Martin Scorsese

The moment director Martin Scorsese got wind of The Departed, he wanted to be the man to direct it. In many of his most famous movies, Scorsese had dealt with themes of organized crime, violence, and Catholicism. So when he heard about a movie set in Boston and featuring Irish Catholic gangsters, he knew he was the right man for the job.

History would prove Scorsese right, as The Departed would go on to win him his first Oscar for Best Director. And trust us when we say that this was a long-overdue Oscar for the great Scorsese, who had been nominated (and lost) five times before finally winning with The Departed. CNN thought enough of the moment to look back on all of Scorsese's accomplishments and basically say, "It's about time."

In an interview, Scorsese says that one of the things that really drew him to The Departed was the way the script explored issues of family—and especially father-son relationships. You can definitely see lots of this in the bonds that Frank Costello tries to form with Billy Costigan and Colin Sullivan in this movie, since it's ultimately both of these relationships that end up bringing about the guy's downfall.

The paradox of being a dad like Costello is that the father wants some sons to carry on his legacy, but he tries so hard to control his sons that they end up rebelling against him and destroying him. Scorsese understands this kind of tragedy as well as any director in the world, and he definitely deserved an Oscar for the way he brought this conflict to life.

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Scorsese was part of the "Movie Brats" of the 1970s: influential young directors who had been raised on movies and formally studied it in school before turning their talents loose on the world. (Other members of this club included Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Brian De Palma and Francis Ford Coppola. Yeah, they were kind of a big deal.) Scorsese got his big break in 1973 with Mean Streets, a story about small-time criminals that drew upon his observation of New York life.

That sent him to the big time, and while he branched out into other kinds of stories, he always came back to the same basic ideas: crime in New York, and street-level dudes trying to make it in a corrupt world. Sometimes he would mix it up, such as with Raging Bull, which covers a boxer who can't win for losing, or The King of Comedy, about a guy so desperate to be famous he kidnaps a famous talk-show host. He also adds a great deal of impressionism and surrealism, painting the docudrama approach with something more personal.

(For example, look at the bravura sequences in Goodfellas, in which a mid-level guy spends a day on a cocaine bender, which culminates in his arrest. In the surface, it's another gangster dude doing gangster things. But thanks to the frenzied pacing and fevered narration, we really get the sense that this is what life looks like to a guy doing waaaayyy too many drugs.)

It was good enough to get him a seat at the Big-Time director's table, and with almost 60 credits to his name, you can't accuse him of not taking advantage of it. And he hasn't stayed limited to New York either. His spiritual side came out in films like The Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun (which was about the Dali Lama), while a plethora of documentaries on his resume kept him from being limited to Hollywood products. His versatility never came at the expense of personal vision, and his distinctive style always made one of his movies an event.

And yet before The Departed, he had never won an Oscar. Five nominations for Best Director before that, but never a win. That's why The Departed was such a big deal, at least in part: it finally let one of cinema's greatest directors take home cinema's greatest prize.