Documenting the life and work of Martin Scorsese would be a daunting task for any filmmaker. But it’s one that Rebecca Miller threw herself into after pitching herself for the job.
After interacting with the iconic filmmaker behind Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas a few times over the years, Miller contacted his documentary producing partner to see if anyone was doing a documentary on him. Directors had been trying, she heard, but Scorsese hadn’t given anyone the green light. So Miller threw her hat in the ring. “I had a meeting, and by the end of that meeting, it felt to me like maybe we were making this film,” she says.
It turns out, they were. Releasing on Apple TV on Friday, her five-part docuseries Mr. Scorsese chronicles the director’s trajectory from his boyhood in lower Manhattan’s Little Italy neighborhood, observing the wise guys that ultimately suffused his later gangster films, all the way to prep on 2023’s Killers of the Flower Moon. It’s informed by around 20 hours of interviews with Scorsese as well as many more hours with a star-studded array of figures from his past and collaborators, Leonardo DiCaprio and Thelma Schoonmaker among them. The series covers the highs and lows, on a spectrum from winning his best director Oscar for The Departed to periods of drug abuse and depression.
That even Scorsese has had an up-and-down journey “sort of gives hope to all of us that there’s a way you can redefine yourself always,” says Miller.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Miller discussed the underappreciated films she wanted to highlight in the series, her treatment of Scorsese’s faith and bringing the filmmaker together with his New York boyhood pals for catch-up sessions that appear in the series.
Did you as a director have any trepidation about tackling Martin Scorsese’s life and work?
I think I was excited about it. Very often I sublimate fear when I’m working because if I allowed myself to feel fear and anxiety, I would never do anything. So I have to kind of pretend it’s not there. Now in retrospect, I’m nervous, but I’m very glad that I did it. I just took it on thinking, I think I can do something here. I think I have a way in and then just put one foot in front of the other, really.
Where did the idea originate to bring together some of Scorsese’s boyhood pals for conversations with him for the film?
So what happened was that he had these photographs of his childhood with him for the first interview. And a few of them were these dear childhood friends and it became clear to me that these people were hugely important in his formation and the raw material for his later work. So I started talking to him about is he still in contact with them? Was there any way I could find them? And in fact, he was still in touch with Robert Uricola and John Bivona and a few others who were his really close friends. I ended up contacting them and in a couple of cases going to Florida to talk to them. And then we also had these two amazing shoots, one in a cafe and one in a restaurant, where he talked to his oldest friends. And it was a real privilege because it’s also an anthropological journey of people. Robert Uricola is no longer alive, and he was the key to a lot of the memories.
How open and voluble did you find Scorsese from the jump or did it take some time to get him to open up?
I really wasn’t manipulating the situation at all. I came in full of curiosity, not knowing very much about his private life, but knowing a lot about his films, having studied his films pretty carefully, and the time around his films. In other words, every year I knew what was being made, I understood the film business and what the whole culture of film was around him, but a lot of the personal things I was really surprised by or didn’t know, I just didn’t know, even the details of his childhood. And so it was me being curious and him having decided, I think, to be honest.
Scorsese’s producing partner, his manager, the sister of his manager and a financial backer of the manager’s company all served as different kinds of producers on this project. How did that come about and did that put any creative limitations on what you could depict in the film?
I’m glad you asked that. So essentially what happened was when we started out, it was like Marty said “yes,” he wants to do it, and then it was the pandemic literally three days later, the shutters came down. And so we started by self-financing and just doing it on my porch. We did that a couple of times, about four-hour interviews each, and then we did a little light editing to really get a sense of where we were, what we had, what we wanted to do. By this time, of course, Rick Yorn knew about the project because he’s Marty’s manager and producer, and we were going to go out to all the usual suspects and try and get financing. But he suggested that he go to Apple. First of all, he gave some gap financing through his company. And then Apple came on board and [he] really made that introduction because they have that relationship with Apple. But we were like, okay, if that works, then we’re fine, we’ll just continue working on it.
Part of it is that I have creative control on the film and I don’t really work unless I have creative control, so that was a prerequisite for me. And he was incredibly respectful. And I guess not incredibly, because he really took his cue from Marty. So that’s your answer. I didn’t have any artistic interference, but he did get involved on that financial level as gap financing and then finally finding us Apple, which was lovely because then we didn’t have to go to absolutely everybody and do it.
Are there any films that you think were underappreciated or under-recognized that you particularly wanted to highlight in this series or talk to?
Yeah, I feel like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is a film that a lot of people haven’t seen, but it’s just a wonderful film, really a tremendous film. And also The Age of Innocence is perhaps one of my favorite films of his. And it’s interesting because Mark Harris says something that I think is really interesting in the film, which is that because of the great success of his movies about the mob, he became “the mob director.” But really his subject is worlds, distinct worlds, and he wants to go in and he wants to understand them. So there’s a part of Marty that is an anthropologist and wants to understand and say, “This is how we lived at this time” to the next generation or whatever. He’s really into what really happened, what did people really do? And you can feel that the detail of that in each of the films, I think.
The series really hammers home Scorsese’s exploration of good and evil in his work. Is that something that you came to the film wanting to look at, or a theme you discovered along the way?
Well, I’d say that from the beginning I was very interested in what I thought was his spiritual life, which I had the feeling was very important to his films, but I didn’t really know how exactly. [In] some of the more overtly religious films, it’s obvious, but how does that jive with Raging Bull? How does it jive with Goodfellas and so on? But you realize that it’s all these questions, these big questions about good and evil and what are we are kind of sewn into all his work. And that was something that I was really interested in exploring and that was kind of my way in, essentially.
A lot of people have an idea of who Martin Scorsese is. What do you hope they discover as a result of watching this series?
I read something where somebody describes the series as a crazy ride in a hot air balloon where you’re up, then you’re down, then you’re up, then you’re down, you think you’re crashing into the water, then all of a sudden you’re up over the hills. And that’s what I think, is you realize that there were so many times where he really felt like it was over. He had crashed out to the bottom and then all of a sudden he’s back again, he’s alive. I mean, literally he had near-death experiences. I think it sort of gives hope to all of us that there’s a way you can redefine yourself always. And the other thing, of course, the most important thing perhaps, is that it brings people back to the films that they either rewatch or discover films. They thought they knew him but no, there’s another aspect. His project in the largest way of looking at it is kind of like our country, all these decades of our country and how it’s reflected in his work, for better and worse — the beauty and the greed and the violence and the love. So much of it is reflected in this work.
Was there anything left on the cutting room floor that you were kind of devastated to leave behind on this one?
There’s one thing that I still would like to put out as its own little thing, which is the story of how he [Scorsese] essentially saved the great director Michael Powell from complete obscurity, living in a trailer in the Cotswalds, and brought him to the United States and he got a teaching job. Marty really enabled people to discover him [and] his films, and also he met Thelma Schoonmaker, who is obviously Marty’s longtime collaborator and editor, and they got married. And it’s just a very beautiful story, but it just didn’t fit in a documentary about Marty. And it’s something that I think is beautiful and also says a lot about Marty, but sometimes in order to make something good, you have to lose things.
Are there any films that you discovered or rediscovered as a result of doing this film?
I didn’t know his early films. One thing that’s really extraordinary is if you look at It’s Not Just You, Murray!, which he made when he was something like 22 or 21 years old, it has the keys to Goodfellas in it. I mean, it’s really mirroring Goodfellas in terms of its approach to form, its energy and its relationship to language and voiceover. Not only that, but he had storyboards that he made when he was nine or 10 years old that contain a shot that he is still attempting to make. And we actually animated his little storyboards when he was a child and you realize, oh my god, he’s still making [these], and we show the shots. He was, in a way, a complete person as a filmmaker. He was so complete in his understanding of the language. But at the same time, it took him so long and he’s still discovering, he’s still developing. He still has the same hunger as he did when he started out.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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