Scorsese on Scorsese

by David Thompson

Confessions of a cinematic sinner.

For you if

you want to understand how a filmmaker's obsessions become a body of work

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Scorsese on Scorsese is the filmmaker in conversation with his own obsessions — faith, guilt, violence, and redemption — told with the precision of a scholar and the fever of a cinephile. Through interviews and reflections, Scorsese walks us through the making of his films and the inner architecture of his vision: how movies became his moral language. It’s intimate, exacting, and electric with reverence for the medium that saved him.

Where This Book Lives

Themes: creative process faith and doubt

Related Viewing

Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.

Silence(2016)

dir. Martin Scorsese

What does God's silence sound like?

Two 17th-century Portuguese Jesuit priests travel to Japan to find their missing mentor and continue his mission, only to be captured amid a brutal state campaign to eradicate Christianity. Adapted from Shusaku Endo's novel.

Why it’s here: Punk in staying inside the missionary's doubt rather than resolving it — apostasy here isn't simple failure, it's a real moral question the film refuses to answer for you. Pedagogical in showing how colonial-era evangelism collided with a society determined to survive it, at real human cost on both sides.

Letterboxd ↗

Same pattern, different era

Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.

Blankets

Craig Thompson