Happy Monday, and an early hello to those of you who will be joining us in Los Angeles for tomorrow’s special screening and Q&A on behalf of AMC’s The Audacity. I’ve been catching up on the dark Silicon Valley satire to prepare, and it really is as good as I’ve heard — both skewering the delusional wealthy and finding pockets of sympathy for the poor little rich boys and girls who have taken over the world (and now have to live with the consequences). It should be a great conversation with the show’s creators and stars, and if you haven’t RSVPed yet, get on it!
Today I’m sharing a conversation with Rebecca Miller, whose best documentary or nonfiction series contender about Martin Scorsese might be one of the most satisfying recent viewing experiences you can find in any format. It is, at least, the only Emmy contender using Robert De Niro‘s face as an entirely predictable but satisfying cliffhanger. Allow me to introduce you to Mr. Scorsese.
Marty
Before I watched the five-part documentary series about Scorsese, I figured I knew more about the revered director than I did about my own grandparents — and certainly couldn’t possibly have five hours’ worth of new things to learn.
Scorsese’s own films have told us plenty about his relationship with his native New York City, with Catholicism and male identity and American history; add that to the stacks of biographies and interviews he’s done over the years, and what can possibly be left to uncover?
For Miller, it was less about finding the untold story and more about looking at how the pieces fit together. “I had an instinct that his religious impulse was sort of pulsing underneath the films,” Miller, 63, says of Scorsese (the filmmaker, rather famously, considered becoming a priest in his youth). “And I didn’t think that the spiritual aspect of his films had been dealt with very much. I just had a feeling.”
Covering every aspect of the 83-year-old Scorsese’s life — from his family’s exile from Corona, Queens, when he was a child, to the production of Killers of the Flower Moon — Apple’s Mr. Scorsese is a thorough biography that is, like Scorsese’s life itself, suffused with cinema at every turn. There are the expected interviews with Scorsese’s great collaborators like De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, editor Thelma Schoonmaker and the late musician Robbie Robertson — but also input from filmmakers like Spike Lee and Benny Safdie and even Scorsese’s own childhood friends. Footage from Scorsese’s films, crisply edited to be in conversation with the interviews as well as each other, can be downright revelatory; Miller had a feeling she saw something about Scorsese that nobody else had explored, and each of Mr. Scorsese’s five episodes passes that revelation right on to the viewer.
Miller says she knew Scorsese “socially very slightly” — he had given feedback on early versions of her previous films, like Personal Velocity and her documentary about her father, the playwright Arthur Miller. Miller’s husband, Daniel Day-Lewis, also starred in Scorsese’s films The Age of Innocence and Gangs of New York, which inevitably gives Day-Lewis’s interviews for Mr. Scorsese a lovely, intimate texture. But Miller was building a relationship with her central subject as they made the film together — and only after Scorsese himself, she says, had decided to open up in a way he never had before.
“Obviously, people have asked him to do a big documentary before, and he kind of avoided it,” she tells me. “But having made the decision to allow me to do it, I think he decided to be honest. Even things that he had been asked before, to answer in a different way, or try and look at them again.”
The interviews with Scorsese himself, many of them conducted outdoors amid Covid-era restrictions, are of course the spine of the film. But those conversations are also the reason it evolved from a single feature-length documentary to a five-part series that took years to produce. Originally imagined as a companion piece to the Apple-produced 2023 film Killers of the Flower Moon, the series instead launched on Apple TV last fall. As evidenced by the near-universal acclaim from critics and audiences, it was worth the wait.
“His interview style is very discursive,” Miller says, with a hint of understatement. “You start at point A, and then you ask a question, and then he’ll answer that question, but that answer will remind him of something else, and that thing’s very interesting. As an interviewer, you’ve got to keep with him going, and then somewhere in your head you’re thinking, but I wanted to get back to this strand, and yet not lose any of the delicious things that he’s giving you.”
Those digressions fit well with what Miller described as a “cubist approach” to Scorsese’s life — both the good and the bad. Some of the most surprising and moving interviews are with Scorsese’s ex-wives and children, who convey an unfailing affection for him even when describing some pretty difficult behavior in his younger years (including severe drug use, angry outbursts and absence in his children’s lives). In Mr. Scorsese Miller connects that younger version of Scorsese to a recurring figure in his films — the rascally striver who seeks forgiveness and love despite their failings, à la De Niro’s character, Johnny Boy, in Mean Streets and Kichijiro (Yôsuke Kubozuka) in Silence.
“The films have a lot of honesty about the characters — he’s not hiding anything about them, and part of that comes from the fact that he is pretty honest to himself about himself,” Miller says. “He has a quality that people want to help him somehow. He’s driven them all crazy, but beyond that, I think there’s a real sense that people just love him. And I think that is a component of the destiny that he ended up with. Being a filmmaker, you can’t create alone. You need other people, and you need their loyalty and their interests. And so I think that that’s part of why he survived and was resurrected so many times.”
Miller won the DGA Award for Mr. Scorsese in February, just a few weeks before Scorsese started production on his next film, Apple’s What Happens at Night, starring DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence. She’s not remotely surprised that he’s already back at work, even as his 84th birthday approaches later this year.
“I think he was born feeling like he was in a rush to get all these films out, but now he’s even more so because of his age, although he still remains very youthful,” Miller tells me. “I think he’ll go out with his boots on, which is why I ended the film the way I did. We had whole discussions where people were like, ‘Shouldn’t it be a more wistful ending?’ No. It’s the middle of a sentence.”
