Sympathy for Mr. Scorsese

“As long as I can remember, I always wanted to be a film director.” This could have been the exciting begins film of the biography of Martin Charles Scorsese (New York, 1942) if he himself had narrated it in the form of a television documentary series. Rebecca Miller, the director of Mr. Scorsese (EU, 2025), a five-episode miniseries available on Apple TV in which we are presented with the life and work of the great Italian-American filmmaker, has a different idea about how to tell this story, on and off film sets.

Mr. Scorsese It was presented, from the beginning, not as a traditional bio-filmography but as a multifaceted personal portrait, built, one might say, from the principles of synthetic cubism. Thus, the filmmaker, screenwriter and actress Rebecca Miller returned here to her origins as a student of plastic arts, painter, sculptor and illustrator, to give us an absorbing Scorsesian cinematographic collage made through very diverse testimonies – from friends, family, colleagues, collaborators and critics of the filmmaker -, from key fragments of many of his films – from his childhood storyboards until his recent major work The Moon Killers (2023)–, the music that has accompanied from beginning to end not only his entire filmography but his life itself (here is the playlist of the series, in case you need it) and, of course, the memories, reflections and even very personal confessions of the director of Taxi driver (1976), who on more than one occasion opens up in front of Miller, in front of the camera and in front of us, to remember not his triumphs – which in the end always turned out to be ephemeral – but of his many weaknesses, his great setbacks and even his enormous failures, both artistic and personal, that have made him what he is now.

Mr. Scorsese – this is what Sharon Stone calls him, with a mix of playful confidence and reverential respect in the first episode – he does not reveal any great surprises about his work nor about his well-known private life: his birth into an Italian-American nuclear family of Sicilian origin, the childhood asthma that forced him to stay inside the apartment watching old movies on the television, which fueled his fervent cinephilia. (“Thanks, asthma!” Spike Lee says with a laugh), his youthful development in the dangerous streets (1973) of his adolescence, in which he met and lived with the real versions of some of his future film characters, his early priestly vocation – which he abandoned very soon because, to paraphrase one of his friends, “he couldn’t stop looking at women” – and his radical life choice which was to become a film director, an unusual vocation not only within his family but within his social environment.

Much of what Miller narrates in the first episode, “Stranger in a strange land” has been told by Scorsese himself in other interviews and even in his own autobiographical films, whether direct (such as Italoamericano, 1974) or indirect, such as the invaluable cinephile documentaries. A personal journey with Martin Scorsese through American cinema (1995), about Hollywood cinema of the 40s and 50s, and My trip to Italy (1999), about the Italian cinema that he knew in his childhood. Nor is the chronicle of his turbulent “cocaine years” a novelty, which we witness in the second chapter titled “All this filming isn’t healthy,” when the filmmaker was on the verge of dying due to his excessive addiction and was saved by Robert De Niro, who suggested he direct wild bull (1980), a film in which Scorsese had not the slightest interest.

However, between one testimony and another, between one reflection and another, some traces do appear, in the interstices of each chapter, between the memories, the confessions and the film and musical fragments that Miller and his editor David Bartner have linked, that help us delve deeper into the life, work and personality of the filmmaker himself. For example, having witnessed, in his earliest childhood, a certain humiliating paternal episode that, many years later, he continues to connect, visibly moved, with the devastating outcome of Bicycle thieves (De Sica, 1948). Or the fundamental role that the strong Catholic priest Francis Principe had in his formative years, his spiritual mentor, who became as important to him as his other cinematic mentor, the patriarch of independent cinema John Cassavetes, who ended up becoming his creative conscience, as one of the talking heads rightly points out.

Likewise, although Hollywood’s love-hate relationship with Scorsese is well known – at least, before he cruelly crowned him by giving him the Oscar for best director for one of his least successful films, The infiltrators (2006) – and although there are legion of anecdotes about how he has had to deal, for better and for worse, with Hollywood film studios, since when they wanted to cut the bloodthirsty ending of Taxi driver to the most recent difficulties in carrying out a project as personal as it was Silence (2016), Miller highlights, in the last episode, “Method director”, something that, at this point in the game, is impossible to dispute: the importance that Leonardo DiCaprio’s presence has had in the second part of his filmography. Ultimately, it was thanks to the box office power of the then-young star of Titanic (1997) that could make possible New York gangs (2002), an ambitious project that Scorsese had been pursuing for twenty years and that, due to logistical difficulties and its exorbitant cost, no studio had dared to produce. DiCaprio’s enthusiastic participation in the following Scorsesian films not only allowed the filmmaker to continue raising project after project throughout the century, but also caused him to become, without seeking it or wanting it, a ubiquitous film celebrity, especially after the success of The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), which is the only film of his that, his daughter Francesca says, all young people have seen.

There is one last element of this portrait of life that was unknown: Scorsese as a failed but redeemed family man. After five marriages, four divorces and three daughters with three different wives, it is clear that for the biographer Mr. Scorsese there is nothing more important than cinema. This man lives and breathes cinema because only cinema has kept him alive. After all, what would have happened to him if De Niro didn’t convince him to do wild bull? This tireless will, so close to religious martyrdom (“He works like a miner but with the vocation of a priest,” Daniel Day-Lewis says of him), has led him to give us some of the greatest cinematographic works in history, without a doubt, but at the cost of risking his physical and mental health, in addition to his closest family relationships, in each new project.

In the most intimate and least complacent moment of the series, Miller presents us with the testimonies of his three daughters –Cathy, Domenica and Francesca– who talk about the different “dads” that Scorsese has been, depending not only on the date when they were born, nor on the relationship he had with their respective mothers, but on the professional stage that the filmmaker was going through. Come on, it is clear that it was not the same to be Cathy – who grew up without the presence of Scorses – as Domenica – who decided to work as an extra in The age of innocence (1993) so that her father would see her with the same interest that he sees his actors (ouch!) – or that the cheerful twenty-something Francesca, who has transformed her elderly father into a joyful Tiktoker celebrity.

It is towards the end, thanks to the critical and psychological analysis of fellow filmmaker Ari Aster, that Miller ends up putting the final touch on Mr. Scorsese’s complex existential cinematographic portrait. The son of the serious Charles and the extroverted Catherine has made all the films he has made not only because he doesn’t know how to do anything else, but because it is what he feels he must do to forgive himself, to be able to become a better human being, to connect spiritually with the other, with the other, with all of us. Throughout Mr. ScorseseMiller points out that the filmmaker has been, from one film to another, the same as the tormented Charlie (Harvey Keitel) of dangerous streets than the self-destructive Jake LaMotta of wild bull or the obsessive Howard Hughes of The aviator (2004). Aster completes this portrait with lucidity: Scorsese may be all of those characters, but he is especially Kikujiro (Yôsuke Kubozuka) of Silencethe perpetually tormented traitor, the pathetic sinner who seeks to be forgiven again and again. Kikujiro always aspires to be better in the eyes of God, but he is incapable of being so by his own nature: he is not strong enough to fight against himself, even though he keeps trying and, predictably, failing.

This is Scorsese’s moral and spiritual position regarding the life that, for him, is cinema. You have to move forward, knowing that there will be setbacks, difficulties and failures to come, but without giving up at any time. As long as there is health, there will be life and, therefore, there will be cinema. It is true that a certain Dr. Klein warned him that if he continued working in this way he would not survive much longer. But that diagnosis was 20 years ago. What will the doctors know, Mr. Scorsese. You follow him. Until the end. ~