\u2022 Martin Scorsese: my wild years with Robert De Niro and Daniel Day-Lewis<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cMarty is a saint sinner,\u201d 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\u2019s drug-fuelled self-loathing, hair-trigger tantrums, assassination paranoia and complete personal breakdown. \u201cMarty did have a problem with drugs,\u201d is how she begins. <\/p>\n Scorsese with Rebecca Miller, director of \u201cMr Scorsese\u201d<\/p>\n RONAN KILLEEN<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s angry and self-described \u201coutsider\u201d status.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n It\u2019s hardly surprising then that once accepted into NYU film school, to study alongside the privileged children of doctors and lawyers, Scorsese\u2019s outsider persona became even more pronounced. \u201cI couldn\u2019t explain to these people where I came from,\u201d he says, sadly.<\/p>\n There are film-making insights, too, from this early period, including the revelation that Scorsese\u2019s 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\u2019s camera set-ups, and how De Niro\u2019s disturbed and alienated protagonist Travis Bickle is always filmed alone within the frame, even when he\u2019s in company. <\/p>\n \u2022 The best films to watch at home this week<\/a><\/p>\n It\u2019s around the Taxi Driver time that the anecdotes become a little \u201cdruggy\u201d and the tales of Scorsese\u2019s 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\u2019s subsequent project, New York New York, \u201cwas a very \u2018cokey\u2019 set\u201d. While De Niro, remembering the same film and suppressing a cheeky smile, says: \u201cHe went a little nuts on that one but, ya know, it happens.\u201d <\/p>\n The young Scorsese: his taste for overhead shots replicates the view from his sickroom<\/p>\n It is normally at this exact point in every \u201cin-depth\u201d Scorsese interview \u2014 and I\u2019ve done two of these \u2014 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. \u201cThe problem is that you enjoy sin,\u201d he says, before adding, even more elusively, \u201cIt was a period of destructive behaviour, so, yeah, that\u2019s it.\u201d <\/p>\n Miller, however, is such a persistent inquisitor, and also patient in her probing, that the famously reticent director eventually opens wide. \u201cI ended up in the hospital, dying,\u201d he says, of his cocaine overdose in September 1978. \u201cI was bleeding internally everywhere. The doctor said, \u2018You\u2019re going to have a brain haemorrhage any second.\u2019 I did not accept the idea that I was dying, but a major part of me wanted to.\u201d <\/p>\n \u2022 Martin Scorsese: my love letter to the British director who inspired Taxi Driver<\/a><\/p>\n Around this time, still in episode three, it\u2019s as if the floodgates open. Rossellini discusses Scorsese\u2019s terrible temper. \u201cHe never hit me, but he could demolish a room,\u201d she says, before recalling that sometimes Scorsese\u2019s first words upon waking up would be, \u201cF*** it, f*** it, f*** it!\u201d 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\u2019s desk out through the window of the production office (only to discover, too late, that it was the wrong desk). <\/p>\n 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 \u201cboys\u2019 club\u201d atmosphere on the set of Casino<\/a> and had the power, being then the film\u2019s biggest commercial draw, to pull the plug on the entire production. <\/p>\n \u2022 Killers of the Flower Moon is Martin Scorsese at his very best<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Rebecca](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/\/7738c363-1dbb-4dc9-a285-07e1fd70a3e1.jpg\")
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