Oh what joy! In an era when the documentary sector has been colonised by nonsense celebrity guff and branded Netflix piffle (see Sly; Pamela, a Love Story; Beckham; Becoming; Harry & Meghan; Victoria Beckham) along comes Rebecca Miller with this rich, serious and consistently rewarding profile of the modern Hollywood icon Martin Scorsese.
The documentary, which launches today, is made up of five weighty episodes and is subtitled rather grandly “A film portrait by Rebecca Miller”. And yet this is precisely what Miller, daughter of Arthur and an accomplished feature director (see Maggie’s Plan) delivers. It’s a captivating and careful study of an Oscar-winning 82-year-old auteur that emerges from a plethora of ideas and intimate testimonies, most notably Scorsese’s own, yet is always balanced by fundamental concepts of light and shade.
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“Marty is a saint sinner,” says his former wife Isabella Rossellini (one of five marriages), setting the scene for an exploration that proves, as each episode unfolds, increasingly fearless. Rossellini is an invaluable witness in a starry line-up of contributors that includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Daniel Day-Lewis (aka Mr Rebecca Miller), Sharon Stone, Steven Spielberg, Cate Blanchett and Mick Jagger. It is Rossellini who drags the portrait, at the beginning of episode three, into the darker territory of Scorsese’s drug-fuelled self-loathing, hair-trigger tantrums, assassination paranoia and complete personal breakdown. “Marty did have a problem with drugs,” is how she begins.
Scorsese with Rebecca Miller, director of “Mr Scorsese”
RONAN KILLEEN
Before that Miller has focused all narrative energy on the familiar Marty myth of a sensitive and asthmatic Italian-American kid growing up on the mean streets of lower Manhattan and turning to the cinema for salvation. Typically, Miller finds complexity here, in an account of the Scorsese family’s original humiliating banishment from a comfortable middle-class home in Queens (due to a clash with a landlord), one that will for ever fuel the film-maker’s angry and self-described “outsider” status.
There are thoughtful contemporary conversations, recorded in a New York diner, between Scorsese and his tough tenement buddies, all earthy octogenarians now, as they remember with sighs and shrugs the soul-shattering violence they witnessed during their childhoods.
It’s hardly surprising then that once accepted into NYU film school, to study alongside the privileged children of doctors and lawyers, Scorsese’s outsider persona became even more pronounced. “I couldn’t explain to these people where I came from,” he says, sadly.
There are film-making insights, too, from this early period, including the revelation that Scorsese’s penchant for overhead shots is a replication of his bedroom view, during his asthmatic childhood, down on to the streets below. Or, in the Taxi Driver section, Miller permits her subject an absorbing mini-lecture on the movie’s camera set-ups, and how De Niro’s disturbed and alienated protagonist Travis Bickle is always filmed alone within the frame, even when he’s in company.
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It’s around the Taxi Driver time that the anecdotes become a little “druggy” and the tales of Scorsese’s behaviour slightly unhinged. When he discovers that the movie has been given a commercially fatal X by the ratings board, he implodes, acquires a handgun and plans to steal the print back from the studio (wiser heads prevailed). The writer and frequent collaborator Paul Schrader then pops up to announce that Scorsese’s subsequent project, New York New York, “was a very ‘cokey’ set”. While De Niro, remembering the same film and suppressing a cheeky smile, says: “He went a little nuts on that one but, ya know, it happens.”
The young Scorsese: his taste for overhead shots replicates the view from his sickroom
It is normally at this exact point in every “in-depth” Scorsese interview — and I’ve done two of these — that the director becomes understandably evasive and starts to speak in euphemisms and metaphors. And, sure enough, at the first mention of cocaine consumption he begins to frame drug addiction in a coyly religious context. “The problem is that you enjoy sin,” he says, before adding, even more elusively, “It was a period of destructive behaviour, so, yeah, that’s it.”
Miller, however, is such a persistent inquisitor, and also patient in her probing, that the famously reticent director eventually opens wide. “I ended up in the hospital, dying,” he says, of his cocaine overdose in September 1978. “I was bleeding internally everywhere. The doctor said, ‘You’re going to have a brain haemorrhage any second.’ I did not accept the idea that I was dying, but a major part of me wanted to.”
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Around this time, still in episode three, it’s as if the floodgates open. Rossellini discusses Scorsese’s terrible temper. “He never hit me, but he could demolish a room,” she says, before recalling that sometimes Scorsese’s first words upon waking up would be, “F*** it, f*** it, f*** it!” His former assistant describes his penchant for smashing phones. While the director also remembers a clash with Harvey Weinstein during the making of Gangs of New York where Scorsese rammed Weinstein’s desk out through the window of the production office (only to discover, too late, that it was the wrong desk).
Other notable disclosures include the fact that, after the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan by the Taxi Driver fan John Hinckley Jr, Scorsese wore a bulletproof vest under his tuxedo and was guarded by FBI agents at the 1981 Oscars ceremony. He again required FBI protection when he was inundated with death threats after the release of The Last Temptation of Christ. And Sharon Stone was initially furious about the “boys’ club” atmosphere on the set of Casino and had the power, being then the film’s biggest commercial draw, to pull the plug on the entire production.
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The portrait ends with the mellower, meeker Scorsese today. He’s the Killers of the Flower Moon film-maker transformed by his encounters with Buddhism, by being present with his youngest daughter, Francesca, and by his marriage to the former Random House editor Helen Morris, who has been living with Parkinson’s disease since she was 30. It proves a moving conclusion to a faultlessly honest appraisal.
Earlier, when asked, Spielberg says that his friend is nothing less than “a cornerstone of this entire art form”. In a glossier Netflix-style puff piece this statement might seem like one more slab of branded guff. But here, in the context of an unflinching yet ultimately loving exploration, it lands with unassailable truth.
★★★★★
On Apple TV from Oct 17