On the night of February 25, 2007, the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood held its breath over one envelope.
Inside that envelope sat the Best Director result, the prize Martin Scorsese had chased for three decades.
Five times before, the Academy had nominated him for directing and then handed the statuette to somebody else.
Presenting the award were Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, his fellow seventies trailblazers.
When his name was finally read aloud, the entire room rose in a roar of relief and affection.
The film that carried him there was a remake, a Boston crime story about two men betraying opposite sides.
It starred Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and a Jack Nicholson performance of pure coiled menace.
It had opened the previous October to glowing reviews and the strongest box office of Scorsese’s long career.
Nobody expected a hard-edged remake of a Hong Kong thriller to become his crowning achievement.
Yet the Academy gave The Departed four Academy Awards that night, including Best Picture itself.
For Scorsese personally, the directing prize was the summit of a chase stretching back to 1980.
For the film, the night confirmed something audiences had already decided the previous autumn.
For the industry, it proved a remake could stand entirely on its own two feet.
Scorsese, at sixty-four, accepted the directing prize with the dazed air of a man checking for tricks.
He later joked, in paraphrase, that the presenters should please check the envelope name twice.
The moment closed one of the longest and most discussed waiting stories in American cinema.
It also crowned a film obsessed with masks, loyalty and the daily price of pretending.
Nobody in the city wears his own face.
To understand that night, the story starts years earlier, with a celebrated thriller from Hong Kong.
A Mirror Held Up by Hong Kong
In 2002, Hong Kong filmmakers Alan Mak and Andrew Lau released a lean thriller called Infernal Affairs.
Their film told of a gangster planted inside the police and a policeman planted inside the gang.
The two hidden men circled each other for years, each hunting a reflection he could not recognize.
Infernal Affairs became a phenomenon at home, sweeping top honors at the Hong Kong Film Awards.
Many credited it with reviving a local film industry that had been losing ground for years.
Its directors, Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, had built the story as a parable about identity and hell.
In January 2003, Warner Bros. and producers Brad Pitt and Brad Grey bought the remake rights for a reported 1.75 million dollars.
The studio hired screenwriter William Monahan, a Massachusetts native who knew Boston’s streets and speech firsthand.
Monahan kept the elegant mirror structure but rebuilt everything around America’s Irish-American underworld.
He rooted the story in South Boston, with its parish loyalties, family codes and long memories.
Monahan had grown up in Dorchester and worked as a novelist and journalist before screenwriting.
That upbringing let him write Boston speech from memory rather than from tourist research.
He also threaded in shadows of real Boston crime, including the era of gang boss Whitey Bulger.
The result was less a copy than a translation, faithful in shape and entirely American in voice.
The Script That Pulled a Director In
Martin Scorsese read Monahan’s screenplay and, by most accounts, admired it enough to sign on quickly.
That admiration mattered, because Scorsese was finishing The Aviator and had his choice of projects.
Producer Brad Pitt had been tentatively lined up to play the police mole, Colin Sullivan.
Pitt stepped aside, later explaining that the part belonged to a younger actor, and stayed on as a producer instead.
His Plan B company remained attached, giving the film patient backing through development.
The budget settled at a reported ninety million dollars, substantial but hardly extravagant for its cast.
Warner Bros. officially greenlit the production in early 2005, four years after the Hong Kong original appeared.
Scorsese brought his lifelong collaborators, editor Thelma Schoonmaker and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, along for the ride.
Composer Howard Shore, fresh from Middle-earth, agreed to build a score around twanging guitar and dread.
Casting Two Sides of the Same Coin
Leonardo DiCaprio took the role of Billy Costigan, the state trooper sent undercover into the mob.
It was his third consecutive film with Scorsese, after Gangs of New York and The Aviator.
Matt Damon, who grew up across the river in Cambridge, became Colin Sullivan, the mob’s polished plant.
Director Kenneth Lonergan reportedly suggested Damon, whose local roots gave the double life an easy authenticity.
Jack Nicholson agreed to play Frank Costello, the smiling crime lord pulling both men’s strings.
Monahan shaped Costello partly on Whitey Bulger, the real Boston boss long protected by corrupt connections.
Nicholson, true to legend, improvised freely and kept younger co-stars pleasantly off balance.
Robert De Niro was approached for Captain Queenan but declined to direct his own film, The Good Shepherd.
Martin Sheen stepped in and gave Queenan a weary decency that anchors the film’s moral weather.
Mark Wahlberg, raised in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, played the foul-mouthed and fiercely loyal Sergeant Dignam.
Vera Farmiga became Dr. Madolyn Madden, the psychiatrist unknowingly treating both hidden men.
Alec Baldwin and Ray Winstone rounded out an ensemble with barely a weak seat in it.
Anthony Anderson played Trooper Brown, Costigan’s academy classmate, with a warmth that matters late in the story.
James Badge Dale took the smaller role of Trooper Barrigan, whose loyalties viewers should watch closely.
Even the smallest parts feel inhabited, because nearly everyone on screen behaves like a Bostonian protecting something.
Boston Streets, New York Interiors
Principal photography began on April 18, 2005, with Boston itself supplying the film’s unmistakable face.
Crews shot on real South Boston streets, capturing the triple-decker houses, bars and church spires Monahan described.
Many interiors, however, were built and filmed in New York, which then offered friendlier production incentives.
The blend is nearly invisible, because editor and cinematographer stitched the two cities into one believable Boston.
Former Boston detective Tom Duffy, who spent three decades investigating the Irish mob, advised the production.
His presence kept police procedure, undercover ritual and street detail grounded in lived experience.
The gold dome of the Massachusetts State House became a recurring emblem of official power watching below.
Ballhaus shot the film in a restless, prowling style, forever sliding past faces that might be lying.
Scorsese hid the letter X throughout the frames, a quiet visual omen borrowed from the 1932 Scarface.
The Sound of the Story
The film announces its allegiances early, rolling its credits over a classic Rolling Stones recording.
Boston’s own Dropkick Murphys supply the signature blast of bagpipe punk energy heard at key moments.
Their featured song, its title borrowed from a Woody Guthrie fragment, became inseparable from the film’s identity.
Howard Shore’s score works the opposite way, all low guitar figures and gathering unease.
The two sounds, street noise and quiet dread, mirror the film’s two hidden lives.
Schoonmaker’s editing keeps those lives on a collision course, often within a single sequence.
She cuts on phone calls, glances and doorways, letting information arrive a breath before disaster.
The approach made a dialogue-heavy story feel like an action film running on pure nerves.
Scene: The Warehouse of Listening Ears
Midway through the film comes a set piece built almost entirely from telephones and held breath.
Costello’s crew gathers in a shadowed warehouse to sell stolen microprocessors to visiting buyers.
What the gang does not know is that state police cameras and microphones are trained on every corner.
Billy Costigan stands inside the room, a wire’s throw from discovery, feeding warnings to his handlers.
Outside the net, Colin Sullivan directs the surveillance while secretly protecting the very men being watched.
At the operation’s peak, a phone rings in the darkness and the whole room seems to stop breathing.
Each mole then begins steering his own side away from the trap he can see forming.
Costello senses the leak without knowing its shape, and his jokes curdle into threats.
Costigan, in turn, realizes the police operation is being guided by somebody feeding Costello information.
Neither man can name the other, yet for one suspended minute they are practically shouting through walls.
Scorsese cuts faster and faster between the warehouse, the surveillance vans and the two sweating faces.
The deal dissolves into confusion, and both sides retreat convinced that a ghost walks among them.
It is the film in miniature, two betrayals canceling each other out in real time.
Scene: A Rooftop Reckoning
Late in the story, Costigan lures Sullivan to the rooftop of the building where Captain Queenan died.
There, at gunpoint, the undercover trooper finally arrests the man he has hunted without ever seeing clearly.
Costigan announces, in essence, that recordings exist tying Sullivan directly to Costello’s orders.
Before the arrest, he calls Madolyn and tells her where the proof will be waiting.
The envelope he entrusted to her has quietly become the film’s most dangerous object.
Sullivan, handcuffed on the roof where his own orders once sent a good man falling, finally looks cornered.
For a moment, the mirror cracks, and both men stare at the single person who understands their lives.
Scene: The Elevator Doors
Then the elevator carries them down toward custody, the longest short ride in either man’s story.
When the doors open at the lobby, a second hidden man is waiting, and one brief shot ends everything.
The film refuses to linger, letting the closing doors say what dialogue never could.
The Autumn the City Talked Back
The Departed premiered at New York’s Ziegfeld Theatre on September 26, 2006.
Warner Bros. released it across the United States on October 6, into a crowded autumn marketplace.
It opened at number one with nearly twenty-seven million dollars, Scorsese’s fourth chart-topping debut.
Word of mouth proved unusually strong for such a bruising, talk-filled crime picture.
By the end of its run it had earned about 291.5 million dollars worldwide.
Against its ninety-million-dollar budget, that made it the highest-grossing film of Scorsese’s career to that point.
Critics responded in kind, with review aggregators later settling around a ninety-one percent approval rating.
Many praised DiCaprio’s frayed intensity, Nicholson’s theatrical menace and Wahlberg’s live-wire supporting turn.
Others simply marveled that a sixty-three-year-old director had made the fastest, angriest film of the season.
The Night of Four Oscars
At the Golden Globes in January 2007, Scorsese won Best Director from six nominations for the film.
The Academy then gave The Departed five nominations, including one for Wahlberg as Best Supporting Actor.
On February 25, William Monahan won Best Adapted Screenplay for his Boston reinvention of the Hong Kong story.
Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s editor since Raging Bull, won her third Academy Award for the film’s editing.
Graham King accepted Best Picture, completing a climb few remakes have ever managed.
And Scorsese finally won Best Director, the personal prize that had eluded him across five previous nominations.
The film’s four wins made it the year’s defining Oscar story, larger than any single category.
It also collected six nominations at the British Academy awards, evidence of its reach beyond Boston.
By most accounts, it remains the most recent Best Picture winner to have debuted atop the box office.
For Graham King’s production company, the victory capped a gamble on foreign material few studios would touch.
Even two decades later, chart watchers in October 2026 reported it climbing streaming top-ten lists again.
Why It Still Grips
Part of the endurance is craft, a machine of cross-cutting, withheld information and perfectly timed revelations.
Part is the X hidden in windows and corridors, quietly telling attentive viewers who is marked.
Part is the final shot of a rat on a balcony rail, symbolism Scorsese cheerfully admitted was unsubtle.
Mostly, though, the film endures because its question keeps renewing itself in every workplace and precinct.
Critics at the time, Roger Ebert among them, wrote about its undercurrents of guilt and absolution.
Stanley Kauffmann pointed to identity itself as the film’s true and ancient subject.
Both men he deceives demand Costigan’s loyalty, and both sides of the law feel strangely like family.
Nobody in the city wears his own face.
Two decades on, the pretending has only become easier, and the film knows it.
Pretending, eventually, costs more than truth ever would.
Martin Scorsese: The Kid from Little Italy
A Sickly Boy and a Thousand Movies
Martin Scorsese was born on November 17, 1942, in Queens and raised on Elizabeth Street in Manhattan’s Little Italy.
Severe asthma kept the boy indoors while other children claimed the sidewalks outside.
So he lived at the movies instead, studying westerns, musicals and crime pictures frame by hungry frame.
The neighborhood around him, meanwhile, was full of priests, small-time hoods and fiercely watchful families.
Those twin educations, the screen and the street, would eventually fuse into one unmistakable style.
The Parents in the Front Row
His father, Charles Scorsese, worked as an actor in his later years after time in New York’s garment trade.
His mother, Catherine Scorsese, became beloved playing mothers and grandmothers in her son’s films, most memorably in Goodfellas.
Both parents appeared on screen with an ease that suggests the camera was always a family member.
Charles Scorsese died in 1993.
Catherine Scorsese died in 1997.
By then, their kitchen-table storytelling had already shaped a national cinema more than they ever knew.
Film School and Mean Streets
Scorsese studied film at New York University, where the European New Wave rewired his sense of possibility.
His early features mixed documentary grit with the confessionals and street corners of his childhood.
Mean Streets, released in 1973, announced him fully formed: restless camera, rock music and Catholic guilt.
It also began his defining collaboration with Robert De Niro, the other kid from downtown.
Taxi Driver and the Palme d’Or
Taxi Driver arrived in 1976 and won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
Its portrait of a lonely cab driver sliding toward violence divided audiences and electrified critics.
New York, New York followed and stumbled commercially, a bruising lesson in hubris and excess.
By the decade’s end, Scorsese’s health and confidence had both taken serious damage.
Raging Bull and the Long Comeback
De Niro helped pull him back to work on the life of boxer Jake LaMotta.
Raging Bull, released in 1980, was shot in smoky black and white and cut like a fever.
It disappointed commercially at first, then climbed steadily into arguments about America’s greatest film.
That pattern, early resistance followed by canonization, would repeat throughout his career.
Gangsters, Gentlemen and Silence
Through the nineties he moved between crime epics like Casino and quieter period pieces.
The Last Temptation of Christ gave way, years later, to Kundun and eventually to Silence.
Silence, his film about persecuted missionaries in Japan, took nearly three decades to reach the screen.
Its patience showed a director willing to wait longer for a film than most careers last.
In 2019, The Irishman reunited him with De Niro while testing new digital de-aging tools.
The picture played like a long confession delivered at the end of a violent century.
The Years of Almost
Goodfellas conquered audiences in 1990, yet the directing Oscar went elsewhere that year.
The Last Temptation of Christ brought protests, bans and another nomination without a win.
Gangs of New York and The Aviator earned him further directing nominations in the new century.
Each loss added another layer to the public story of the Academy’s most conspicuous oversight.
Colleagues began calling him the greatest living American director without an Oscar, half compliment and half itch.
A Protector of Other People’s Films
In 1990, Scorsese helped found The Film Foundation, dedicated to preserving cinema’s fragile history.
The foundation has since helped restore hundreds of films from around the world.
His World Cinema Project championed neglected masterpieces from Africa, Asia and Latin America.
For Scorsese, directing was never only ambition; it was also stewardship of an art form.
The DiCaprio Decades
After three films with DiCaprio, The Departed sealed a partnership that defined both men’s middle careers.
They reunited for Shutter Island, The Wolf of Wall Street and Killers of the Flower Moon.
The Flower Moon epic, released in 2023, carried their collaboration into Scorsese’s ninth decade of life.
It earned ten Academy Award nominations and reminded voters that the old man remained a contemporary.
Daughters Behind the Camera
The family thread did not stop with his parents’ appearances in his pictures.
His daughter Francesca Scorsese became an actress and director, and the two charm millions with homemade videos together.
His daughter Domenica Cameron-Scorsese also works as a filmmaker and actress.
Three generations of Scorseses have now faced a camera, an inheritance built entirely of stories.
Eighty-Three and Still Casting
In 2026, reporting found Scorsese, at eighty-three, deep into his next feature, What Happens at Night.
The gothic drama reunites him with DiCaprio and adds Jennifer Lawrence to his company for the first time.
Casting news from the production was still making entertainment headlines in October 2026.
That same autumn brought Just a Shot Away, the first major biography of his life in film.
Meanwhile his documentary series The Saints returned, concluding its second season run in spring 2026.
Younger audiences, meanwhile, adopted him as an unlikely social-media favorite during the streaming era.
His video essays, interviews and daughter-led clips circulate among fans young enough to be his grandchildren.
Retirement, clearly, remains the one genre he refuses to direct.
Some filmmakers slow down; Scorsese simply keeps developing.
February 25, Again
Perhaps you have worked a job where everyone performed a version of themselves to survive it.
Perhaps you have smiled in a meeting while quietly keeping your real thoughts under lock and key.
The Departed takes that familiar small dishonesty and raises it until it becomes a way of life.
Return now to that February night in 2007, and to the envelope everyone remembers.
Spielberg tore it open, smiled at his old friend, and read the name the room wanted.
Scorsese climbed the steps carrying thirty years of almosts and one very Boston film.
He thanked the room, the city of his story and the friends who had checked that envelope.
Somewhere in that audience sat actors who had played his parents’ neighbors, students and ghosts.
Behind him stood Elizabeth Street, a garment worker and a mother who stole scenes.
Ahead of him stretched two more decades of work he had not made yet.
Nobody in the city wears his own face.
That night, for once, nobody needed a mask at all.