The Subtle Art of the Scorsese Cameo

About 40 minutes into his 1976 grimy neo-noir drama Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese appears in the back seat of protagonist Travis Bickle’s cab with a series of demands. He orders Bickle (Robert De Niro) to pull over to the curb, put the meter back on, and just sit. “I don’t care what I have to pay,” Scorsese says in a pushy New Yorker’s staccato. “I’m not getting out.” He then directs Bickle’s gaze toward a silhouette of a woman in a second-floor window, explains that it’s his wife in another man’s apartment, and—with an eerie calm—details his plan to kill her. “You must think I’m pretty sick,” he repeats over and over again, egging himself into a fit of laughter. It’s an unnerving moment in the film, one that mirrors Bickle’s own rage toward women, and it deepens the low thump of anxiety that pervades the film.

Ironically, Scorsese wasn’t supposed to play that part. After the actor Scorsese cast, George Memmoli, was unexpectedly injured, De Niro encouraged the director to take the role himself. “It was a labor of love, a film that was made for us and not a popular film in the sense that we could take chances and see what happened,” Scorsese told The Hollywood Reporter in a 2016 oral history of the film. “If worse comes to worst, we could reshoot with another actor.” In the end, the scene stayed in. What was originally a quick fix became an early blueprint for the many cameos Scorsese would make over the course of his legendary 56-year career. The role of “passenger watching silhouette” is anonymous, more atmospheric than plot-driven in purpose. He’s an everyday Joe, part of the masses. And most importantly: He has a penchant for micromanaging. His character is there to drive forward the themes of the film, to emphasize an everyman’s experience, and to remind us all who, in this particular telling of the story, is boss.

Welcome to Scorsese Week

One of the masters of American cinema is back in theaters this Friday. In celebration of the release of Killers of the Flower Moon, The Ringer welcomes you to Scorsese Week. 

• The 20th Century, as Told by Martin Scorsese
• Martin Scorsese’s 81 Greatest Movie Characters, Ranked
• The Story of Martin Scorsese’s Most Forgotten Film
• The Subtle Art of the Scorsese Cameo
• Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio: An Essential Pairing
• Martin Scorsese’s Great Crossroads
• The Legend of John Joseph Mathews

Scorsese by no means invented the directorial cameo. So long as cameras have existed, the people behind them have put their friends, their family, and themselves into their work to quell budgets and egos. (And also: because they could.) But once Alfred Hitchcock turned the practice into a type of visual signature in the 1920s, it became de rigueur for elite filmmakers to enshrine their mythic reputations in their work as a way of winking at superfans. Over the years, the device has been deployed as a self-referential gag, an excuse to offer unsolicited hot takes, or a way to simply get weird. But Scorsese’s appearances on screen tend to be swift, subtle, and illustrative of his connection to the emotional story of the movie in question, a reinforcement of his slick style and dedication to constructing authentic worlds within his films.

Scorsese’s earliest work was inspired by his late-’50s upbringing in the tenements of Little Italy, a Manhattan neighborhood he said was “steeped in a kind of organized crime” and violence that he missed “by chance.” His cameos during this initial period gesture toward his own conflicted relationship with that culture. In his 1967 directorial debut, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, his uncredited blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance as a member of J.R.’s carousing inner circle is less an authorial stamp than it is an insider’s nod to his own lived experience.

His 1973 follow-up, Mean Streets, brought an even stronger perspective on fealties to family and faith and, perhaps uncoincidentally, was bookended by appearances from the director himself. The film opens with a short speech from Scorsese’s disembodied voice, meant as a kind of conscience for protagonist Charlie Cappa (Harvey Keitel): “You don’t make up for your sins in the church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit, and you know it.” In the final scene, Scorsese appears as a gangster who kisses his gun before firing it into the car of the lead characters—a dramatic conclusion that was drawn from real-life experience. “I was with these people in this car,” the director said in an interview with GQ, referring to his youth in the Lower East Side. “Told my friend—we were in the back seat—‘It’s 2 o’clock in the morning. This is nonsense; let’s go home.’ ‘Yeah yeah, OK, let’s go home.’ Car drove off, and they got shot.” Though Scorsese has waved off his decision to play the shooter as just a matter of logistical necessity, the cameo spotlights the nonsensical violence of his upbringing. The person shooting out of a car could just as easily be a person shooting a scene about it—it’s all the luck of the draw.

Scorsese applied that same everyman philosophy in his slew of ’70s hits that followed. In Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, he’s a guy in a diner. In Taxi Driver, he’s a man who’s succumbed to the same rageful logic as the film’s antihero. But by the time Raging Bull debuted in 1980, the director’s cameos had shifted to engage less with his upbringing and more with his budding career. In the buildup to the film’s production, Scorsese had been licking his wounds from the colossal failure that was New York, New York, and he was also in dire medical straits. Shortly after a trip to the Telluride Film Festival, he had collapsed in New York as a result of a bad batch of cocaine mixed with his asthma medication and prescription drugs. He was recovering in the hospital after nearly dying when De Niro visited and reminded him of a pitch the actor had pleaded for years earlier, during the making of Alice. Would Scorsese finally direct the story of disgraced middleweight champion Jake LaMotta? Scorsese, now relating to that sense of rock bottom, agreed, later saying that he made the film as if it was the end of his life: “Over. Suicide film. I didn’t care if I made another movie. … Every day on the shoot, ‘This is the last one, and we’re going for it.’” His voice and torso appear briefly in the final scene of the film as he plays a stage manager who checks in on LaMotta (played by De Niro) as LaMotta’s reciting Terry Malloy’s iconic “coulda been a contender” speech from On the Waterfront. To the average viewer, it’s a throwaway moment, a brief interruption in De Niro’s stirring performance. But with the context of Scorsese’s professional precarity, the scene could be just as much about the director’s fear of failure as it was about LaMotta’s.

Commercial and critical reception to Raging Bull was mixed, but the film was nonetheless nominated for eight Academy Awards in 1980, winning two, and it gave Scorsese a newfound confidence in his identity as a director. That boost ushered in a new type of Scorsese cameo, where the filmmaker began casting himself as meta auteurs: directors, photographers, dispatchers, and behind-the-scenes observers who frame the events of the film in real time. In 1982’s The King of Comedy, he’s a TV director prepping Tony Randall for a guest stint on a talk show, barking at him to “take the tissues out of your collar.” Three years later, he showed up in After Hours as a uniformed spotlight operator in the rafters of the infamous Club Berlin. He plays a photographer in both the 1993 period piece The Age of Innocence and the 2011 family film Hugo. In 1999’s Bringing Out the Dead, Scorsese guides his ambulance-driver protagonists over the dispatch radio. And in 2004’s The Aviator, he’s the voice of the projectionist who buzzes into Howard Hughes’s screening room during Hell’s Angels’ postproduction. In practically all of these appearances, Scorsese asserts his authority to guide characters and camera frames—a skill he became more famous for with every new project.

Scorsese’s prolific career since the 1980s has cemented him as a titan in his industry—the rare talent who can conjure far-off worlds with visual ingenuity and shape narratives with powerful depth. And after years atop that comfortable perch, the director has occasionally allowed himself to venture beyond the roles of “common nobody” and “bossy guy.” He appears in 2002’s Gangs of New York, not as a street urchin, but as the fancy uptown aristocrat whose home Jenny Everdeane (Cameron Diaz) robs. Similarly, in 2016’s Silence, he has a split-second role as a bearded Dutch trader. Given Scorsese’s uncanny ability to pull personal threads from vast, historical epics, these appearances may very well be an acknowledgment of how far he’s come since roaming the blocks of Little Italy. Whatever the case, Scorsese is far too detailed a filmmaker to ever pass up an opportunity for a sly self-referential bit.