NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — First meeting with director Rebecca Miller Martin Scorsese was on the set of the 2002 film Gangs of New York. It stars Miller's husband Daniel Day-Lewis. There, Miller found an anxious Scorsese on the edge of a huge fight scene filmed on a sprawling set.
“He looked like a young man hoping he had chosen the right way to shoot a big scene,” Miller recalls. “I was stunned by how young and alive he was.”
That remains largely the same throughout Miller's wide-ranging and moving documentary portrait of an endlessly energetic and singularly important director. In Mr. Scorsese, premiering Friday on Apple TV, Miller chronicles the life and career of Scorsese, whose films have become one of the greatest enduring arguments for the power of cinema.
“We're talking about 32 films, which is a lot. But there are even more films,” Miller says, referring to Scorsese's future projects. “It's a life that goes beyond its limits. You think you have it, and then there's more and more and more of it.”
Scorsese's life has long been associated with myth: an asthmatic kid from Little Italy who grew up watching old movies on television and then starred in some of New York's defining films. It's also part of Mr. Scorsese, but Miller's film, culled from 20 hours of interviews with Scorsese over five years, is a more intimate, thoughtful and often funny conversation about the compulsions that drove him and the constant questions of morality, faith and filmmaking that guided him.
“Who are we? What are we, I should say?” Scorsese speaks in the opening moments of the series. “Are we inherently good or evil?”
“It’s a struggle,” he adds. “I struggle with this all the time.”
Miller began interviewing Scorsese during the pandemic. Then he started doing “Killers of the Flower Moon” Their first meetings were on the street. Miller first pitched the idea to Scorsese as a multifaceted portrait. She then imagined a two-hour documentary. Later, out of necessity, it became a five-hour series. It still seems too short.
“I explained that I wanted to take a cubist approach, with different beams of light on it from different perspectives—collaborators, family,” Miller says. “In a very short period of time, he kind of started talking like we were doing this. I was a little confused, thinking, 'Is this an interview or a planning situation?'
Scorsese's own documentaries have often been some of his most insightful sources of information. In one of his first films “Italian-American” (1974), he interviewed his parents. His film reviews, including those from the 1995s. “A personal journey through American films with Martin Scorsese” and 1999s “My trip to Italy.” were especially revealing of the inspiration that shaped him. Scorsese never wrote a memoir, but these films come close.
While much of Mr. Scorsese's portrayal comes from the director's own memories from film to film, there are many other personalities at play in the portrait. This includes staff such as the editor Thelma SchoonmakerPaul Schrader, Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio and Day-Lewis. It also includes Scorsese's children, his ex-wives and his old buddies from Little Italy. First, Salvatore “Sally Gaga” Uricola is first seen as the model for De Niro's scandalous mailbox-bombing Johnny Boy in Mean Streets.
“Cinema consumed him at such an early age and never left him,” DiCaprio says in the film. “There will never be another like him,” says Steven Spielberg.
It's easy to think of Scorsese, perhaps the most revered living director, as an inevitability that he will, of course, be able to make the films he wants. But “Mr. Scorsese” is a reminder of how often that wasn't the case, and how often Scorsese found himself outside of Hollywood, whether due to box office disappointment, clashing styles or the perceived danger in the controversial subjects (Taxi Driver, The Last Temptation of Christ) that he was drawn to.
“He fought for every movie,” Miller says. “Cutting through it all was like riding a bucking bronco. You rise and you fall, you're dead and then you're alive.”
Today's film executives, especially the risk-averse ones, could learn a few lessons from “Mr. Scorsese” about how they can benefit the personal director. As the film recounts, in the late '70s, producer Irwin Winkler refused to make Rocky II with United Artists unless they also made Raging Bull.
For Miller, whose films include The Ballad of Jack and Rose and Maggie's Plan, being around Scorsese was an education. She discovered that his films had begun to infect “Mr. Scorsese.” The editing of the documentary adopted the editing style of his film. “Being around these films,” she says, “you begin to breathe air.”
Being close to Scorsese also inevitably means recommending films. There are many of them. Miller especially remembers “Insect Woman” Japanese director Shohei Imamura's 1963 drama about three generations of women.
“He still does it,” Miller says. “He still sends me movies.”
“Mr. Scorsese” recently debuted on New York Film Festivalwhere Miller's son, Ronan Day-Lewis, made his directorial debut with Anemone, a film that marked husband's return from retirement. At the premiere of Mr. Scorsese, a packed audience at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Auditorium was eager to enjoy the screening and pay tribute to the story.
“You hear all these people laughing with him or suddenly applauding when they see Thelma Schoonmaker or at the end of the episode 'The Last Waltz,'” Miller says. “There was such a palpable feeling of enthusiasm and love. My husband said something that I thought was so beautiful: it reminded everyone how much they love him.”
