The first time Rebecca Miller witnessed Martin Scorsese working on set, he seemed edgy.
“Marty’s demeanor was so anxious and nervous and alive,” she recalls. Miller had been living in Rome with her husband, actor Daniel Day-Lewis. The couple were overseas while he filmed in Scorsese’s historical crime epic, Gangs of New York, and a visit to set put the director in a whole new light.
“I remember thinking, ‘My God, this is a man who’s made all these masterpieces, and yet he’s as nervous as if he’s never made a film before.’ And yet it did occur to me later that, in a way, that is part of his secret is he’s so alive. He hasn’t gotten complacent. There’s no part of him that is resting on his laurels. He’s always only as good as… what he’s doing now.”
Miller captures the duality of Scorsese as a living legend and human artist in Mr. Scorsese, her docuseries about the famed director that begins streaming globally on Apple TV on Oct. 17. The five episodes offer an unrestricted look into his entire personal and professional life, scoping in on his extensive private archives and robust filmography. She also captures a number of unprecedented interviews with friends, creative collaborators, and family members. The star-studded lineup includes, among others, Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mick Jagger, Isabella Rossellini, Steven Spielberg, Sharon Stone, Jodie Foster, Paul Schrader, Margot Robbie, Cate Blanchett, longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker and, of course, Scorsese himself.
After Gangs of New York wrapped, Miller got to know Scorsese more as filmmaking peers. While getting ready to make Personal Velocity — a drama based on the book of the same name that she wrote — she asked for some advice from Scorsese about using voiceover while at his daughter’s first birthday party. “The minute you asked Marty for advice on films, the floodgates open.”
Over the next two decades, Miller and Scorsese didn’t see much of each other, but she continued to screen her films for him, and he would privately pass along his thoughts. Then, as early 2020 set in, she wondered to her producing partner, Damon Cardasis, about making another documentary (her first, 2017’s Arthur Miller: Writer, captured her father).
“The first person that came to mind was Martin Scorsese,” she says. “I was sort of fascinated by the dichotomy of Catholicism and his fascination with violence and how those two things go together… I had a sense that his spiritual life was very key to actually reading his films.”
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Scorsese on the set of The Aviator
She inquired with Scorsese’s documentary producing partner Margaret Bodde if someone was already working on a documentary about him. No one was, and one letter and a meeting later, the documentary was underway. “That was [my] last hug of anyone before the pandemic,” Miller remembers. “That’s why some of our interviews are outside.”
From the start of COVID-19 to 2025, Miller and her team went to work. She estimates they had at least 200 hours of footage to edit down, about 20 hours of which was just Scorsese.
Five hours into interviewing Scorsese, he was only at 12 years old in his life story. It became clear that the planned two-hour documentary needed a longer runtime. Early on, she interviewed filmmaker Brian De Palma, who warned, “You can’t do it in two hours. There’s no way. Maybe you can get to Taxi Driver.”
Grateful for the flexibility of Apple TV, Miller expanded it from two hours to two parts to five parts, each of which runs about one hour. “His whole nerve center, in a way, as an artist, is in the neighborhood [he grew up in,]” she explains. The Catholicism, the machismo, the moral complexity and violence and crime of his films — it all bubbles to the surface in the examination his Little Italy childhood.
of his childhood indoors due to asthma
Scorsese’s exuberant passion for filmmaking is reflected in electrifying needle drops, many courtesy of The Rolling Stones. Sure, the music choice was a technicality: the English rock legends’ songs pepper many of his movies, not to mention he directed their 2008 concert film, Shine a Light. But it also kicks up the pulse of the docuseries.
“He has such a deep, visceral connection to the stones, to The Stones…That was the Holy Grail in terms of music,” Miller says. “It’s an intelligent but very anarchic energy in that music.”
Given the richness of his life and art, Scorsese is a dream documentary subject. But what made the process run smoothly was his openness. No topic goes untouched, from filmmaking fun and his love for cinema to religion, drugs, relationship turbulence and career peaks and valleys.
“He was so wanting to say things in a new way,” Miller notes. “He really made such an effort. Because, of course, he’s somebody that has spoken endlessly and people know a lot about him, but he was just trying to create a new angle or a new way of saying something that he hadn’t quite said, and he was very, very considerate in that way.”
“I really did follow Marty in these interviews,” she adds. “I think the fact that I wasn’t coming out with an agenda actually helped him to probably be open. And after all, he’s probably the most, one of the most, honest filmmakers in existence.”
Haley Bosselman
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