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Mr. Scorsese is more than just a five-part documentary series about a visionary filmmaker who redefined filmmaking. The work of acclaimed director Rebecca Miller examines how Martin Scorsese's own life experiences fueled the Oscar-winning director's visions, stunning audiences. It's something he has previously declined to do, but this approach felt right so the typically hands-on director was uncharacteristically hands-off and went with it.
"One of the most astonishing things is he didn't control this at all," Miller reveals as we chat over Zoom. "I think that he knew that if he had taken some part of the control, how would you end that? He was very adamant that it's my film, that I was allowed to make it. He would often say, 'I don't know what you're doing. It could be anything.' He decided to trust me and knew me quite well through my films and my books."
"He had avoided doing this for a long time. Other people had definitely asked if they could make a big film about him, and he said no. Once he decided to do it, he threw himself into it lock, stock, and barrel. When he was going to ask a question, he would often say to me, 'I have to think a moment because I want to answer this in a way I've not answered it before.' He was very conscious that he wanted to give me something new."
The portrait of the man behind such films as Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, and The Wolf of Wall Street boasts contributions from such luminaries, friends and collaborators as Robert De Niro, Daniel Day-Lewis, Leonardo DiCaprio, Spike Lee, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, Steven Spielberg, Sharon Stone, Jodie Foster, Paul Schrader, Margot Robbie, and Cate Blanchett.
The documentary series, which is now streaming on Apple TV+, starts with various interviewees saying how they refer to the subject, from Marty to Mr. Scorsese. You instantly get a feel for the space and the relationship they share with the iconic figure.
"It was also to get you used to the idea that there are going to be multiple perspectives in the film," Miller explains. "One of the ways that I proposed the film to him when I wrote a letter to him about how I would do it was that I was going to take a cubist approach and try to see him from many angles at once. You have his childhood friends, his parents, his collaborators, Thelma Schoonmaker, many different ex-wives, his current wife, and his children, so you're looking at him in a rounded way, and that was all really important to me."
"Thelma was the one person that I got a lot more time with because it was so important to me that we go through some of the films and analyze some of them. Having her next to the editing bay was solid gold. We got two four-hour interviews with her. She was very generous."
Among Miller's early creative choices was to frame the fiver-parter as a portrait rather than anything else because that word "implies something personal."
She adds, "It also acknowledges that somebody is making the portrait. It's not a neutral thing that has just bust out of an egg somehow, but it's somebody who is seeing it with a point of view. It also shows this is not an academic treatise, it's not a filmography, it's not a list, it is one human being's portrait of this great artist who is a filmmaker. I wanted to make that very clear."
Miller started work on the project in 2020, right before the pandemic hit. Coordinating the plethora of talking heads, many of whom are some of the busiest individuals in the film industry, was its own challenge. Still, the timing actually helped in various ways.
"None of this was inevitable. We did the first interviews with Marty outside because of the pandemic," Miller recalls. "If the interviews in the beginning had gone a different way, the whole thing might have too, but for whatever reason, he must have had a good feeling for how it went. We had a lot to say to each other and our conversations were interesting. We went for 20 hours altogether but it was like a long conversation between two people who are coming to really like each other. There was a relationship that was being built because I didn't have a social relationship with Marty even though I had met him. I had no social relationship with him."
"He's amazingly open about looking for projects that strike him and he thinks he can bring all of himself to them in some way. Reading The Aviator, he found a way into that to make it really personal even though it was a big film. He brought himself completely to it and it's very interesting. It wasn't something that generated out of him and yet, look what he did with it. Similarly, with Raging Bull, he didn't want to make Raging Bull but De Niro had this vision of it for him then he goes to a fight and starts to see it and finds a way of making it personal to him."
Something Mr. Scorsese highlights are forks in the road throughout the Casino and The King of Comedy, from his childhood to adulthood, circumstances and happenstances that ended up being essential for making him who he is both creatively and personally. Would things have turned out the same had they not happened?
"You can't subtract things from a life and then recalibrate," Miller says. "In other words, he was born with immense talent but then there were all of these factors that were either serendipity or fate or however you want to look at them."
"When it comes to his asthma," she continues, "as Spike Lee says, 'Thank God for asthma.' He was cooped up, had to stay, and couldn't go outside, and had to go to movie theaters to breathe at night in the summer. There are people he met, like Thelma, or some of the people who enabled him to get the money to make these movies, or times where he was down on his luck, and people had to believe in him and help him. He had to redefine himself many times as a filmmaker."
As influential as Scorsese is as a filmmaker, the documentary series doesn't shy away from the fact that he has box office and critical failures like New York, New York, Kundun, and Bring Out the Dead—which have almost derailed his career to varying degrees. However, he takes it in his stride.
"There's a lot of humor which is one of the main survival tools," Miller reveals. "As an artist you have ups and downs. In hindsight it's easier to laugh at things."
However, one moment that continues to leave a mark on the legendary filmmaker is the fallout surrounding The Last Temptation of Christ. The adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis' controversial 1955 novel of the same name depicts the life of Jesus Christ and his struggle with fear, doubt, depression, and lust. The pushback, for various reasons, included protests, a terrorist attack on a cinema, and even death threats against Scorsese. In the documentary, the filmmaker also recalls being called the Antichrist while out for dinner and is still visibly shaken by the incident.
"With that particular anecdote, I have everything that was there on film in that moment," Miller confirms. "I think you can see it all in his face. Sometimes not saying anything and letting somebody sit there is more effective than a lot of talking."
Something else that becomes clear in the series is that every generation has its Scorsese movie, whether that's Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, The Wolf of Wall Street, or Gangs of New York. While the documentary is timely, it shows how his work is timeless, such as his 1967 horror short and Vietnam protest film, The Big Shave.
"I think that's an important point," Miller concludes. "One of the things that's really unique about him is that his films are so personal but they tend to leap into the zeitgeist—to reflect it—and to catch fire. Sometimes that is in ways that he would prefer it didn't happen—like John Hinckley's assassination attempt or The Last Temptation—but you know they leap into a kind of public arena."
"One of my hopes for Mr. Scorsese is that people will watch it and leap over that barrier of whatever their generational Martin Scorsese film is and discover other films. I'm hoping that people who love The Wolf of Wall Street will discover Taxi Driver."