‘Just a Shot Away,’ Book on Martin Scorsese’s Life in Film, Coming

The cover art for Just a Shot Away: Martin Scorsese’s Life in Film.

A new book, described as the first major biography of filmmaker Martin Scorsese, is coming this fall. Just a Shot Away: Martin Scorsese’s Life in Film arrives November 3, 2026, from author Mark Binelli. The 544-page title, via Metropolitan Books, is available to order in the U.S. here, in Canada here and in the U.K. here.

From the publisher’s announcement: Just a Shot Away is as stylish and audacious as the director’s movies, drawing on previously unseen sources, original research, and new interviews to reveal the origins, genius, and influence of his life and work. It chronicles the brilliant and tumultuous life and career of one of the world’s foremost living filmmakers, from his childhood on the violent streets of mid-century Little Italy, recreated in unprecedented detail, to his tectonic contributions to the cinema of the New Hollywood and beyond. The making of such masterpieces as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Last Waltz are explored here in revelatory depth, along with undersung favorites like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and After Hours.

In its advance praise for the book, Booklist wrote, “While Scorsese’s public image is well-known as the fast-talking film guy who seems to have an opinion about everything movie-related, Binelli presents him in a more subdued light, as a deeply dedicated artist who brings a keen eye, and a sharp intellect, to every project he undertakes. Think of this portrait as capturing the Martin Scorsese who lives behind the man we think we already know.”

Readers will learn never-before-reported details about Scorsese’s Italian American upbringing amidst mobsters, which he drew upon for Goodfellas; and eavesdrop on recorded brainstorming sessions with Robert De Niro and Jake LaMotta for Raging Bull.

With new sources and interviews, the author conjures Scorsese’s asthmatic boyhood, spent memorizing movies and watching wiseguys. He traces the earliest steps out of Little Italy and into filmmaking, marriage, and the halting path to recognition, which, when it came, coincided with a personal life spiraling out of control. Previously untold fly-on-the-wall accounts detail wild stories of cocaine-fueled days and nights jetting to international film festivals and hunkered down behind the blacked-out windows of the director’s infamous Mulholland Drive bachelor pad (shared with Robbie Robertson of The Band). Yet Scorsese rebounded with a career that itself serves as a pocket history of the more than half-century of Hollywood he’s traversed, making classics decade after decade in a startling array of genres.

Through deep archival research, interviews with dozens of friends and collaborators, and access to a trove of previously undiscovered material, including firsthand accounts from Scorsese, his parents, Robertson, De Niro, and ex-wife Isabella Rossellini, Just a Shot Away dynamically recasts the life of the master filmmaker with brio and the headlong, form-shattering dynamism of one of its subject’s own indelible pictures.

The acclaimed director has frequently appeared in cameos in many of his films, including this memorable scene from Taxi Driver.

Binelli is the author of Detroit City Is the Place to Be and the novels Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ All-Time Greatest Hits. A features writer at Rolling Stone for twenty years, he is now a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine.