WNYC Host (2:34)

They are something else to say the least. What did they tell you about him as a little kid that maybe surprised you and then maybe, you know, it made sense?

Rebecca Miller (2:44)

Well, I love the idea that he was making these drawings that they would Come and look at. And we're just amazed by. Because he was quietly working on storyboards, which he understood film language so completely as a young child, because partly having spent so much time in the movie theaters and also just his innate genius. And, you know, they would talk. Talk about looking at these things and then being. Then they would make films together. And there was one film that they made on the top when he became an adolescent, like in 16 or so, they made it on the top of his rooftop. And they were. He was a private detective in ancient Rome trying to like. So everybody's in sheets for togas. And it's just amazing to watch this film with them.

WNYC Host (3:30)

When you first started on this project, what was the main question you wanted to answer?

Rebecca Miller (3:38)

Well, initially, I was really intrigued by his faith and his spiritual journey alongside his interest and curiosity and obsession, maybe with violence. And I thought, well, that's really interesting. I mean, I knew much less about him at that time, but I was really interested in that conundrum, and I thought it might be a portal that I could go through.

Alison Stewart (3:59)

It's interesting because he sits for the documentary. You interview him in the documentary. Was anything off limits?

Rebecca Miller (4:06)

No, I mean, he really didn't say that up front. And it never really came up that anything was off limits. I think he decided to be pretty honest with me, you know, as much as anyone can be.

Alison Stewart (4:18)

Why do you think he decided that? Do you think it was his age? Do you think he wanted to just tell the truth about his life?

Rebecca Miller (4:24)

I'm not sure. I think it had to do with a combination of things that had to do with maybe the him plus me equals us doing this together. It was really a conversation. You know, the voice appears in the.

Alison Stewart (4:36)

Documentary quite a bit. In a good way.

Rebecca Miller (4:39)

Yeah. I mean, because I wanted it to be clear that it's a conversation and not just these. His questions aren't come or his answers aren't coming out of nowhere with no questions. And I didn't know that much about him going in, so I was genuinely asking questions, getting answers, sort of feeling my way through. And I think to some degree, it wasn't like he decided up front. It was more like it was something that he felt out. It was an instinctive thing on his part to. To just let go and. And just tell the story.

WNYC Host (5:06)

Oh, that's interesting. So his first interview isn't like the last interview you did with him?

Rebecca Miller (5:12)

Well, they're.

WNYC Host (5:13)

Initially when you first started doing them, were they. Were they different? Were they more structured? And then it got looser or I.

Rebecca Miller (5:19)

Mean, you know what his. He came in with really good will, I would say. But we went from being people that knew each other a little bit socially. He knew my films, I knew and he knew my documentary and he knew my other films. So he knew me in a way that, the way that one does, you know, when through knowing three films. But then we got to know each other as people over this five year period. So then by the time. And also I started to do interviews where I asked the crew to all leave and really just leave the cameras up and leave the lights up. So then it's just him and me in the room and it became more and more personal in a way. It felt more and more like just conversations between two people.

WNYC Host (5:58)

My guest is director Rebecca Miller. We're talking about her new five part documentary, Mr. Scorsese. It's available stream now on Apple TV. He was born in Corona Queen. Actually he was born in Little Italy, right?

Rebecca Miller (6:10)

Yes. And then they moved to Corona.

WNYC Host (6:11)

232 Elizabeth street, where his parents lived. 232, 241. Then they moved to Corona, Queens and they moved back to Little Italy. That's part of the story actually.

Rebecca Miller (6:21)

Yeah, yeah. He talks about it as a kind of exile from paradise. Cause Corona for him was a kind of paradise where all his family members were living there on the Kappa side, his mother's side, his aunts, his cousins, his uncles. And then there was this immense fight between him and the landlord that he talks about being, you know, witnessing a big physical fight. And then they had, they had to leave. You know, I think they both had important friends in the community. Men who had power and you know, their guys lost and they just had to, they had to go.

Alison Stewart (6:56)

What did he witness when he witnessed what happened with his family?

Rebecca Miller (7:01)

Well, it sounded like it was a really big physical fight. He said there was an ax involved, like the mother, his sister in law, his father's sister in law. I guess his aunt was pulling them off the landlord, off the father. I mean there was a. It was a big physical fight and we actually. One of the first, that was one of the first times I realized that there was this one to one ratio. You know, his experience and his work. Like there's a moment in Raging Bull which we use where there are two kids witnessing this intense violence scene when Jake LaMotta comes in and says, you know, starts dragging Joe Pesci along the floor and the two kids are witnessing that. So it was like the first time we used a film to kind of as Evidence, in a way, he's in.

WNYC Host (7:47)

A lot of his films, whether we.

Alison Stewart (7:48)

Know it him or not, for sure. Which is. Which was fascinating, I found.

Rebecca Miller (7:52)

Absolutely. I mean, his films are so personal, and yet he manages to also make them about much bigger. Much bigger things in the culture, too.

Alison Stewart (8:01)

What do you think is special about the way that he portrays New York City in his films?

Rebecca Miller (8:09)

Well, you know, there's so many layers of how he portrays it. It's funny because he's not always shooting in New York to portray New York. Actually. New York, New York, for example, was mostly shot on sets. Gangs of New York was shot in Rome, and Mean Streets was also shot largely in California, except for a few shots that were done in New York. And yet you feel such an authenticity of New York, because New York is a state of mind, really, and I think a dream of sorts. And in his work particularly, that's true.

Alison Stewart (8:50)

We hear a lot about Taxi Driver and Goodfellas. What was a movie that you ended up spending more time on in this film than you anticipated?

Rebecca Miller (9:03)

Well, New York, New York ended up taking a lot of time because it was complex. It was like a really. Almost like a nerve cluster because it had his daughter's experience, or rather, of course, she was a newborn. But she's talking a little bit about the experience that she heard about or knew about through, you know, her mother or whatever. And then the relationship. Just the ways in which life paralleled art and art paralleled. Life got quite complicated in that particular one. And I feel like that happened also in Taxi Driver. You know, Shutter island was a film I didn't know that I was going to spend as much time on. But it ended up being something that had gotten under his skin in such a way that we had to really kind of try and unpack that, too.

Alison Stewart (9:52)

It was so interesting. I was watching Taxi Driver last night. Not the film. I was watching your film, and it was interesting. Just sidebar that Jodie Foster ended up doing all the promo for it. Cause she could speak French.

Rebecca Miller (10:04)

Yes. When it won the con, that was amazing. Well, also, they weren't coming out of their hotel room because they thought everyone hated it. And so, you know, it was so violent. So there she is at, like, 12 years old, talking to the press. It's hilarious.

Alison Stewart (10:18)

There's this motive that comes through in the film, Marty. Saint versus sinner. His. His two sides. Faith and spirituality is a big part of Martin Scorsese's life. He thought about becoming a priest at one point. How did you want to explore this in a documentary without sort of banging us over the head with it.

Rebecca Miller (10:39)

Yeah, well, I mean, I was just interested in how in a way the identification with the sinner, you know, that, that, that's something that has been brought up in the documentary that in a way he identifies with, with the s.

Alison Stewart (10:54)

Work.

Rebecca Miller (10:56)

And he also talks about in his life that his brother was very mischievous and kind of always in trouble. And he was the good, Marty was the good one and the brother was the bad one. But internally he knew it wasn't true. And there's a kind of sense that it was actually him that was the bad one. And so that's very, very interesting to me. These kind of layers of guilt and getting down underneath the surface.

Alison Stewart (11:20)

My guest is director Rebecca Miller. We're talking about the new five part documentary, Mr. Scorsese. It's available to stream now on Apple Plus. It's so interesting hearing his mother and father talk in this documentary because I was like, oh, he's just like his mom. Like, oh no, he's like his dad.

Rebecca Miller (11:40)

It's like his mom.

Alison Stewart (11:41)

But then his mom's voice is so, you know, spectacular.

Rebecca Miller (11:44)

I know.

Alison Stewart (11:45)

Could you decide which one he was like after watching so much video, I.

Rebecca Miller (11:50)

Feel like, you know, he made that great documentary, Italian American, which is just such a goldmine for them. And it's basically all about them and her. You know, when I was watching, I was like, she's really an artist. She has the personality of an artist.

WNYC Host (12:03)

She's.

Rebecca Miller (12:03)

She's ebullient and imaginative and kind of brilliant and unafraid of the camera and a natural actress. And I think there is a big part of Marty that is like that woman and I think she had an immense influence on him. But I do think that, you know, his father, as somebody who was very grounded in the neighborhood and understood how to speak to people of power and deal with some of the things that they had to deal with, which were very serious things, also had a big influence on him. And yeah.

WNYC Host (12:38)

Scorsese, excuse me, he gets candid about his struggles with drug addiction at one point in his life. First of all, how did he get out of it?

Rebecca Miller (12:49)

Well, I mean, you know, that's what I ask him. And you know, he, as he says his thing is like, I didn't, until it took, you know, I didn't get out of it. And he collapses. And I mean, that's what you see in the documentary. And then, you know, I think for him, the answer, his despair and his savior is always his work.

WNYC Host (13:08)

Really.

Rebecca Miller (13:08)

I mean, there and there's the religious connection again, his words, where, you know, I think that the despair prior to Raging Bull had to do with the sense that he had lost the muse, that he had nothing to say, that he couldn't function as a filmmaker anymore and so wasn't really a person anymore. And then, you know, De Niro comes in and says, let's do Raging Bull. And there's this sort of. His saying, okay, let's do it is the beginning of a. Of a. Of a kind of resurrection, I guess, of sorts.

Alison Stewart (13:42)

Yeah, you kind of get this idea that, you know, depending on where he was depended on how the film was going. DiCaprio shares that during Shutter Island, a very dark mood, Scorsese was kind of in a bad funk. But during Wolf of Wall street, he was in a great mood. So what sense did you get from him how different projects affected him mentally?

Rebecca Miller (14:03)

Josh Safdie says something kind of great in the film. He says he's almost like a method director. He identifies so deeply with the. And he also even changes the way he dresses depending on what he's actually portraying. And there is a kind of sense that it goes so, so deep. And, you know, Thelma Schoonmaker also talks about that, about how he identifies with the work very, very deeply. And sometimes that's very painful to do that, and sometimes it can be dangerous to do that.

Alison Stewart (14:31)

Please tell people who Thelma Schoonmaker is, because she's so important.

Rebecca Miller (14:34)

Thelma Schoonmaker is really his editor for. Since From Raging Bull on, which is, you know, 40 to maybe 50 years, she's been his absolute partner, his. A real creative rock. And they. And she does unpack some of the films so beautifully in the film. I mean, she's. She's really one of the most brilliant editors, you know, alive, certainly, and has had a big impact on this iconic work.

Alison Stewart (15:03)

There are two big muses that loom large in Scorsese's career. Robert De Niro, as you mentioned, and Leonardo DiCaprio. And you speak with both of them for the film. What do you think, these relationships, why they continued on creatively?

Rebecca Miller (15:20)

Well, you know, I think you go where the nourishment is. You know, I mean, there's, of course, film is a practical medium, and in some ways, there's that moment in the film where we joke about how Martin is dead again because he's. Once again, his films aren't making money. And then he says, and yet. And then you meet Leonardo DiCaprio, who comes in, and not only is he this wonderful young actor who does gangs with him. And so he's both extremely talented, full of capacity to. To be as open as Marty likes to be with actors. But at the same time he also has the capacity to bring some money with him because it is. He's. These are large canvases that he's working on. But I do think that a lot of it has to do with trust that, you know, he talks about the trust of when you have these core collaborators, which are his actors, that there's immense trust that they can keep going further into areas that you didn't anticipate. I mean, there's an immense. Like with Scorsese, I think there's this combination of being extremely prepared on the one hand and on the other hand, extremely open. Margot Robbie talks at length about rethinking a very big sequence the night before in Wolf of Wall Street. There are very few people who are that confident that they would be just like, oh, yeah, let's just try this completely different way of expressing this passage. Yet there he is doing that. So it's an interesting, it's an unusual combination.

WNYC Host (17:02)

You mentioned Margot Robbie and I'm thinking.

Alison Stewart (17:04)

Back to Sharon Stone, who shared that.

WNYC Host (17:07)

At the beginning of Casino she felt excluded, like it was a boys club. How do you think Scorsese's work with.

Alison Stewart (17:14)

Women and female characters has changed over.

WNYC Host (17:17)

The course of his career?

Rebecca Miller (17:19)

Well, I mean, even very early in his career with Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, he was really, really moving toward the challenge of working on a story that was really from a female point of view and trying very hard to not see things through the lens of masculinity, but to try and see things from her point of view, work with as many women as possible, et cetera. Having said that, the worlds that he's interested in exploring were often male dominated worlds. But the women who ended up being in those worlds, like the characters, like for example, Sharon Stone's character, always end up being fantastic performances. And her story is really of her finally saying, listen, I need more attention. You're spending so much time in the trailer with De Niro and with Pesci. I need also my time. And so he stops, he thinks, oh, no, you're right. He goes back, he starts to pay this, you know, time with her and then becomes, you know, the work with her becomes very, very kind of beautiful and personal and then comes. They bloom into this wonderful performance. So I would say he treats all actors, whether they're male or female, with that same, like, I would say, love and Interest and care. But at the same time, it is true that the worlds that he's interested in have sometimes been dominated by male characters.

Alison Stewart (18:35)

We learn he's been married five times. You learn about his relationships with his daughters.

Rebecca Miller (18:40)

Yeah.

Alison Stewart (18:41)

How much, you know, that's another whole section of it. But I'm curious, in spending time with him, how much at this point in his life does he care about critical success versus commercial success?

Rebecca Miller (18:58)

You know, I think there's somebody who asks him, I think Lesley Stahl asks him in the film, you know, if you're not really box office and you're not really, and you're not getting the Academy Award, like what, what makes you value the what's, what's, what's, what are you striving for? Like what makes you the work work for you? And he says, and he says the value of the work. So there's this sort of sense, like in an absolute sense, he has to believe in it and love it. He knows that critical acclaim is, it's, sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not. Like there's films like, you know, the King of Comedy that just didn't work in terms of the zeitgeist at that moment. Nobody went to go see it. It wasn't, it wasn't. It was called the flop of the year. And yet now it's like adored. So you have to kind of, you know, you learn, I think, to take things with a grain of salt.

Alison Stewart (19:49)

My guest has been Rebecca Miller. We were talking about her new five part documentary, Mr. Scorsese. It's available now to stream on Apple TV. Thank you for coming into the studio.

Rebecca Miller (19:59)

Thank you so much.

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