Widely considered the greatest living director working today, Martin Scorsese grew up in New York’s Little Italy neighborhood as a young, asthmatic kid obsessed with movies; he later channeled that love into a six-decade career that has changed (and turbo-charged) American filmmaking several times over.

Scorsese would help establish the gritty, personal “New Hollywood” style of the 1970s with films such as Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976), both starring his friend and longtime collaborator Robert De Niro. Their work together on those films, along with Raging Bull (1980), The King of Comedy (1982), Goodfellas (1990), Cape Fear (1991) and Casino (1995), helped establish them as the ideal actor-director duo. Scorsese would later duplicate that dynamic with Leonardo DiCaprio in films such as Gangs of New York (2001), The Departed (2006) — which won Scorsese his long-deserved Best Director Oscar — and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013).

Though he’s largely known for modernizing the gangster film, Scorsese has also balanced chronicles of streetwise wise guys with more spiritual dramas (The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun) and documentaries ranging from The Last Waltz (1978) to the Bob Dylan portrait No Direction Home (2005). “The cinema gives us something precious,” he’s said. “A record of ourselves in time, documented and interpreted.” —David Fear