Martin Scorsese in Taormina on His Sicilian Heritage: Growing up ‘I Was Really Living in a Sicilian Village. It Just Happened to Be Downtown Manhattan’

Roots and religion are very much on the mind of Martin Scorsese as the Oscar-winning director is being honored with a lifetime achievement award by the Taormina Film Festival in Sicily, where he has family roots.

Scorsese, 82, is back in Sicily after he last travelled to the Italian island in October 2024 to start shooting a doc that takes its cue from the recent discovery in Sicilian waters of the wreck of a large sunken ship called Marausa 2 dating to the third century A.D. On that occasion, he visited the town of Polizzi Generosa, home of his paternal grandparents, Teresa and Francesco Scorsese, before they immigrated to New York at the turn of the last century.

Scorsese is also currently involved in two religion-related projects partly shot in Sicily. A feature-length doc titled “Aldeas – A New Story,” featuring Pope Francis‘ final in-depth on-camera interview, which will have a Sicilian component. And the second season of his documentary series, “Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints” that is now shooting in the town of Custonaci, in Western Sicily, site of a 15th century sanctuary.

Scorsese sat with Variety in Taormina and spoke about his ties to Sicily and why they are getting stronger.

Can you talk to me about your connection to Sicily and how it feels to be in Taormina getting this award?

Growing up, my first formative years, even before my early teenage [years], I was really living in a Sicilian village. It just happened to be downtown in Manhattan. What I mean by that is the thinking, the behaviour, the language. All of this was very, very much part of who I am. Then we became American, kind of. In a way I think that for me that [Sicilian connection] combined with the religious experiences, it has propted a curiosity and a search as to my own identity. As to who I am.

There is so much of that. So much of the foundation is Sicilian: Sicilian thinking; Sicilian behaviour; the nature of the Sicilians I grew up. I’ve acted other ways. But I can’t get away from where I come from. So it’s part of a process of finding that out. Of that constant curiosity about all of that. What would have happened if my grandparents never came to America?

I’d [previously] only spent a few weeks in Sicily my whole life. As things are winding down, since I’m 82, and I had the opportunity of going to Sicily in October and November – working on the archeology film and on the Pope Francis film – I tend to find a kind of comfort, I think. I am looking to where I might belong. There’s a couple of places in the streets of New York where I could belong. But that’s about it. Whether it’s the upper class groups in New York City; I can be with them. New York’s intellectual journalists or writers. But that’s it. Basically, I can’t be with any others. I don’t belong there, but I am there. And so I just try to not be anybody else and just be myself, really. And myself kind of starts here [in Sicily].

I am American. But maybe there is a way of getting back in touch with some of those comforts. Those moments of comfort and love that I felt with my family, my immediate family in particular, in those buildings, in the slums.

Are those roots connected to an archeological relic that is at the bottom of the Mediterranean?

Yes, I think so. What I mean by that is: who were the Etruscans? Who were the Sicels? Who where the Romans. To a certain extent: who were the Greeks? If I want to read something that cleanses the mind, somehow – aside from religious readings and that sort of thing – I’m always back to the Greek tragedies: it’s Aeschylus, Sofocles and Euripides. I’ve read them all in different translations. I just keep going back and re-reading them. I’m exhilarated by them, but also fascinated. I like to immerse myself in that thinking and that world, and that was here. Here and in Greece.

Will this give special significance to the fact that you are going to be awarded a prize in Taormina’s Ancient Greek theatre tonight?

Absolutely. [In the theatre] that was renovated by the Romans. And we saw the columns under the water two days ago. The columns that are there now, some of them have a kind of green-tray colour, they come from a place called Chios [the Greek island]. And some of the columns are still there. But the columns that are under water right now are part of a shipwreck. I believe they’ve estimated that the ship that was carrying them was carrying 70 tons of these things. But again, it’s really the ship, ultimately, from the ancient world to the world of Christianity and hence the films on “The Saints.”

How so?

The idea of “The Saints” is not necessarily to tell stories about saints that come in and glow in the dark. There’s a lot of legend, that sort of thing, and we take that into account. But here is what Pope Francis told me: “The Saints are the people you never see.” 

And so that’s interesting. But the stories of “The Saints” are about fate. It always goes [back] to fate. And how that [notion of fate] came out of the ancient world. The change it must have been, those three or four hundred years, or a thousand years, that created the world that we are in now. That always fascinates me. I am going back to the roots of that.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.