Miller, who has been married for nearly 30 years to actor Daniel Day-Lewis, star of The Age of Innocence and Gangs of New York, knew Scorsese socially before sitting down with him during the pandemic for hours-long conversations. But she began her inquiry as a devout consumer of his filmography, rather than as a friend.<\/p>\n
She wondered how growing up in Manhattan\u2019s Little Italy shaped the stories he dreamed up. She was curious about how he squared his Catholicism with the intense violence of his movies. She questioned how he worked so furiously and prolifically on projects that required so much of him.<\/p>\n
Yes, cocaine once played a role. It also nearly killed him, landing him in the hospital with internal bleeding in 1978. He tells Miller that Robert De Niro came to his bedside and asked, \u201cDo you want to die like this?\u201d They put out Raging Bull two years later.<\/p>\n
Scorsese is \u201ca person with a lot of anomalies built in inside of him\u201d, Miller said.<\/p>\n
Having mostly directed narrative films (Personal Velocity, Maggie\u2019s Plan), Miller discovered an \u201cinner freedom\u201d working on documentaries, citing the ability to determine their forms along the way.<\/p>\n
Mr. Scorsese is her second non-fiction work after Arthur Miller: Writer, an intimate, 98-minute portrait of her father, the lauded playwright.<\/p>\n
That is a far more personal piece \u2013 Miller, diving into her own family history, even narrates the feature \u2013 but it shares with Mr. Scorsese the goal of deconstructing a towering public figure\u2019s image and self.<\/p>\n
Film nerds are bound to enjoy Mr. Scorsese, which dissects how the director developed certain aspects of his aesthetic: he favours high-angle shots, for instance, because they resemble how he viewed the world as an asthmatic child, forced to watch other kids play outside from his perch at a window.<\/p>\n
Rebecca Miller\u2019s five-part docuseries pulls back the curtain on Martin Scorsese.<\/p>\n
Miller said the single-take Copacabana nightclub scene in Goodfellas set a new bar for Steadicam usage in film.<\/p>\n
\u201cMarty has invented some film grammar that we use all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n
With so much at stake, Scorsese has been steadfast in his efforts to protect his vision. In the docuseries, he revisits the time a disagreement with executives over disturbing material in Taxi Driver almost drove him to break into the studio to steal the rough cut. He even considered buying a gun, though he says he didn\u2019t have any plans to use it.<\/p>\n
\u201cMarty was very upset,\u201d director Steven Spielberg tells Miller in an interview. He talked Scorsese out of the burglary. Brian De Palma adds, \u201cHe was going crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat he wants to fight against is the homogenisation \u2026 of cinema,\u201d Miller said. \u201cHe wants to preserve individual voices because it is very, very important.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stories like this complete Mr. Scorsese, which is as enamoured of his artistry as it is candid about his flaws.<\/p>\n
The episode Saint\/Sinner gets its name from actress Isabella Rossellini, Scorsese\u2019s third wife, who describes how the film-maker\u2019s fascination with morality butts up against some not-so-great behaviour.<\/p>\n
His three daughters \u2013 Cathy, Domenica and Francesca, each from a different marriage \u2013 speak candidly about their relationships with their father. It becomes clear he was not as present during the childhoods of the two eldest.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there\u2019s a tendency, particularly among male artists, to bifurcate them: there\u2019s the man, and then there\u2019s the artist,\u201d Miller said. She challenges this tendency through her work, an effort supported by Scorsese himself.<\/p>\n
During one of their conversations, Miller said, he mentioned facing \u201ctemptations along the way. I said, \u2018As a man or as an artist?\u2019 And he said, \u2018Both, because there is no difference.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Even as he re-established his personal priorities, work continued to consume Scorsese. Miller remembered him seeming \u201cso alive and so vivid and so young\u201d when she met him on the set of Gangs of New York. He was nearing 60 but had the anxious energy of a debut director, she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was in such a state of nervous anticipation over whether he had selected the right angles, the right shots. He was worried about how it was going to go,\u201d she recalled. \u201cThat was a big surprise to me, because somebody who\u2019s obviously a great man usually sits back and just enjoys his great man-ness. But he\u2019s really not like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Getting to know Scorsese through the documentary deepened Miller\u2019s admiration of his work: \u201cIt\u2019s like a Shakespearean level of output \u2013 and he\u2019s alive,\u201d she said. While she had always revered certain films, Raging Bull among them, poring over Scorsese\u2019s oeuvre prompted her to reassess others, such as The Wolf of Wall Street.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was such a pop film,\u201d she said. \u201cI didn\u2019t fully appreciate that when you look under the hood of that film at what it took to make that technically \u2026 at the level of expertise that both he and Thelma [Schoonmaker, his editor] and all the actors exhibited, the level of freedom was extraordinary.\u201d<\/p>\n
Miller was supposed to visit Scorsese on the set of Killers of the Flower Moon, which he made while she worked on the documentary, but schedules got the better of them. In the end, it didn\u2019t matter to her: his innermost thoughts are laid bare in the film itself.<\/p>\n
Leonardo DiCaprio\u2019s character in Killers is \u201ca classic example of a Scorsese antihero\u201d, Miller said, noting that he \u201cis in love with his wife and poisoning her for money at the same time\u201d. Is he good? Is he bad? Can both be true at the same time? In a sense, the character grapples with the moral dilemmas that have rattled Scorsese his entire life.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s like a hall of mirrors,\u201d Miller said. Her docuseries captures \u201ca dance between the man and the films, the films and the man. They are always creating each other\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Miller, who has been married for nearly 30 years to actor Daniel Day-Lewis, star of The Age of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":91467,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[1443,124,25819,18432,3936,859,156,68637,31405,1333,106,11551,221,68636,296,6451,5812,13106,5133,17935,409,111,139,69,68639,57230,64578,3048,68638,68634,68635,684,5828,6730],"class_list":["post-91466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-about","tag-could","tag-deep","tag-did","tag-director","tag-documentary","tag-entertainment","tag-featurelength","tag-filmmaker","tag-get","tag-head","tag-hours","tag-how","tag-impossible","tag-into","tag-knew","tag-make","tag-maker","tag-martin","tag-miller","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-oneandahalf","tag-oscarwinning","tag-rebecca","tag-said","tag-scorsese","tag-scorseses","tag-slowly","tag-there","tag-wanted","tag-would"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91466\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}