Director Martin Scorcese poses for photographers on the red carpet at the Bafta Awards in London. Photo / AP
Film-maker Rebecca Miller knew it would be impossible for her to make a feature-length documentary about Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese. “There was no way I could go as deep as I wanted to go in one-and-a-half or two hours,” she said.
Maybe she could plan for a two-part series. But as she started to interview Scorsese – in addition to numerous collaborators, family members and close friends – it became clear two parts still wouldn’t be enough. So the documentary stretched into three. Then four. Finally, Miller landed on a total of five episodes, each with its own emotional arc.
“Obviously, I could go on forever,” she said in a recent interview. “But I also wanted to be able to tell a story that was lean and very propulsive.”
How does one even begin trying to capture the inner machinations of one of the greatest living film-makers? Is it possible to explore the impetus behind movies such as Taxi Driver, The Last Temptation of Christ, Casino and The Departed without making something longer than their cumulative run times?
Working on the series Mr. Scorsese, which is streaming on Apple TV, required sharp focus and unrelenting honesty. To tell a revelatory story, Miller couldn’t let Scorsese – or herself – off easy.
Miller, who has been married for nearly 30 years to actor Daniel Day-Lewis, star of The Age of Innocence and Gangs of New York, knew Scorsese socially before sitting down with him during the pandemic for hours-long conversations. But she began her inquiry as a devout consumer of his filmography, rather than as a friend.
She wondered how growing up in Manhattan’s Little Italy shaped the stories he dreamed up. She was curious about how he squared his Catholicism with the intense violence of his movies. She questioned how he worked so furiously and prolifically on projects that required so much of him.
Yes, cocaine once played a role. It also nearly killed him, landing him in the hospital with internal bleeding in 1978. He tells Miller that Robert De Niro came to his bedside and asked, “Do you want to die like this?” They put out Raging Bull two years later.
Scorsese is “a person with a lot of anomalies built in inside of him”, Miller said.
Having mostly directed narrative films (Personal Velocity, Maggie’s Plan), Miller discovered an “inner freedom” working on documentaries, citing the ability to determine their forms along the way.
Mr. Scorsese is her second non-fiction work after Arthur Miller: Writer, an intimate, 98-minute portrait of her father, the lauded playwright.
That is a far more personal piece – Miller, diving into her own family history, even narrates the feature – but it shares with Mr. Scorsese the goal of deconstructing a towering public figure’s image and self.
Film nerds are bound to enjoy Mr. Scorsese, which dissects how the director developed certain aspects of his aesthetic: he favours high-angle shots, for instance, because they resemble how he viewed the world as an asthmatic child, forced to watch other kids play outside from his perch at a window.
Miller said the single-take Copacabana nightclub scene in Goodfellas set a new bar for Steadicam usage in film.
“Marty has invented some film grammar that we use all the time.”
With so much at stake, Scorsese has been steadfast in his efforts to protect his vision. In the docuseries, he revisits the time a disagreement with executives over disturbing material in Taxi Driver almost drove him to break into the studio to steal the rough cut. He even considered buying a gun, though he says he didn’t have any plans to use it.
“Marty was very upset,” director Steven Spielberg tells Miller in an interview. He talked Scorsese out of the burglary. Brian De Palma adds, “He was going crazy.”
“What he wants to fight against is the homogenisation … of cinema,” Miller said. “He wants to preserve individual voices because it is very, very important.”
Stories like this complete Mr. Scorsese, which is as enamoured of his artistry as it is candid about his flaws.
The episode Saint/Sinner gets its name from actress Isabella Rossellini, Scorsese’s third wife, who describes how the film-maker’s fascination with morality butts up against some not-so-great behaviour.
His three daughters – Cathy, Domenica and Francesca, each from a different marriage – speak candidly about their relationships with their father. It becomes clear he was not as present during the childhoods of the two eldest.
“I think there’s a tendency, particularly among male artists, to bifurcate them: there’s the man, and then there’s the artist,” Miller said. She challenges this tendency through her work, an effort supported by Scorsese himself.
During one of their conversations, Miller said, he mentioned facing “temptations along the way. I said, ‘As a man or as an artist?’ And he said, ‘Both, because there is no difference.’”
Even as he re-established his personal priorities, work continued to consume Scorsese. Miller remembered him seeming “so alive and so vivid and so young” when she met him on the set of Gangs of New York. He was nearing 60 but had the anxious energy of a debut director, she said.
“He was in such a state of nervous anticipation over whether he had selected the right angles, the right shots. He was worried about how it was going to go,” she recalled. “That was a big surprise to me, because somebody who’s obviously a great man usually sits back and just enjoys his great man-ness. But he’s really not like that.”
Getting to know Scorsese through the documentary deepened Miller’s admiration of his work: “It’s like a Shakespearean level of output – and he’s alive,” she said. While she had always revered certain films, Raging Bull among them, poring over Scorsese’s oeuvre prompted her to reassess others, such as The Wolf of Wall Street.
“It was such a pop film,” she said. “I didn’t fully appreciate that when you look under the hood of that film at what it took to make that technically … at the level of expertise that both he and Thelma [Schoonmaker, his editor] and all the actors exhibited, the level of freedom was extraordinary.”
Miller was supposed to visit Scorsese on the set of Killers of the Flower Moon, which he made while she worked on the documentary, but schedules got the better of them. In the end, it didn’t matter to her: his innermost thoughts are laid bare in the film itself.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Killers is “a classic example of a Scorsese antihero”, Miller said, noting that he “is in love with his wife and poisoning her for money at the same time”. Is he good? Is he bad? Can both be true at the same time? In a sense, the character grapples with the moral dilemmas that have rattled Scorsese his entire life.
“It’s like a hall of mirrors,” Miller said. Her docuseries captures “a dance between the man and the films, the films and the man. They are always creating each other”.