The only movie genre Martin Scorsese gave up watching

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Tue 18 March 2025 19:45, UK

Martin Scorsese has witnessed cinema evolve drastically over the decades since his emergence in the 1960s with his indie directorial debut, Who’s That Knocking at My Door?. As Hollywood shifted towards a blockbuster-driven future, Scorsese carved out a middle ground—creating films that were both accessible and artful. This balance has earned him a rare status: beloved by serious cinephiles and casual moviegoers alike.

The filmmaker is most comfortable making crime films or intense dramas, with movies like Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas standing as some of Scorsese’s best and some of the greatest movies ever made in the history of cinema. 

Scorsese has enjoyed an incredibly impressive tenure in Hollywood, and while he might not have experienced as much box office success as contemporaries like James Cameron or Steven Spielberg, the filmmaker has shown an interest in sticking to a more classic form of filmmaking, refusing to use extensive special effects and favouring complex storytelling and character analysis over intense action sequences.

In fact, action is a genre that Scorsese once claimed he was no longer a fan of, even if several years after this claim, he went on to direct The Departed, a remake of the Hong Kong action movie Infernal Affairs. It seems as though Scorsese is more turned off by Hollywood blockbuster action movies that use a shameless amount of special effects because, as far as Hong Kong action goes, Scorsese seems to be a big fan, citing The Killer as an unbeatable piece of filmmaking in a 2006 interview with Cinema Blend. 

However, back in 1997, he explained his disinterest in action during an interview with The New York Times alongside Woody Allen. The filmmaker recalled, “There is a friend of mine who said recently, ‘Do you remember when there were movies where something would happen, it was like a climactic thing, then there would be a pause, there would be something slower, and then there’d be a big moment?’ It would build. It is not that way anymore. It is climax, climax, climax, you know, and you are being pummeled. It isn’t why the bad guy dies now. It is how he dies.”

Scorsese makes an interesting point here, and it’s undeniable that many modern action films prioritise thrilling yet ultimately unstimulating action sequences that focus on the ‘how’ rather than the ‘why’, which Scorsese simply can’t stand. He added, “The technique should never lead you. I stopped watching action films about six years ago. I tried looking at a few, but it is all technique. It isn’t interesting. I would never go in and say that we’re going to make a whole film with digital techniques. It just wouldn’t be right. I wouldn’t know. I don’t have that kind of vision here. Those movies are too punishing after a while. Too much noise.”

It hardly feels surprising to discover that Scorsese has openly disregarded the action genre considering the fact that he has also dissed Marvel cinema in recent years for similar reasons. He compared these action-packed movies to “theme parks” in an interview with Empire, adding, “It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”

Evidently, if a film is to impress Scorsese, it has to do a lot more than feature endless dramatic fights, car chases, and explosions. 

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