Martin Scorsese, born in Queens, New York, grew up in Manhattan’s Little Italy. During this year’s Tribeca Film Festival Talk with actor Robert De Niro, the filmmaker described this particular pocket of the city as the intersection of “the Italian-Americans, the Sicilians, the Neapolitans… not necessarily in the Bronx or the West Side, but the East Side.” It’s a pocket that stuck with him, even into his most recent film, The Irishman.

“One has to take the negative things of what was going on,” Scorsese, 76, said of that time in his life. “It was a world that has been, I think, romanticized since then. It’s become something that, even in our new film, we still deal with… how should I put it? The nature of it, the essence of who the people are, not necessarily the trappings around it, but who the people are.”