Martin Scorsese, as holy as he is a sinner | Television

In the late seventies, Martin Scorsese shared a house with musician Robbie Robertson. House and drugs. Mountains of narcotics, confirms the member of The Band. New York, New York It had been a failure, and the filmmaker had lost his life direction. Until his body said enough, and due to internal bleeding, he ended up hospitalized. “Most of me wanted to die. Because at that moment I couldn’t do my job anymore. I felt incapable of creating,” the director confesses to Rebecca Miller on camera. His friend Robert De Niro approached his bed, pressuring him—he had been doing so for some time—to accept a project led by the actor, and to which the filmmaker was resisting. Scorsese recalls: “He looked at me and said, ‘What the hell do you want to do? Do you want to die like this?'” No, and that’s how it started Wild bull.

This is one of the anecdotes about the cinema legend that are discovered in Mr. Scorsese, a five-episode documentary series directed by Rebecca Miller that premieres this Friday on Apple TV, and that brilliantly analyzes the life and work of the director of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, One of Our Own, Casino, Gangs of New York, The Wolf of Wall Street and so many resounding films.

Miller, in addition to being a director of fiction features, had directed another documentary about a myth, in this case her father, the playwright Arthur Miller, in 2017, and called Scorsese (whom she knows well for several reasons, among them that Miller’s husband is Daniel Day-Lewis, who worked with the filmmaker on The age of innocence y Gangs of New York) in the middle of confinement to propose the project. This is how he began to record him and friends and collaborators from different periods. But given the amount of material, what was going to be a film became, after eight months of editing, a series for Apple TV, the platform that financed Scorsese’s last film, The assassins of the moon. And yet, Miller has said in the promotion, they have had to eliminate facets of Scorsese’s work such as his passion for production and restoration, or Hugo’s invention the only film by the filmmaker that is not mentioned on screen.

The life of Marty Scorsese (New York, 82 years old) cannot be understood without cinema. In reality, his life is cinema, the rest is subject to his drive. His daughter Domenica remembers her days filming the film as the best moment with her father. The age of innocence, where she performed. And he emphasizes: “My father is like a lighthouse: when he shines his beam of light on you, you are the chosen one… And then that light turns and you are left abandoned.”

Curiously, his father was almost not a filmmaker. Because his art is fueled by infinite anger and determination. Shortly after he was born, his parents left the lazy streets of Little Italy to live in a small house in Corona (Queens). “Paradise,” Marty points out. Tranquility, trees, garden. A father’s fight with the landlord, with an ax involved, returned the family to an apartment on Elizabeth Street, that is, to violence, crime and Catholicism. And asthma confined the boy, who watched life for three years from a third-story window, a point of view that explains his habitual camera shots in his movies. Furthermore, from there, says Nicholas Pileggi, screenwriter of one of ours y Casino, You could see the dichotomy that has cemented his work: “In Marty’s world, St. Patrick’s Church is in front of the Ravenite Social Club, where the mafia met and which dates back to the Prohibition era. Do you want to talk about the connection between those two worlds? There was that kid watching everything that was happening. How can that not affect you?” The same filmmaker remembers that he went to the seminary (he left it because he liked women more), and on one occasion, chatting with Gore Vidal, he told him that in his neighborhood you could only be a gangster or a priest, to which Vidal responded: “You became both things at the same time!”

Miller has free access to material and friends. On the one hand, it is going to be a fundamental documentary in Scorsese’s future study, because he himself analyzes and breaks down his films both in their form (he draws each shot before filming) and in their production (he explains how he works in improvisations and gives good examples) and in their theme (why he made each film, what he wanted to tell and at what moment in his life).

Additionally, the series unearths fascinating stories. De Niro remembers the first time they crossed paths professionally and suddenly realizes that this guy is Marty, whom he met as a teenager hanging out in Little Italy. Or when Miller interviews Robert Uricola, a neighbor and childhood friend, and he confesses that Johnny Boy, the protagonist of bad streets, is based on Marty’s uncle, Joe The Bug Scorsese, and his own brother, Salvatore Uricola, better known as Sally Gaga. Miller blurts out, “I’m so sorry we didn’t get to meet your brother.” Robert calls him and after a while Sally appears, devastated face, shining teeth and shirt open to the navel, to tell some of his crimes of the time, as unpredictable and dangerous as his alter ego on screen. In Scorsese, life and work are indivisible.

The director, on the other hand, misses a topic. Scorsese talks about his hell with drugs, how with meditation he has managed to be aware of his anger, and to face and channel it. Isabella Rossellini, his third wife, recalls: “I would say that Marty is a saint/sinner,” holy because he constantly asks (and wonders) about good and evil, and then acts badly, often, in real life. And he adds: “He could demolish an entire room and then not remember it. At least he never hit me.”

That is the topic that Paul Schrader, another great, qualifies, speaking of Taxi Driver, and extrapolating it to his entire career, a “Madonna/whore problem,” a simplification of his female characters that has never completely disappeared from Scorsese’s career. Miller prefers to talk about his actresses’ Oscar nominations rather than delve into that dichotomy, a minor detail in an outstanding portrait.

Many movies tell you what to think. Marty doesn’t want to do that. “He wants you to feel it”

Thelma Schoonmaker

Curious, because it does delve into its dissonance between violence and spirituality. His professional editor and traveling companion Thelma Schoonmaker explains, “A lot of movies tell you what to think. Marty doesn’t want to do that. He wants you to feel it.”

In five hours there is time to talk about Scorsese’s numerous failures (more than people believe) and which he, laughing, emphasizes: “Dead again”; how the success of the elusive cinema of his colleagues Lucas and Spielberg destroyed his way of working in the late seventies; about his relationship with the Oscars and how he has never felt accepted by Hollywood; of the times he has been attacked and suffered boycotts for his films; how he has come to fiercely defend his artistic criteria before producers or large studios, even with a gun in hand; about how Leonardo DiCaprio has saved his cinema in the 21st century, or how in the end he has portrayed himself in all his helpless protagonists (his framing lesson with Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver to achieve that feeling).

About that Schrader script, Scorsese says that when he read it he felt “almost as if I had written it myself.” Miller asks, “What about you, at that moment, do you feel was more in Taxi Driver?”. Marty reflects and after a silence: “The anger, the loneliness, the inability to know how to really connect with people.” Cinema saved him.