Martin Scorsese is the director of some of American cinema's most striking works, including the celebrated Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and GoodFellas. He first became interested in movies while growing up in Manhattan's Little Italy. Prohibited by poor health from indulging in neighborhood sports, the asthmatic Scorsese turned to the cinema as a refuge from the hectic ethnic environment. He was especially impressed by Hollywood productions of the 1940s. "There's a great similarity in the way I look at reality and the things I saw in the musicals and the dark `noir' films," he told a Christian Science Monitor interviewer. "My reality and film reality are interchangeable."

By age fourteen Scorsese was planning a career as a Roman Catholic priest, though his expulsion from a junior seminary (the charge was unruly behavior) resulted in his transfer to a Bronx high school. Upon graduation he had hoped...