Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese: How They Compare

Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese are the two directors film fans most often set against each other, and they could hardly work more differently. Scorsese has spent sixty years making films about people and the places that shape them; Nolan builds puzzles out of time and scale. Yet they share a cause, a few leading men and, since 2024, a page of Oscar history.

Two routes into film

Scorsese was born in New York in 1942 and studied film at New York University, where he met the editor Thelma Schoonmaker. His first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, came out in 1967, and Mean Streets (1973) showed the Little Italy he grew up in. From Raging Bull (1980) on, Schoonmaker has edited every one of his feature films.

Nolan was born in London in 1970 and taught himself on a Super 8 camera. He made his first feature, Following, on weekends with friends for about $6,000. Two years later Memento made his name. Where Scorsese came out of a film school and a city, Nolan came out of a garage and a genre: noir, bent out of shape.

Nolan vs Scorsese: what sets them apart

Scorsese’s films are about character and place: gangsters, boxers, cab drivers and con men, usually in a specific New York neighbourhood, filmed with restless cameras and pop songs on the soundtrack. Violence in his films is sudden and costs something.

Nolan’s films are about structure. Memento runs backwards, Inception runs on four levels of dreams at once, Dunkirk braids a week, a day and an hour together. His characters tend to be defined by an obsession rather than a neighbourhood, and the plot is often a machine they are trapped inside.

Both have grown longer with age. Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019) runs 209 minutes and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) 206. Nolan’s longest, Oppenheimer, stops at 180, and he can still go short when the story asks for it: Dunkirk runs 106 minutes. Scorsese uses length to let scenes breathe; Nolan uses it to stack timelines.

Two remakes and two obsessive Americans

Their filmographies rhyme in places. Each has remade a film from another country: Scorsese turned the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs (2002) into The Departed, and Nolan’s Insomnia (2002) is a remake of the 1997 Norwegian film of the same name. Scorsese kept the cat-and-mouse plot and moved it to Boston’s Irish mob; Nolan kept the sleepless detective and the midnight sun, and moved him to Alaska.

Each has also made a big period film about a brilliant, difficult American. The Aviator (2004) follows Howard Hughes from 1927 to 1947, as he builds planes and films and loses his grip on himself. Oppenheimer follows the physicist through the Manhattan Project and the hearing that ended his security clearance. Both films care less about what their heroes achieved than about what it cost them, and both put Hollywood’s biggest machinery behind a portrait of one man’s mind.

Songs and scores

Listen to their films with your eyes closed and you can tell them apart in seconds. Scorsese built his sound out of records: the pop and rock songs of Mean Streets and Goodfellas are part of how those films remember their time. His closest musical partner was Robbie Robertson of The Band, who worked on eleven of his films; the last was Killers of the Flower Moon, released two months after Robertson’s death and dedicated to him.

Nolan rarely uses songs. His films run on original scores that work like a pulse: David Julyan’s on the early films, Hans Zimmer’s from Batman Begins to Dunkirk, and Ludwig Göransson’s since Tenet. The ticking watch in Dunkirk’s score is the opposite of a Scorsese needle drop: it tells you how much time is left, not what year it is.

Cinemas and streaming

Their careers have also split over where films should be seen. Scorsese made The Irishman for Netflix, and Killers of the Flower Moon was financed by Apple, which shared the release with Paramount: cinemas first, then streaming. Streaming money paid for long, expensive films for adults that the studios had been reluctant to make.

Nolan went the other way. When Warner Bros. decided to release its 2021 films in cinemas and on HBO Max on the same day, he criticised the plan in public, ended a partnership that went back to Insomnia, and took Oppenheimer to Universal. Oppenheimer and The Odyssey were both shot with IMAX film cameras and both made their money in cinemas.

Where their paths cross

The clearest bridge is Leonardo DiCaprio. He has made six films with Scorsese, from Gangs of New York to Killers of the Flower Moon, and one with Nolan: Inception. Matt Damon played the mole in Scorsese’s The Departed and has since worked with Nolan three times, ending with the title role in The Odyssey. Liam Neeson, Matthew McConaughey, Al Pacino, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow and David Bowie have also worked for both.

The deeper link is their belief in film itself. Scorsese founded The Film Foundation in 1990 to restore and show old films, and Nolan joined its board in 2015. In 2023 Scorsese told GQ that the fight against movies made as “content” has to come from filmmakers themselves, and named Nolan among the people he is counting on.

The 2024 Oscars: Oppenheimer vs Killers of the Flower Moon

The two finally met head on at the 96th Academy Awards in March 2024. Both films were up for Best Picture and Best Director. Oppenheimer won seven Oscars, including both of those, and Nolan took Best Director at his second nomination. Scorsese, nominated for the tenth time, went home without a win; at 81 he had become the oldest Best Director nominee in the Academy’s history.

It was a strange reversal. In 2006 Nolan’s The Prestige and Scorsese’s The Departed opened two weeks apart; The Departed won Best Picture and Scorsese his only directing Oscar, while The Prestige left with two nominations and no wins.

Their roads to that award could hardly have been more different. Scorsese lost five times before he won: for Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York and The Aviator. When his name was finally read out in February 2007, for his sixth nomination, he was 64, and the award was handed to him by three directors of his own generation: Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Nolan was nominated for the first time for Dunkirk, lost, and won the next time he was in the race, at 53. Scorsese has been nominated four more times since The Departed and has not won again, which makes his record of ten nominations and one win as much a story about the Academy as about him.

And Tarantino?

Search for Nolan and Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino comes up next. He belongs in the comparison less for his style than for the same cause.

In 2014, when Kodak was close to giving up on motion picture film, Nolan, Tarantino, J.J. Abrams and Judd Apatow pushed the studios into a deal to keep buying it. Tarantino has owned the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles since 2007 and runs it on film prints. Scorsese restores old films, Nolan shoots new ones on film, and Tarantino keeps a cinema to show them in.

So who is better?

There is no fair way to pick a winner, because they are not playing the same game. If you want to understand a person, a city or a kind of violence, start with Goodfellas or Taxi Driver. If you want a film that rearranges how you watch, start with Memento or Inception. A ranking of Nolan’s films, with the reasons for each place, is in the full filmography; Scorsese deserves a list of his own.