Interview: Martin Scorsese, film director

"The Departed was that way too," he adds, and almost sighs, though he's not a man who pauses much to catch his breath. If he seems a bit tired on this bright, cold afternoon in New York, it's perhaps because he has been up late in the editing room, cutting the pilot he directed for an HBO gangster series called Boardwalk Empire.

He is 67 now, firmly in lifetime-achievement-award territory – when we meet he is just back from a trip to Los Angeles to receive one of those not-dead-yet honours at the Golden Globes – and wears his years and stature comfortably. His dress is age appropriate: dignified (neutral- colour sports jacket, good shoes) but casual (no tie). His rapid-fire, unmistakably New York conversational style is slightly less manic than it once was, a tad more patient. His characteristic manner now is one of affable enthusiasm, like a hip priest. And he has had, by any measure, as satisfying a decade as a middle-aged American filmmaker can reasonably expect: the work has been bold and exciting, and the acclaim has been steady, never less than respectful, often perilously close to reverent.

Three years ago The Departed won him his first Oscar, after more than four decades of filmmaking (and a longer lifetime of crazed, inveterate film- going); he can afford to rest. But he is still, it appears, determined to continue making the kind of film that will, like Shutter Island, become "something else" for him.

Based on an exceptionally tricky 2003 mystery novel by Dennis Lehane, this film wears its something-elseness proudly, even defiantly. It's a true oddity, an outlier, as isolated and enigmatic as the gloomy, rain-whipped island on which the action takes place. The hero, a federal marshal named Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), is a tormented soul, the type of man to whom Scorsese has never been a stranger, from his first, Who's That Knocking At My Door? (1968), through Mean Streets (1973) Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980), and on to The Aviator (2004), in which DiCaprio played a Howard Hughes beset by hallucinations, bizarre phobias and creeping paranoia.

• On the set of Shutter Island (from left to right) Ben Kingsley, DiCaprio, Scorsese and Mark Ruffalo

Teddy's emotional troubles manifest themselves as bad dreams – many of them about his dead wife – and the most spectacular movie migraines since James Cagney in White Heat.

"When I read the script," says Scorsese, "I was just taken by the character, felt very empathetic with him."

Teddy is accompanied by his curiously passive partner, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), and arrives on Shutter Island to investigate a disappearance. This island, an unprepossessing chunk of rock out in Boston Harbour, houses an asylum for the criminally insane, one of whom – a woman who murdered her children – has somehow managed to vanish from her cell. We learn fairly early on that Teddy might have other agendas: the man he believes killed his wife may be an inmate there, and he's suspicious of the motives of the asylum's psychiatric staff, represented here by the reliably ambiguous Ben Kingsley and the great, gaunt Max von Sydow (who, thanks to Ingmar Bergman, has done time on more than a few bleak, chilly, madness-inducing islands himself).

What makes Shutter Island feel such a peculiar film for Scorsese to have made isn't the troubled protagonist, or the detective-movie plot mechanics, it's the claustrophobia, the tight, hermetic, locked-down structure that's so unusual for this director, whose films are generally a lot more expansive.

DiCaprio, who has starred in all four of the non-documentary features Scorsese has directed since 2002, explains: "With scripts like Gangs Of New York and The Aviator there's a little more flexibility, certain things that can be done to reshape the character, but in scripts like Shutter Island there are too many interlocking segments. If you take one piece out, the story starts to fall apart."

Scorsese makes the structure sound even more delicate: "With the editing we found that just putting in one reaction shot could throw the scene off completely." The movie's balance is, like its hero's, fragile.

Most of the film was shot at an abandoned mental institution in Medfield, Massachussetts, which had, Scorsese says, "the feeling of a trap, a labyrinth – a labyrinth of the mind, which is what I wanted."

It's hard not to suspect, as you listen to him discoursing with a certain relish about the technical problems of the film and the rigours of shooting in a mental hospital – "It's not a good feeling, being there every day" – that he has come to a point in his career where he actually thrives on difficulty, almost can't do without it.

DiCaprio describes the process of working out the nuances of Teddy's character as "pretty intense, because I didn't understand how emotionally complex this character is until Marty and I started breaking down this cathartic journey he goes on".

He pauses and adds: "When you're working with someone like Martin Scorsese, you know you're going to have to go places emotionally that you didn't ever foresee."

For Scorsese, that's entertainment. Some filmmakers as they grow older begin to pare down their styles, to produce mellow, autumnal works that attempt to express with serene simplicity the accrued wisdom of their lives. Does that sound like Scorsese? His movies have always been fuelled by nervous energy and huge rushes of adrenaline, and it's nearly impossible to imagine him doing without some kind of emotional turbulence, even if he has to induce it by sheer force of will.

Or stimulants may sometimes be required. With Scorsese's filmmaking, the drug of choice is the memory of old movies, and the selection of music for his collage-like soundtracks. Robbie Robertson, formerly of The Band, met Scorsese during the filming of the concert documentary The Last Waltz (1978) and has collaborated with him since. Robertson, credited as music supervisor on Shutter Island, says: "Marty just has this unique gift with regard to music in film. It's one of those mysteries. You could tell right from the opening scene of Mean Streets, with The Ronettes doing Be My Baby. It isn't about the song, or the lyrics, it only has to do with the Wall of Sound, and that's why it's so beautiful."

On Shutter Island, Robertson says: "This was the first time in all these years that he's ever said to me, 'God, I don't know what to do with this material music-wise'." The solution they came up with, weirdly appropriate to the anxious era in which the movie is set, was to use modern classical music in the way that, in previous films, they would deploy brief, timed charges of rock or pop or blues: here the sonic blasts come from composers like Krzysztof Penderecki, John Adams, John Cage, Gyorgy Ligeti and Morton Feldman. And this music, much of it dissonant, stark, hauntingly repetitious or plain spooky, certainly amplifies the film's thick atmosphere of dread.

"With something like Penderecki's Passacaglia," Scorsese says, "it's definitely bold and to me it reflects what's going on inside Teddy. If you're with the film, with the character on this strange journey he's on, that's the kind of music you hear in your head."

The funny thing is, a fair amount of the fierce, moody modern music in Shutter Island sounds a bit like 1950s movie music too, something from an angst-drenched psychological drama by Elia Kazan, say, or Nicholas Ray. It's inward-turning music, lonely music. Pop songs are used extremely sparingly, because popular music implies a larger world, millions listening, maybe dancing – the world outside this island and this tormented hero's mind.

The old-movie memories have a part to play in this insular universe too. "I love memory," Scorsese says, "I mean, I'm a preservationist." (Twenty years ago he was the prime mover in the creation of the Film Foundation, which restores and protects endangered movies. He still serves on its board.)

He always shows classic films to his cast and crew. "We saw Laura, Out Of The Past and, of course, Vertigo," DiCaprio says, "all these movies about obsessed detectives coming to terms with themselves through their investigations." He adds: "He wanted a genre feel to the film, and wanted it to be specific to this particular era. It's almost like he's accessing his dreams or something, the dreams being all those movies. They're like memories coming back to him."

So when Scorsese talks about Shutter Island, he also inevitably needs to speak of remembered films like those of Jacques Tourneur, who made the doomy, complex noir Out Of The Past (1947). "I like watching Out Of The Past repeatedly," he says, "because I never know quite where I am in it, I don't know what's the beginning, the middle or the end… Leo applauded and said to me, 'That's the coolest movie I ever saw'."

That nervous sense of not knowing exactly where you are, beginning, middle or end, seems vitally important to Scorsese, who, although closer to the end of his career, has for the past decade been making movies with the jittery vigour of a beginner, trying on different genres, different sounds and different actors (with DiCaprio as a constant) in a valiant attempt to keep himself sufficiently disoriented to create his kind of something else.

The run of Scorsese movies since Gangs Of New York (2002) (which includes his 2008 Rolling Stones concert documentary Shine A Light) is perhaps his liveliest, most varied, and most consistently inventive stretch since the 1970s. He finds a way to remain charged up, by any means necessary, even if it involves making a film as relentlessly and baroquely interior as Shutter Island, which has the nightmare architecture of a Piranesi prison. Whatever works. And what works for Scorsese, usually, is some form of unease.

He may or may not be stuck in the 1950s, but for him it's always, one way or another, an age of anxiety.

Shutter Island is released on 12 March www.shutterisland.com

This article was originally published in Scotland on Sunday on 21 February 2010