There are dozens upon dozens of books, biographies, film-by-film breakdowns, published interviews, recorded public appearances and moderated Q&As, behind-the-scenes clips, and overall tributes to Martin Scorsese. There is, it’s safe to say, nothing quite like Mr. Scorsese, Rebecca Miller’s five-hour docuseries on the filmmaker who’s given us Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence, The Departed, The Irishman and other American cinematic landmarks.
Even if you know the basic facts behind Scorsese’s journey from asthmatic kid to New Hollywood maverick to industry pariah, Oscar-winning legend, and first-round contender for GOAT status, you’ll be surprised at how candid the 82-year-old director is regarding his childhood, his marriages, his successes and failures and numerous professional resurrections. So many documentaries come off as little more than Wikipedia entries with benefits. This multi-episode profile makes you feel as if you’re eavesdropping on an artist reflecting back on his life and work, while footage of his films attest to five decades worth of spilling his guts on celluloid.
A remarkable moviemaker in her own right who’s no stranger to examining the work of larger-than-life figures — she’s also made a deep-dive look at her father, the playwright Arthur Miller — Miller spent five years constructing what feels like the definitive look at a living legend. And when she met up with us at a small cafe near her home in the West Village, a little over a month before Mr. Scorsese was set to premiere at the New York Film Festival in early October (it’s now streaming on Apple TV), she was willing to be equally open and forthcoming as her subject. The following interview has been edited and condensed.
Once you knew this would be a docuseries, as opposed to a feature, how did that change how you wanted to tell Martin Scorsese’s story?
It was tricky, because you try to have that thing of giving each episode a kind of lift off, because we didn’t want to do something dry and academic. We wanted to make something that was as exciting as Marty’s work. The whole thing is, after all, a page turner, and you do want people to want to turn that page.
Which was something I learned, because at first I thought, “Well, this is like one long snake, and you just chop it up.” But then, it was actually Molly Thompson, from Apple’s documentary division, that pointed out to me that, “Sometimes people might see one episode of this — and then you need them to come back. You need them to return to it.” So it was really a case of educating myself in terms of what it is to make something that is multiple parts, and how to make people be like, “I have to find out what happens.” Because there’s no murder driving the plot. It’s not like, “Who killed the girl in the ditch?” [Laughs]
“How can I make this a cliffhanger? What if it’s that he’s just about to meet the guy who’s he’s going to collaborate with for the next 50 years?
Exactly! At first, I really did think it was going to be a two-hour film, and that’s what I had started making. We had self-financed it, and once Marty said yes to this, we just said, “OK, we’re going and we’ll figure this out later.” Even once Apple came in, we were still thinking it was one film. And then at a certain point, I invited the producers in, showed them some of what we’d cut together, and then said, “I don’t think I can make this in one piece. We were thinking maybe two pieces?” And then that, too, became impossible. It gradually grew because we realized that, Well, yes: there is a version where it only takes 12 minutes to go through his whole childhood. But then think about all that you would miss!
There’s a wonderful American Masters doc on him that played on PBS right before Goodfellas, came out, and it’s wonderful —
It is!
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in Australian/New Zealand music and globally.
— But even that skims past a lot of interesting stuff. And if you think about everything that’s happened in the last 35 years since that was made, in both his life and career, plus everything leading up to it — you couldn’t cover all of that in just two hours. It would be Martin Scorsese: The Cliff Notes version.
And it would also be kind of a list. What I really didn’t want is “He did this, and then he did that, and then he did this, and then he did that. The end.” And someone just comes out think, Oh, wow. I forgot he did that one. He sure did a lot of films…” Whereas this was really about creating something that’s almost like you’re living with him as he discovers his own life. You don’t know more than he knows when he knows it as you go through it — so you’re still really with him as a character.
The bullseye, really, is where the films and his life intersect, and that’s sort of what also guided me which films to to focus on. Look, I’m a storyteller, so I have to tell a story. It’s not a filmography, really. That you can just look up some place. I wanted to call it a “film portrait,” because it’s my portrait of him. We do include the great majority of his work — although some of his documentaries aren’t included — but we tried to get as much of it in here as possible.
Let’s take a step back for a second. I’m sure the idea of doing a very long deep-dive documentary on the person who’s arguably America’s greatest living filmmaker seemed like a no-brainer overall. But at what point did you decide this was something that you were going to devote a number of years of your life to making?
I was having a conversation with my producing partner, Damon Cardasis, about making my portrait of my father [Arthur Miller: Writer, 2017] parallel to doing [the 2015 feature] Maggie’s Plan. I said to him, “I really do like that thing of having a documentary that I’m working on while we’re working making a feature. I think that that’s a nice way to do it. I’d like to do that again.” And his question: Who? Who would you think you might want to do a film on? And the first person that came to mind was Marty.
Why Marty, specifically?
I think I had an instinct that I didn’t really know him. I had met him on the Gangs of New York because of Daniel [Day-Lewis, Miller’s husband], but I knew him very little socially — and I just had this instinct that I might be able to look at some things in a different way because of that. I was so interested in the juxtaposition of Catholicism and violence, his fascination with violence, and then, on the other hand, this very intense spiritual life that he seemed to have. That’s really interesting. How does that go together? How is that the same person?
Even if you consider that people contain multitudes — that’s a lot.
Yeah. So I had this sort of instinct, and because we had also known Margaret Bodde, who’s his doc producer, we called her and said, Look, I’ve got a crazy idea. I’m sure someone is doing this already. But is anyone making a big movie about Marty? And she said, No, and there are a lot of people who’ve been trying to get him to do this for years. But this is a really interesting idea. Let me talk to him.”
You pitched her on the idea of spiritual and violence in the profile, and that’s what she found interesting?
I hadn’t pitched an angle at that point. It really was just: Would you consider letting me take a crack at this? Let me back up a bit. So when I met him briefly on the set of Gangs, I was making my film Personal Velocity. And I asked him during an off-moment, if he had any recommendations for great voiceovers, since I knew I was going to use a voiceover in that film, and felt like I needed a model. He gave me some great advice, of course, and a list of films to check out. Then later, I showed him that film and he gave me a few notes. Plus he’d read my books.
So I knew Marty was aware of who I was as an artist. Margaret said to him, “You know, Rebecca would like to do this thing.” And he said, “Wow. OK. Tell her to write me a letter. Write a letter that would tell me what she’s going to do.” So I thought, Oh God, I can’t go in with, you know, “it’s spirituality plus violence!” — even if that might be one of the things I wanted to explore, it just didn’t feel like an accurate way of pitching it. I wanted to do something more encompassing than just that. So I just said “It’s a Cubist approach, where I look at his life and work from different angles.”
That’s a good pitch.
I mean, we know him as an artist, we know about his family dynamics, we know his collaborators, and we know his movies. That’s all out there. But when I went to him, I specifically said, “I’m not going to pretend I know more than I actually know. There’s a lot worth talking about here past the usual stuff.” And I think that was when he said, “Okay, let’s have a meeting.” I went to meet him, and this was literally two days before everyone disappeared because of Covid. It was that moment when you know something was happening, but it’s still like, do we hug or do we not hug?”
“Are hugs OK? Are they still legal?”
[Laughs] For a few years, my last hug with a person who I wasn’t related to was Marty! So we meet and then he literally gets locked in his study, because everyone’s scared for his health. All his film projects get shut down. He’s extremely bored. Perfect time for me to have him. So he took a car to my house upstate, and we decided to do the first interview. That’s why we’re outside talking on my the porch, because of Covid, and it’s like the leaves, this bucolic scenery — it’s not really his normal vibe. But it was because of that thing that we were able to get it started. We did two long, separate interviews there and then gradually, over a period of five years, we got what we needed. It took a long time to get everybody sit down. We went to Los Angeles to talk to Robbie Robertson, and then we took a trip to Florida to meet some of his friends from back in the day, which was kind of the highlight for me.
I cannot believe that you met Salvatore Uricola, a.k.a. “Sally Gaga,” the inspiration for Johnny Boy in Mean Streets — he’s like the Holy Grail for Scorseseologists.
When I showed this to Marty, his favorite part was when Salvatore is acting paranoid, like, “Why do you wanna know all this stuff?” And his brother says, “She’s not a cop!” [Laughs] That cracked him up.
But I mean, the way that interview happened was so serendipitous and so unexpected — I really didn’t think I was going to get to meet Sally. He is almost this mythic figure in Marty’s world. There’s that moment in the movie when I mention him to Robert De Niro, and he says, “Oh, he’s still alive?!” That was a common response. And then suddenly there he is, sitting next to his brother, telling all these incredible stories….
What kind of insight into Mr. Scorsese did you get talking to those people from his past?
I mean, you understood that this very talented kid was very isolated, you know — he talks about his isolation, having to stay inside because of his asthma and constantly looking out the window…
You get him to admit that he’s been trying to recreate that view from his window for years!
That view he had of the street from when he was 10! He says that he’s still trying to do that shot. “Sometimes it works out better than others.” [Laughs]
But I think the group of friends that he made when he was young man really adore him, and he he’s very loved by them then and now. Marty could take care of himself, you know — if not physically, then definitely verbally. He figured out how to make people laugh. I think he figured out how to get out of situations He talks about it in the in the film, but there were definitely groups, and “Whose group were you in?” was an important question. And when you talked to those guys, you really got the sense that even when he was a kid, he had a real talent for this. It’s not just that he drew well. It’s that he was already able to think cinematically on such a high level back then. And he really was gobbling up films constantly. That aspect of needing to be inside in a cold space because he had such bad asthma, and that made the theater a safe space? He’s already linking being at the movies to breathing. That’s an intense thing.
It’s already a life-or-death thing from the jump.
One of the reasons that I insisted on spending such a long time inside his childhood and the development of him as a filmmaker in early days is because I do think that it’s like the nerve center. You know like they say that all your nerves go to your stomach? I think that all the nerves for him go to Elizabeth Street. Everything that happened, all the dramas that happened there, and the traumas that happened there… I felt like, in order to really, honestly get a sense of who this person was, we needed to dwell there for a bit. We need to see the grit that turns into the pearl inside the oyster.
Do you remember the first time you saw a Scorsese movie and had a sense of someone with a real vision being behind the camera?
To be honest, I don’t think it was one of the early ones. Goodfellas is the early Nineties, right?
It’s 1990. That film literally starts off the decade with a mix of violence and irony, which ends up setting the tone for a lot of what comes after it over the next 10 years.
I was still years away from being a filmmaker yet, and so was watching it really in a more of a pure audience way. But I remember the sheer energy of it being so extraordinary. And there’s a slight-of-hand element to it, like you literally don’t know how you got from one place to the other. I felt like I was being pushed by a very strong tide when I was watching it. I was probably just starting to make very experimental films —I really didn’t think I would ever be making films for larger audiences, or any kind of movies where masses of people would be sitting in a seat to watch my films. I was thinking I was going to be showing things in galleries and stuff. But I remember being impressed by the sheer storytelling he was putting up on the screen in that film. It changed a lot for me.
What did you learn about him through work, whether you revisiting movies for the doc or watching some of them for the first time now?
That he has this dazzling honesty about himself as a human being, which he expresses through the characters. He’s so honest, but he’s not cynical and he’s not cruel. He has love for these people, and personally, I think that’s the secret to all great artists. But sometimes people get it mixed up. They think the violence or the shock of everything is the end goal. But that’s never what he’s doing. I mean, you look at something like The Age of Innocence, which is not a violent film —
Not physically violent, at least.
Right, there’s so much emotional violence in it. But there’s so much heat coming off the film, like, in terms of just love and lust and the impossibility of that person that you want yet you can never have. You know, the idea of longing — it’s a very difficult thing to portray in film, and he managed to do it. But yeah… I guess my answer is that the more I watched his films again, the more I realized that he never will stop. He’s a filmmaker who will die with his boots on.
There’s that scene in the docuseries where he recalls a professor telling him, “You have technique now, but: What’s your philosophy?” And it feels like once you’ve gotten past the kind of heat that comes off his work, it’s the philosophy behind all of those films that stick with you. You feel like, “I know the artist who’s made these movies because there is a philosophy behind it, even if he’s burying the lead sometimes. It’s still in there.” It makes perfect sense to me that the same person who made Casino—
—Also made The Last Temptation of Christ and Silence, because that’s who he is, I think. I remember coming across the moment when I was researching this, where his father says all his films have some religion in them. And it’s interesting, because you remember that his formation is in the neighborhood where the church was opposite the Ravenite Social Club, where all those gangsters would congregate, you know? Those two things were literally across the street from each other. That tells you a lot about where he’s coming from, and the conundrum that he’s working through all the time.
How were you organizing these five chapters outside of just hitting the chronological markers?
Once we had all of the research and the pictures, the home movies, the footage from his films, we kept going back to two central questions: What are the clouds of ideas? And how do they link? Because it’s almost like they’re not chapters. They’re kind of like these smaller episodes within the episode, all of which are dealing with separate things besides just, “He made these two movies over this five-year period.”
There’s a lot of split screen sequences where you’re seeing similar stuff happening on each side of the frame, but they’re coming from films are 30 years apart. It’s almost like they’re talking to each other across decades.
Yes! Different films, same sensibility. Even the talking-head segments will cut between a contemporary interview and that same person when they were younger. Part of that was to keep things visually interesting. But if you just concentrate on his films, there are so many instances of them mirroring each other. There are a lot of echoes and rhymes inside his work. Even the way we use the split screen —that’s a mirror as well, because of his work on all of the split screen stuff in Woodstock.
That’s extremely clever.
I didn’t want it to seem like you were watching an academic lecture about his work. I wanted viewers to see those scenes and make the connection themselves.
Do you think if you had tried to do this, say, 10 years ago, you might not have got as much out of Mr. Scorsese as you did? There are moments in some of the interviews where he seems to be way, way more honest and reflective about aspects of his life than he has been in the past….
I mean, if he hadn’t wanted to talk to me about all those things, of course, he wouldn’t have talked to me about any of those things that I talked about in film that are quite intimate or quite personal. But I didn’t necessarily try to lead him. It was more that he led and I followed him. It’s funny, there were times when I’d ask him something, and he’d go out of his way to answer the question not just in a new way, but a way that kind of like shook him up a little bit. He wanted to look at some of these things he’s talked about a million times in the past and really look at them now. I mean, some of the interviews we did were like five hours long. But he would keep refreshing himself. And I think that’s where his youthfulness comes from. He seems like he’s exhausted a subject, but then the wellspring kind of comes up inside him again, his mind is going, and it’s like, “Wait, Rebecca, I just thought of something else…”.
Did it take a while to get him to that point of being honest, or was he already laying it all out from the beginning?
There’s a part in the film where I asked him something like, “How much of you is in Travis Bickle and Taxi Driver?” And you see him close his eyes and he’s like: I have to be careful what I say right now, because it can be taken the wrong way. Then he just dives right into it. That was the first interview we did! But yeah, I guess I do feel that over the years and the many hours he and I talked, there was a kind of deepening trust and a comfort. Not having a big crew present, I think, made a big difference as well.
How do you feel different about him after digging into his work and having had him crack himself open for you for the last five years?
I certainly understood that he was an artist with a truly Shakespearean level of output. But I mean, we’re talking about somebody who has created so many pieces of extraordinary art — but he’s alive and I got to talk to him for a long time. It’s a bit like going back and talking to Dostoevsky for five years. To be completely honest with you… I don’t think I understood the level and the breadth of his greatness until I had really unpacked everything. I mean, you look at all these films he’s made, and you find yourself going: How did these incredible works of art happen? What’s cocktail of things that somehow came together and enabled them? Because talent is only one factor, you know. It’s one very important factor, but it’s not the only factor.
And you know, his films are all sort of collectively about America in a very deep way. Yes, there are gangster films, the crime movies, and then there’s The Wolf of Wall Street, which is a really profound piece of work. That’s a film that I’ve really come to appreciate in a deeper way. But so many of his movies are reflecting back his family’s experience in America, his own experience in America, the American experience as a whole.
The good and the bad and the ugly of it, yeah.
His films have a lot of craft in them. But he’s not really going for perfection as much as truth. That was a big takeaway for me. Plus the fact that I felt like I went to graduate school. I saw so many movies that I hadn’t seen thanks to him while making this.
From Rolling Stone US
