10. Martin Scorsese's Religious Symbolism
It's one of modern Hollywood's more famous origin stories: Martin Scorsese almost joined the priesthood before deciding to become a filmmaker, a slightly less holy but slightly more wholesome career path if modern Catholicism is anything to go by. Even if you didn't know that, the religious influence on the Raging Bull filmmaker is evident from even a cursory glance of his filmography and the characters he's chosen to make movies about: Italian-Americans (Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Italianamerican - which is about his own Catholic parents), Irish-Americans (The Departed, Gangs Of New York), hell, even Jesus himself in The Last Temptation Of Christ. The recurring themes of suffering, doubt and sacrifice are all there, even from his earliest short The Big Shave, in which a man persists in shaving and cutting his face until the only dry spot is his own neck, which he saves for the big finish. Scorsese usually deals in characters with huge internal conflicts, as many people of faith have, as in Harvey Keitel's character in Mean Streets who tries to square his life of crime and debauchery with God by confessing at church, or the protagonists of the Paul Schrader-written Taxi Driver and Bringing Out The Dead, who both live in a world they perceive as filled with sin and unnecessary suffering. Schrader also wrote Scorsese's alternate-Biblical-reality The Last Temptation of Christ in which Willem Defoe's Messiah struggles with trying to get out of dying on the cross and saving humanity. Even in Goodfellas, a film where religion isn't often explicitly mentioned and the lead Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) doesn't express any particular guilt about his crimes, the ritualistic and familial nature of the Mafia in which he lives and breathes can easily be seen as a religion in and of itself.