Scorsese on Scorsese (1989)
The director's own account, film by film, assembled from interviews. Intention straight from the source — with the usual caveats.
- book
- interview
- scorsese
Scorsese on Scorsese, edited by David Thompson and Ian Christie (Faber & Faber, 1989; revised editions since). Scorsese narrating his own filmography, from the Little Italy shorts onward, in the Faber "directors on themselves" series. Publisher page ↗
Good for
Intention and film-memory: what he thought he was quoting, what the studio fought him on, how Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) fit between Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. The Mean Streets pages (pp. 36–49) are the densest account of that film anywhere in the library. Feeds Martin Scorsese, Alice — the prologue and the Personal context note — no filmmaker documents his own influences more willingly.
Handle with care
Which edition. The scan in Reel is not the 1989 first edition. It is a later revised edition that runs to Casino and Kundun, with a filmography that credits every song in Mean Streets. Its text for the 1970s chapters matches the first edition as far as can be checked; page numbers may not.
Pagination. Two printed pages are missing from the scan between pp. 84 and 86. Up to p. 83
the scan runs two pages ahead of the printed book; from p. 87 it matches. Checked against
running heads in September 2026. tools/reel.py and tools/verify-citations.py correct for
it; the library's own caution note on this book gives different offsets and is wrong.
Like Truffaut, it's a self-portrait: interviews compiled with the subject's cooperation, decades of retelling smoothing the anecdotes. Cross-check production claims against Biskind and Burstyn.
In the library
Held in Reel, the local research library of scanned and indexed film books. 10 parts, 1,012 indexed passages. Page numbering is hand-checked.
Cite passages from this book as sos <page> — for example sos 214.
Caution. Scorsese on Scorsese paginates two ways: offset 24 through most of the book, 26 in the early chapters, because two printed pages are missing from this scan. Check the running head before citing anything before about p.60.
Strongest on
Measured, not guessed. Each figure is how much denser this book is on a concept than the library average — so common words don't crowd out real specialisms.
- Colour — 4.0× the library average (71 passages)
- Spoken language — 2.1× the library average (75 passages)
- Chronology — 1.7× the library average (195 passages)
- Mise en scène — 1.5× the library average (62 passages)