Martin Scorsese: a childhood crossed by violence and faith that forged the film legend

What made Martin Scorsese reproduce violence, faith and more social issues in such an exceptional way in cinema? The answers are multiple, but the documentary Mr. Scorsese chooses to take us to the beginning of everything, the starting point of his vocation as a filmmaker: his dangerous hometown, Little Italy.

In the original documentary Apple TVreleased on October 17 globally, the director and screenwriter Rebecca Miller took on the difficult task of telling the story of the most important living filmmaker to date. He shared interviews with him, his family, his lifelong friends, regular collaborators like the actor Robert De Niro and more figures from the film industry.

Miller spoke with the media through a press conference, where he was present Infobaeand delved into the creative decisions behind the five-episode docuseries. First of all, was Scorsese okay with someone else directing his audiovisual biography?

“I wouldn’t say there was resistance, because I wasn’t trying to manipulate anything. I was really following the process. And often, I was very surprised by what I heard,” the director clarified. “It was about trying to get the perfect image, the most unusual image, an image that no one had seen before”.

Mr. Scorsese uses extensive archival material, between the director’s home movies and the feature films he made in Hollywood, to draw a canvas that connects his life experiences with his stories and characters in fiction.

As evidenced in numerous films, the city of New York It has a crucial presence as a setting and even as another character. Marty—as his loved ones affectionately call him—was born in the Little Italy neighborhood of Queens, into a of Italian descent. Shortly after, his family briefly moved to the community of Corona in search of prosperity and tranquility.

However, they suffered exclusion from other neighbors and would soon return to Little Italy, where Scorsese would spend years of his childhood exposed to high rates of violence and observing the social dynamics of the streets from his window, since asthma confined him to living in his room when he was little. There he began to create his first storyboards.

“It became very important to me that childhood and early youth were addressed and taken their time,” Miller said. “Because I feel that all the nerve endings of his work end in that neighborhood, in that family”.

During the interview process, Rebecca Miller got to know the people who surrounded and shaped her vision as a storyteller, in addition to inspiring some of her characters such as the case of Johnny Boyprotagonist of dangerous streets (1973), a film that is also the first collaboration of Scorsese and De Niro.

“At the beginning I didn’t know if we would be allowed to meet these people or if they were even alive.. So it was extraordinary to meet some of the people he grew up with in the neighborhood, and to really hear the voices. When you hear the voices, you also hear the voices of their characters,” he responded to Infobae during the conference.

In the case of the man behind Johnny Boy, he admitted that “it was a surprise because we didn’t think we would get to meet him and it turned out that his brother just called him and he showed up. So it was a really extraordinary experience.”

For Miller, in addition to being a portrait of Little Italy, the filmography of Martin Scorsese reflects the society of the United States: “His films are about the United States, our history. Much of our history is contained, the good and the bad”.

Another of Miller’s key approaches in Mr. Scorsese It has to do with the strong bond between the filmmaker and the Catholic religion. “I was very interested the dichotomy of a man of faith fascinated by violence”, he argued among his motivations for working on this project for five years.

In addition to his fascination with the sinnerMarty asked himself questions like “Are we good? Are we bad? What is the balance? What are we capable of?”, as revealed by the director of the documentary.

“For me it made it a very big project, and much more than just a project about one man’s achievements, but about who we are as human beings and how an artist can really address that in a profound way,” he added.

The purpose of revisiting his biography was also to demystify a film legend, whom we currently see as an “affable older man, almost like an uncle.” However, at the beginning of his career, he conveyed the opposite: “A more dangerous and darker side”.

Rebecca Miller narrates and describes these different stages of Scorsese, although without ceasing to affirm that he is still the same person. The transformation processes had to do with each experience, between failures and successes, that went through both his career and personal life.

“You observe how a person remains the same and how they change,” he said. “Notice how it is still that child who receives his first communion with the big pink bow “what you see in the photo, and in what way he is a different person from that somewhat dark figure that appears in certain interviews from the 1970s.”

In Mr. Scorsesethe same filmmaker acknowledges that initially it was difficult for him to connect with female actresses and characters, because his stories were predominantly male as they were a reflection of what he experienced during his youth.

That component of male domination It has a latent presence in her films, however, that did not stop women from also appropriating these spaces through creative choices that Miller highlights.

“He is a wonderful director of women.and he is interested in their complexity and the details of their behavior,” he said, recalling that “he treats women the same as men. He is simply interested in the characters.”

The settings that are of interest to them are dominated by men and, according to Miller, “to tell the truth about those worlds, you allow that domination to be clear.”

But, in these stories, there are also women with their own points of view, such as that of Lorraine Bracco in Goodfellas (1990), the protagonist of Alicia doesn’t live here anymore. (1974) and more recently Mollie’s in The Flower Moon Killers (2023): “It is as if the female point of view is as important as the male point of view.”

Mr. Scorsese’s director believes that no one will be able to repeat what he did Martin Scorsese nor have a career like that, “that particular man cannot come backThere are many elements that make him a one-of-a-kind filmmaker, from the way he invented a style to his ease in moving between film genres.

“It has infected our culture to such an extent that it is almost difficult to remember that in reality this way of seeing cinema, of moving the camera, is rooted in Scorsese,” he stressed when discussing his influence on the seventh art.

Along the same lines, Rebecca Miller pointed out that “he is not a film artist who is really hooked only on one genre,” because he has explored horror, suspense, drama and comedy, even reinventing gangster films.

He proposes Travis Bickle as examples in Taxi Driver (1976) and Mr. Pupkin in The king of comedy (1982), in the sense of how one character is seen through the comedic lens and another through a more tragic perspective.

“That’s part of his greatness as a filmmaker, that he’s able to manipulate tone and a kind of gestalt, so that it works depending on what his decision is, what kind of genre he’s doing. He knows the genre, and then he goes towards it,” he explained. “But you can look at the same topic through totally different lenses.”

As for his own learning, Miller says Scorsese was a master in terms of approach: “The substance, the philosophy of a shot. The idea that nothing should be filmed without a reasonwithout understanding what the meaning of the shot is.”

Infobae He asked the director if she would agree to project Mr. Scorsese in film schools and his position was totally open to the documentary being used and presented to students.

“It could be an interesting insight. It’s also very inspiring. Both in terms of his own work, his influences, but also in terms of how many times did you have to fail and get upshake off the dust and start again,” he said.

For Miller, being a person—and even more so a film artist—“It is a long distance race and a continuous process of becoming”.

“Sometimes you look at someone like Marty and it seems like Martin Scorsese has always been like that. And that’s really not the case. It wasn’t an inevitability. He became himself, and then there were people he found, collaborators, people who were able to help him with finances, all of these people were involved in creating the man we now think of as Martin Scorsese,” he concluded.