If at all there is a director who makes me want to become a film director as well, it is Martin Scorcese. He is acknowledged unanimously by Hollywood, as the best living American film director, but they just don't know what to do with him (as if there are good enough materials these days). Worst still, the Oscar never offered him anything.

My own experience with Scorcese began with watching Casino on big screen, even though I may have caught a few of his films before on TV or video. I went back for this one three times. Then, I scrambled around looking for his other films, reading books about him and scrutinising reviews on his films. I was hooked.

Amongst some fan and majority of the critics, he was sometimes referred to as a director of Arthouse Films, a genre that has nothing to do with me. Art was supposed to be pretentious as far as my taste is concerned (I know, very juvenile opinion). But Scorcese is different. His film is realistic and very very entertaining, easily because the scenes and the characters are really involving. He pulls you in his film, you are not merely an audience, but a witness. I still think his first major film, Mean Street, is his best, after Raging Bull of course. It is funny and very character driven. There's not much plot or story in it, but it had many great scenes.

These scenes made me curious like no other directors ever did; how did they wrote that scene, or how it was shot?; Why did he filter the shot that way?; And why does the camera keep moving in this scene;. His use of slow motion, especially, was far more meaningful than Peckinpah, who, to me, used it merely to glorify violence.

Scorcese, being born to staunch Catholic parents (Italian American) wanted to become a priest. He entered a seminary in 1956, but the passion for film won him over and he graduated from NYU in 1964 as a film Major. He got a job editing Woodstock (1970) and directing exploitation flick, Boxcar Bertha (1972) With the break he got directing Mean Streets (1973), he found a great collaborators in the form of Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel. Mean Streets did fairly well amongst the audience, but grabbed attention from the critics.

It was not supposed to be a bumpy ride for Scorcese after that, as critical success would have easily paved way to easy breaks and success. He directed greater films like Alice Doesnt live Here Anymore (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), New York New York (1977) and Raging Bull (1980). Great career, one might say, but it took him one long torturous journey to get all of them make. Read his interviews and biographies and you will get the idea.

The eighties saw the lighter side of him, when he made King of Comedy (1983), After Hours (1985), and The Color Of Money (1986); and he went back to personal filmmaking with Last Temptation of Christ, perhaps the most controversial film of the eighties. He did one commercial thriller, Cape Fear (1991), which was a remake. His Goodfellas (1990) was a revisit of his favorite territory, gangsters. He went back there again in 1995 with Casino, which looks at greed and power, more than just a gangster flick. He is still working, very hard, to make the kind of movies he wanted to make. He is still fighting for them. It will never end. It probably never will. Perhaps thats what the real joy of filmmaking is all about. If it is all about struggle and pain, then Scorceses career had been full of it.