like many geniuses, Martin Scorsese has something of the geek about him.

Shuffling into the room, he's smaller than you'd expect, with thick-rimmed glasses and big bushy eyebrows that could have been lifted off a Stingray puppet and plonked clumsily on his face.

He comes across as not so much an icon of the cinema as an Italian-American Eric Sykes.

Then he starts to talk and the somewhat doddery 67-year-old is transformed into a witty and erudite raconteur whose look back on his life and career is every bit as thrilling as the movies that have earned him the unofficial title of Greatest LivingAmerican Director.

Mention this, though, and the Oscar winner - whose gong for The Departed four years ago seemed as much in recognition of his body of work as for the admittedly brilliant crime drama - goes all modest.

"Er, how can I answer that?" he asks shyly. "I can't think in terms of my reputation or in terms of awards. When you're in the thick of filmmaking, you just try to make something that allows you years from now to say, 'Yes, I directed that film and I'mhappy with it.'"

Marty, as he's known to his mates and frequent collaborators such as Robert De Niro and Leonardo Di Caprio, has more reasons than most to be happy with his work.

Just look at his CV: Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation Of Christ, The King Of Comedy, GoodFellas, Casino, The Aviator, The Departed. That's a masterpiece rate to equal Hitchcock.

Even Scorsese's lesser movies - like the silly but gripping Cape Fear and the muddled Gangs Of New York- are a damn sight better than most directors' best.

His latest, Shutter Island, is one of the lesser ones - an overboiled psychological thriller anchored by yet another superb performance from Di Caprio as a US Marshal investigating a complex missing persons case in a hospital for the criminally insane.

It also proves Scorsese can tackle any genre, belying his bonkers assertion that "I don't know if I can ever be called a director, not in the tradition of the true greats like George Cukor and Howard Hawkes.

"Cukor wasn't just a great filmmaker, he was also a great theatre director, but I have no idea how to do theatre. And Hawkes was a real director - he was able to do musicals, comedies, film noir.

"Early on, I thought I was going to do musicals, Westerns, all sorts of genre pictures. But there's a side of me that only really felt comfortable doing pictures like Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and GoodFellas."

he added: "They're about h my own experiences - my life, my friends, something I can relate to."

Scorsese is selling himself short. Yes, his movies about New York gangsters and lowlife are his most memorable, but Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore found him tackling feminist drama, After Hours is fall- off-the-sofa funny and New York, New York remains abold reinvigoration of the musical.

Scorsese lives, eats, breathes, sleeps and dreams I cinema. He loves to talk about movies. And, boy, can he talk. It's as if the cocaine he admits to over-indulging in during his past is still running around his brain as he rattles off anecdotes atlightning speed.

He doesn't talk about personal stuff (he's now on his fifth wife and has three children) because that's real life and Marty is only interested in reel life.

When he reminisces about growing up as an asthmatic,he does so in terms of how he first got hooked on cinema.

He said: "I couldn't play sports, so the only thing my parents could do with me was take me to a movie theatre."

When he talks about family, it's about how his father and uncle were the inspiration for the brothers in his 1968 debut Who's That Knocking At My Door, played by Harvey Keitel and Lennard Kuras.

"The movie is about my father and his younger brother and what I saw unfold in the tenement where I grew up. It was a tiny place, just three rooms.

"My Uncle Joe was constantly getting in trouble and my father felt that, out of respect for the family name, he should deal with the people Joe was in trouble with.

"They called them 'sit-downs'. It wasn't about the law, police or politics - it was its own society. My father was trying to hang on to dignity. That was hard, especially in a world where you often got your jobs through wise guys."

Thanks to a father who kept everything square and above board, Scorsese didn't have any dealings with these so-called wise guys. But as a moviemaker, he is often drawn to mob bosses and the seedier characters who prowl New York's mean streets.

but is it any wonder? These are the people who inhabited the bars, restaurants and shadowy doorways of New York's Little Italy, where he was raised.

Brought up a Catholic, the young Marty considered entering the priesthood before giving in to his grand passion for cinema by enrolling at film school.

After graduation, he started Who's That Knocking At My Door? on a shoestring budget in 1965 but didn't wrap it until 1968 after he realised he needed a nude scene if he was going to secure a distributor.

He said: "By 1968, there was a new freedom in cinema, the anti- pornography laws were all gone, so every film had to have nudity in it. We stuck it in the middle of the movie because wherever it landed seemed OK."

Rough, ready and full of energy, the film was finally released in 1969, earning Scorsese a job offer from exploitation king Roger Corman to direct Boxcar Bertha, a cheapie update of the Bonnie and Clyde story.

The end product wasn't up to much but it was all part of Scorsese's learning curve. He said: "I learned how to make a movie fast - honing the script, casting it, storyboarding it and then shooting it in just 24 days."

Next up was Mean Streets, his first collaboration with De Niro. The story of a small-time hoodlum's miserable existence makes for uncomfortable viewing and proved a tough sell.

Limited distribution meant the film didn't do well but it's a milestone - the first film in which Marty began to explore violence and religion as well as portraying Italian-Americans in less than flattering terms.

He has often been criticised for his jaded view of his own lineage but defends himself with: "People say to me, 'You tell all these stories about wise guys in downtown New York but not everybody was like that.' "That's true but I'm telling stories frommy perception of the world I lived in. I was very much aware of these wise guys, just as I was aware of the decent, hard-working people in the garment industry or trucking."

There have been diversions but his most acclaimed films have been set on the mean streets of New York (with the Boston-set exception of The Departed).

GoodFellas remains a personal favourite and, surprisingly for a film that opens with the brutal stabbing of a man in a car boot, it was aimed at the mainstream.

"There's always been this tension between the box office and what I wanted to say in a personal way," he explains. "It's as close as I can get to a Hollywood film."

The film is thrillingly alive with the joy of telling a good yarn, something Scorsese got hooked on as a child. And it is eye- poppingly colourful, like something from the Hollywood of the Forties, while the acts of unspeakable violence have ablack-and- white film noir feel.

For some viewers, the violence in Marty's movies has been hard to stomach but he says adamantly: "There is no such thing as pointless violence. It's reality, it's real life, it has to do with the human condition."

Fast-forward two decades and despite mixed reviews and a delayed release, Shutter Island is on its way to becoming Scorsese's biggest hit at the US box office.

I doubt we'll be talking about it 20 years from now but Marty doesn't fret about his own legacy.

"I just do the best work I can," he says. "I love to work and I'll continue to do so for as long as there's a place for me. Younger filmmakers will always push through because they're burning to tell a story."

Ah, yes, but you can bet they'll be looking to the work of the Greatest Living American Director for inspiration.

Shutter Island opens in cinemas on Friday.

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