How Martin Scorsese Stays Curious

0:00Rebecca Miller:From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

0:11Rebecca Miller:Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. As a writer, Rebecca Miller likes to focus on her character's compulsions, which she's done in novels, such as Personal Velocity and Total, and her screenplays that she's directed, such as She Came to Me and Personal Velocity. She also found this fascination in Martin Scorsese, the subject of her Apple TV documentary, Mr. Scorsese. Miller stopped by last year to discuss her docuseries on one of the world's greatest living filmmakers. One of the things that's so interesting about the series is just that he is, and you get him for a long period of time, such an animated talker and just to let him talk and not hear the question, but just hearing him talk.

0:59Rebecca Miller:So often you hear him responding to a question and it was terrific that you give him so much time to just give vent to what he's thinking.

1:07Martin Scorsese:Yeah, because it's so important. Like really what I was doing was, you know, this kind of radical listening where I was just fully, fully listening and responding. But also knowing when to shut up was really one of the main things is like allow him to fill up that space. And sometimes if you just don't talk, somebody will add something that is actually deeper than the first way they said it. Some of the interviews lasted four and five hours. Every time it would be like after an hour and a half or two hours, we'd say, well, I guess we're done. Thanks, Marty. I don't have any more notes. That's great.

1:37Martin Scorsese:And then he'd say, and then he'd start talking about something and then we would be going. And then two hours later, that was finally the end of the interview. But I mean, because very often it would be some of the best stuff would come out of these after the end interviews.

1:53Rebecca Miller:Because he is somebody who, once the interview is done, he doesn't just walk away. A lot of people just leave and he just sits around and he continues to talk. And you were smart enough to let the cameras keep going.

2:05Martin Scorsese:Yeah. You know, I didn't know very much about his personal life, which actually I think was helpful. I had studied the films really carefully, but there were a lot of things I didn't know. And so I was kind of feeling my way through the dark and surprised by a lot of the things that he said.

2:21Rebecca Miller:What surprised you?

2:24Martin Scorsese:Well, I didn't know, you know, the story of how he was flipping out about that they were going to cut taxi driver for an R. I didn't know that story. I didn't really know the story of what happened when he almost was overcome by drugs. One of the big reveals was just when I looked at all the pictures that he had brought, a lot of them were of these kids from the neighborhood. And I started thinking, wouldn't it be great to meet them? And meeting them was just an extraordinary. That was extraordinary.

2:55Rebecca Miller:You were a director. So you know that sometimes you're going to be able to get that shot, just run across the street because this is the only time you're going to have. You don't have permits. Let's go do this before we get arrested.

3:07Martin Scorsese:Oh, yeah.

3:07Rebecca Miller:And there is that quality to this.

3:10Martin Scorsese:Yeah. Yes. Absolutely. I think that it's that slight naivete that I brought to it. I didn't know the answers beforehand. I wasn't trying to manipulate anybody. I was really just asking and listening that I think was helpful, probably.

3:26Rebecca Miller:It's the treatment. We're talking about the project, the five-hour docuseries. Mr. Scorsese with its director, our old friend Rebecca Miller, she's sitting in front of me. But I guess one thing that strikes me about this is everybody who talks to you about him, and not just the movie stars, but they're all outsized personalities. And he surrounds himself with these kinds of people, and he likes to observe them. That you got that? Because for me, that's subtextually what this is all about. this guy who likes to look at things, who likes to watch these bigger-than-life forces slam into each other.

4:00Martin Scorsese:But that, you know, immediately when you said that, I thought of his mother. I mean, his mother was an enormous personality, really has the character of an artist, was in fact an actor, like a really great actor herself, had unbelievable poise in front of the camera, never, it was as if the camera didn't even, she didn't even notice it. And I think that he was formed by this wonderful character. And so then, of course, he's in, And the forces in the neighborhood, these kids, these neighborhood kids that he's around are also immense personalities, you know. So he's kind of surrounded by this almost operatic cast of characters.

4:31Rebecca Miller:But these are people who can't help but sort of talk about the best and worst of themselves at the same time. And that you get that so often. There's so many of these people, like Nick Pelleggio, who I love. First of all, you forget how their age is because they're still so powerful at this point in their 80s, these guys.

4:49Martin Scorsese:I know. They're the best advertisement for living after 85 years old or 80 years old. It's amazing. Like, Nick Pledge is in his 90s, I think, and is still like that.

4:59Rebecca Miller:Mr. Scorsese, I'm calling him your documentary. He is like that, too. And I just found it was interesting that even as his body language changes, he still got that same kind of magnetism. You go, oh, I see why directors put him in films, because there is this power that he has. I mean, he's the kind of guy who would play a director in a movie. So it's interesting that he became one.

5:21Martin Scorsese:Yeah, he also has that quality of being completely natural in front of the camera. And I think originally, originally did think he might want to be an actor. I think like there was a moment like because he hadn't really imagined yet that he might be able to make films because it was such a big it was a huge leap. I mean, like, you know, he it's hard to really, I think, fully imagine. It's one of the reasons I wanted the first episode to be so big. I wanted you to really understand where he came from and that neighborhood, because I do feel like all the nerve endings of his work. end up in that place.

5:50Rebecca Miller:There's a lot of your work that has sort of monologue, inner monologues or narratives, narrations. And there's a lot of his that has that too.

5:56Martin Scorsese:Yeah.

5:57Rebecca Miller:And I wonder if that was something that influenced you because I wonder how he influenced you as a filmmaker, as an artist.

6:01Martin Scorsese:In that time period of time where I got to know him a little bit on Gangs of New York, one of the few conversations I had with him because he was kind of busy was, I said, you know, I'm about to make this film and it was Personal Velocity. And I said, do you have any, I knew I needed a lot of voiceover for the film. And I said, do you have any suggestions for films, you know, that I should watch. I mean, obviously his films aside, like, and he gave me this amazing list and I watched all of those films and then later gave him personal velocity to watch. And I said, like, if you have any notes and his note was like, well, my mind wandered here.

6:33Martin Scorsese:That was his only note, you know, like at one place. So I cut that down. And then he watched other of my films and kind of gave me notes. And that was really the basis of our, whatever relationship we had. So he knew me quite well in terms of like my work much better than he knew me as a person.

6:47Rebecca Miller:He talks about the making of Boxcar Bertha, but if he hadn't made Boxcar Bertha, he doesn't meet Barbara Hershey. If he doesn't meet Barbara Hershey, he doesn't reach The Last Temptation of Christ. Yes, yes. So for me, the way that women impacted him is, for me, felt throughout this piece.

7:03Martin Scorsese:Absolutely. But you see also Thelma, like the moment that Thelma... Who are we talking about? Thelma Schumacher. His editor. His editor.

7:12Rebecca Miller:And his alter ego.

7:14Martin Scorsese:Yeah, I mean, that relationship began And almost in their late childhood, I mean, they were very, very young. And, you know, you see how they sort of create each other as artists. It's the same also, I mean, that I would say also with De Niro, certainly.

7:28Rebecca Miller:If I would say with her, just because she's the one person who always has his ear. And she's the one person who sees the man as most vulnerable. When she's getting that footage and having to put it together, that's a lot of trust. And the thing that's interesting about it, you can sort of see how hard it is for him to trust people. He talks to a lot of people. He doesn't trust a lot of people. And that's one of the things that's evident from this conversation is that he trusts you because he got to know you through your work.

7:55Martin Scorsese:That may be true. And he had also read my books, which is interesting because like that became such a surprise to me that he had read Jacob's Folly. I mean, I was like, what?

8:05Rebecca Miller:What did he think of Jacob's Folly? What did he say to you about it? He really loved it.

8:08Martin Scorsese:But I mean, it was like amazing to me that he had gone to the trouble to read these novels. And not when he thought I was going to make a movie about him, but he had just been, you know, curious. He's so curious. He wants, he's a sponge, you know, and he was interested in me as an artist. So he read, he did a deep dive. But you're probably right that he knew me so he could, he knew what I was going to be like. Yeah.

8:30Rebecca Miller:There is a quality to your work that's about breathing, about respiration, about both for the actors and for the material, which I feel in the best of his works. I feel it in silence. Yeah. I feel it certainly in Gangs of New York when these things are taking an air. And I feel like that connects you too to him.

8:48Martin Scorsese:Yeah, it's giving also honoring the human being that you're talking about enough to let them breathe and let them be part of the process and not try to control everything. With him, it's like a really interesting combination of being incredibly well prepared, but also allowing for a level of chaos that a lot of people wouldn't tolerate on set or right prior to set or redoing things according to improvisation and things like that. And loving actors like we both. I definitely have that feeling of like, I really love to work with actors and I love to feel their sort of soul being exposed, which is really what's happening.

9:24Martin Scorsese:And I think that he definitely has that.

9:27Rebecca Miller:It's The Treatment and my 2025 conversation with director Rebecca Miller on her docuseries, Mr. Scorsese.

9:57Rebecca Miller:And we do that by talking to the people living with the consequences. My feed was flooded without my consent. I was targeted by Instagram. Listen to Question Everything wherever you get your podcasts.

10:12Rebecca Miller:Welcome back to The Treatment and more of my 2025 conversation with director Rebecca Miller on her Apple TV docuseries, Mr. Scorsese. There are a number of these projects that have narration, where the characters are sort of saying things that they can't face. They can't say out loud. They're kind of almost like they're muttering these things to themselves. And I was thinking back to She Came to Me, where he's kind of muttering to himself a lot in that too, and creating this narrative that has nothing to do with the real world, that sort of finds a reality for itself. And you've done that with a number of characters, and he's done that too.

10:51Rebecca Miller:They still have a narrative in their head that they end up creating around them. That fascinated me to just sort of see those linkages and make me understand that's why he let you do this with him.

11:00Martin Scorsese:It's very true. And also, the thing about narration or any kind of river of sound that's like words that belong to a character that's like extra information, it's kind of literary in the sense that books can get this depth that sometimes movies can't get because you have to keep moving the plot along. But if you use voiceover correctly or if it hits right and it's integral to the thing, it can give you depth of understanding of what you're watching.