posterity will judge him: as a young sensation or an artist for all time. metal hair matches the smart suits (Italian, no doubt). Marty doesn't throw money around, but he has become a charcoal dandy – you feel it's a look he has decided on, as his own character. He could even be mistaken for a producer.

David Thomson's 'New Biographical Dictionary of Film' is published by Little, Brown at £25