Jose Arevalo

There were once two boys who grew up in the ‘mean streets’ of New York, born one year and a few blocks apart. They weren’t from the poorest families but they were far from rich. One of the boys was fully Italian, the other had an Italian father, and an Irish mother. Growing up, they saw ‘wiseguys’ and made men and gangsters in the street. They saw the gangs, even had friends who joined them... their early childhood was Goodfellas. One of the friends was the son of an actress-turned-seamstress. The other was the son of a painter who had left his wife because he was gay — his mother had been an artist. Not surprisingly, both kids inherited the ‘artistic gene’ from their parents and, from their fathers’ humble immigrant origins, a strong drive to make it in the world. The two boys grew into men and went their separate ways. They met again in their twenties. The half-Irish one, the tallest and most handsome of the two, had gone to acting school and was now an actor known as Robert De Niro. His friend, a creative fellow but too short for leading man status, was Martin Scorsese. Scorsese wanted to recreate the world they had grown up in and make it come to life for a young audience largely unfamiliar with it. Mean Streets. Taxi Driver. Raging Bull. The King of Comedy. Goodfellas. Scorsese directed movies. De Niro acted in them. As it turned out, Scorsese was a damned fine director, and script writer. De Niro was a damn fine actor. They would come to define cinema in many ways, and put their mark on the genre of mafia films and organised crime drama like no one else before them, and no one else after.

Snow leopard jumping from a 197-foot (60-meter) cliff to catch its prey.