The New York Film Festival was a family affair for the Daniel Day-Lewis and Rebecca Miller family. Day-Lewis returned from retirement to co-write and star in “Anemone,” directed by his 27-year-old son Ronan, who sent in his film after his mother submitted her five-hour Martin Scorsese documentary, “Mr. Scorsese.” New York Film Festival artistic Director Dennis Lim invited them both.
When we met for coffee the day after the October 4 premiere, Miller couldn’t believe that 1,000 people sat still in Alice Tully Hall for five hours without leaving. That may be due to what her husband told her afterwards: “It reminded people of how much they love him.”
That’s what the series does. I’m of an age. I grew up with all these movies. I watched them when they came out, from “Mean Streets,” “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” and “Taxi Driver” through “Raging Bull,” “The Aviator,” “The Wolf of Wall Street,” and “Killers of the Flower Moon.” (And that’s not all!) My first job out of NYU Cinema Studies was in the United Artists publicity bullpen; I worked on both “New York, New York” (1977) and “The Last Waltz” (1978). While Miller doesn’t tell the story of how much it cost UA, in the pre-digital era, to erase the coke hanging out of Neil Young’s nose, frame by frame, she does capture that coke-fueled era in all its frenzied glory.
Scorsese is part of the fabric of any cinephile’s life. And soon, any Apple TV subscriber can enjoy Miller’s fast-moving five-year dive into his life and films. (Miller showed the streamer four hours of interviews with Scorsese and got substantial backing, first for a two-hour feature, then a five-hour series.) She gets loads of help from Scorsese’s ample archives and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker (who scored applause at Alice Tully Hall), as well as his surviving childhood friends from Little Italy and work cohorts Day-Lewis, Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jay Cocks, Nicholas Pileggi, Paul Schrader, and more. The good news for the always busy Scorsese: After some 10 interviews (20 hours) running from the start of the pandemic through the present, he’s not talking about himself for a bit.
Miller, a narrative filmmaker (“Maggie’s Plan”) who directed a 2017 documentary about her father (“Arthur Miller: Writer”), isn’t afraid to ask for help. She first met Scorsese during the filming of “Gangs of New York,” which starred Day-Lewis. She asked the director for recommendations of movies with good voiceovers. He gave her a list. She then asked him to give her notes on a rough cut of her first film, “Personal Velocity” (2002). He watched it and told her where it slowed down, and she made a fix. She turned to him again for input on her films “The Ballad of Jack and Rose” (2005) and “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee” (2009).
Her interest in Scorsese was rooted “in the apparent anomaly of his spiritual life as a Catholic and his fascination with violence,” she said. “How do those two things go together?” So she reached out to Margaret Bodde, his documentary producer. “Well, why not ask?” said Miller. “That’s always my motto for everything: It never hurts to ask. It’s one of the privileges of having been around people that intimidate other people, and realizing they’re just people. They often don’t get asked things that actually they would love to be asked.”
That’s how she felt the confidence to ask Bodde if anyone was making a documentary about Scorsese. “No,” Bodde said. “Nobody is. People are definitely asking a lot. But he just keeps saying ‘no.’” First, Scorsese asked for an email pitch. (Miller suggested a periscope approach, illuminating him from multiple perspectives.) Then, he asked for a meeting. “During this meeting, he began to talk about it as something that was going to happen,” said Miller. “He started saying, ‘Well, and then we could do this, and then we could do that. We could shoot in the office.’ I was [thinking], ‘Are we making this movie? What’s going on?’ So we hugged. I left.”
Miller called her producer Damon Cardasis and said, “I think we’re making this movie.” She and the producers put up a little money. “By this time, the pandemic is in full swing; nobody can move,” she said. “Marty is stuck in his study. And it was just a tiny handful of people on my porch. So it was not an expensive thing. And he came upstate and sat down for two and a half hours.”
After a Zoom interview with Scorsese, she used the audio where he says, “What are we? Are we essentially good or evil?” — she said, “he’s different when no one’s in the room. So frank and so naked. So after that, I had everyone set up the cameras and leave the room so we were alone. Then, we got into his study, which was what I was angling for the whole time. I really wanted to get into his sanctum. And it felt very intimate.”
Miller gets good stuff out of De Niro, Scorsese’s collaborator on 10 films, who is not an easy interview. “If you just count the words, it was a sparse interview,” she said. “But if you look at what he gave me in terms of his expressions, it was rich, and it was all inside of him. It’s the way he is on screen, too. It’s a lesson in screen acting. At the end of it, the crew is like, ‘Oh my God, he didn’t say anything!’ And I was like, ‘No, I think we’re OK.’”
Images can be stronger than words. When Miller confronted the time when Scorsese is fighting for his life in a New York hospital, there’s a dramatic moment when De Niro urges Scorsese to commit to making “Raging Bull.” Scorsese said, “OK, finally, OK.” Scorsese needed a movie to make. Otherwise, he couldn’t live. So he recovered in order to make “Raging Bull.” “It was the meaning of his life,” said Miller. “You have a gift, and you have to do your best with the gift.”
Every time Scorsese headed into bleak days in his career, someone rescued him. “I called them his angels,” said Miller. “In other words, he encounters people at the bottom of his life that help him to the next level. Part of it is the strength of his personality: He has something that makes people want to help him, that is his personal charm. There’s something inside of him.”
Editor Thelma Schoonmaker was one angel. Scorsese pulled Schoonmaker out of the documentary world. He had loved working with her on “Woodstock” (1969). “He meets Thelma, then he loses her,” said Miller. “But he gets her back because he remembers ‘she’s the only person I can trust.’ Can you imagine learning how to cut feature film on ‘Raging Bull?’” On their first collaboration after nine years, “Raging Bull” (1980), they broke all the rules. Schoonmaker shows what they did on “Raging Bull” on the Avid, frame by frame.
Miller was prepared on the films, “but with his own life, I knew very little,” she said. “Most of the questions about his life are me just saying, ‘I didn’t know a lot of these things.’ I wasn’t a Scorsese expert in a biographical sense. And that was actually helpful, because had I been manipulating the situation in any way, it would have been maybe palpable to him, versus genuinely asking questions. Whereas with the films, of course, I had studied the films, that’s what I had in front of me.”
Admirably, Scorsese never backed down or compromised when the studios or someone like Harvey Weinstein tried to make him change his films. In that sense, he stayed pure. “The Color of Money” (1986), starring Tom Cruise and Paul Newman, may have been a mainstream studio picture with stars that made money, but Scorsese not only delivered a hit, but a good movie. ($52 million worldwide in 1986.)
“Listen, it was literally a survival situation at that point,” said Miller. When he was asked to change his films, “his attitude was like, ‘then I’ll just go. I’ll steal the film. Or I’ll take my name off.’ There was a deep, ethical thing. It wasn’t standing up for yourself to do it. It’s a sense, like you’re betraying something deep, if you compromise.”
Another angel, DiCaprio, rescued Scorsese by wanting to work with him. Suddenly, Scorsese’s more expensive projects were bankable. Scorsese could make “Gangs of New York,” also starring Daniel Day-Lewis, “The Aviator,” also starring Cate Blanchett, “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which launched Margot Robbie’s career, and “Killers of the Flower Moon,” with De Niro, which pushed newcomer Lily Gladstone to an Oscar nomination.
Scorsese is candid about his turbulent internal landscape, forged in the hardscrabble Italian upbringing that fueled his movies, from “Mean Streets” to “Goodfellas.” But moving through the ups and downs of his career — and he had many dips — you see how he got to that breakdown in 1978, from the never-ending production of the musical “New York, New York” (1977) to his insistence on making The Band concert movie “The Last Waltz” (1978) with his roommate and coke buddy Robbie Robertson at the same time. Leonardo DiCaprio points out that Scorsese made no money on that film. His agent was furious. “I got to make the film,” said Scorsese.
“It struck me. He’s so honest to himself,” said Miller. “It’s a real lesson, because everybody wants to lie to themselves a little bit about who they are, what’s going on. He doesn’t lie to himself that much. He’s brutally honest with himself…It’s also so rare that such a personal artist connects with the culture in such a deep way. Time after time, he inflames the culture. Look at what happened with ‘Last Temptation of Christ,’ my God.”
In Miller’s portrait, the filmmaker goes through isolation, loneliness, and pain. He always felt like an outsider in Los Angeles. He drove himself hard. And he was not so easy to live with for the women in his life, five wives and three daughters: Cathy (first wife Laraine Marie Brennan), Domenica Cameron-Scorsese (second wife Julia Cameron), and Francesca (current wife Helen Morris). Cathy reveals how wonderful it was to be directed by him in a supporting role in “Casino” (1995). (In contrast, we infer, to the rest of her more distant interactions with him.) And third wife Isabella Rossellini, while affectionate toward him, is candid about how angry and destructive Scorsese could be. (He never hit her, she said.)
“What’s fascinating is the journey and the hope,” said Miller. “You see a person who maybe, essentially, hasn’t changed, in the sense that the little boy who is making those drawings is still that person now. But he’s changed. There’s been so much evolution in him. It’s interesting from the point of view of character.”
Clearly, Scorsese has used therapy, meditation, and other tools to keep his frenetic life on a calmer track. He spends time with his youngest daughter, Francesca, and his wife, Helen Morris, who has been battling Parkinson’s for 30 years.
“She wanted to be present in the film,” said Miller. “So we came in and we did it, and it was right, because she’s his wife, and she should be in the movie. Also, it’s important to see him in that home space, as he is now. You never want to be exploitative, but at the same time, clear-eyed, keep your eyes open. If anything, [Marty] teaches you to not look away. As Spike Lee says, at some point, ‘people want to look away, and he doesn’t look away.’”
In the end, Miller had to make some tough choices about what to leave out, including “Hugo” and the filmmaker’s television and documentary work. Finally, “Hugo” didn’t relate to the themes she was pursuing.
“‘Hugo’ is the only one we don’t have,” she said. “Essentially, the art and the life are in a tango, right? You can’t separate them with this man, because they were sewn together when he was a very small child. So the film only makes sense when those two things are clasped together. The minute we stopped doing that, it would turn into a list movie, which is my idea of hell. The big challenge with this movie was transitions of thought and making them feel like nothing. You need to hold the audience. You need to keep the reins of the film tight.”
The final editorial debate was one of length. This was an Apple TV conversation. “They gave us a decent budget, not immense, but definitely decent,” said Miller. “It had to increase slightly, because originally it was a feature film.”
After about eight months of cutting, she realized it was a series. “‘I can’t do this,’” she said. “There was a version, of course, of a 15-minute childhood and [snaps fingers] get to ‘Mean Streets.’ ‘This is terrible. It’s boring. We know everything.’ I started realizing we have to go deep into the original friends. It’s like the kryptonite, the stuff that he molded everything out of.”
The series links De Niro’s character in their first collaboration, “Mean Streets,” Johnny Boy, to other roles in the Scorsese oeuvre. He was based on a real guy [Salvatore “Sally” Uricola] in his neighborhood. “At first, Marty didn’t say his name, like he was not somebody that we were never going to talk to,” Miller said. “He was almost a mythic figure, and for whatever reason, it was just not even in the cards at all that I was going to talk to him. There was “a fascination with this young man who was this outlaw, really, who even within the mob scene of the ‘serious guys’ was a cowboy, he was unpredictable. That’s why De Niro said, ‘Is he still alive?’ Because nobody could believe that he survived, that they didn’t kill him.”
Scorsese’s old neighborhood pal Robert Uricola helped her out when she said, “Gee, I’m really sorry we couldn’t meet your brother.” Robert instantly phoned Salvatore and invited him to join them, and he showed up 15 minutes later, his shirt open to the waist, his face ravaged by hard living. Miller was shocked to find herself in the room with Salvatore and reached blindly for a question. “He’s worried because he doesn’t know what’s going on,” she said. “He said, ‘My brother can tell you most of it, and the rest of it is off the record.’”
She asked him if he ever blew up a mailbox. Cut to Johnny Boy blowing up a mailbox in “Mean Streets.” “Yes,” he said.
“Mr. Scorsese” premieres on Apple TV on October 17.