What lights Martin Scorsese up when he’s in front of the camera?

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

0:14it's the treatment i'm elvis mitchell you can also hear the show at kcow.com we've been hearing rebecca miller's voice on this show since her film personal velocity which was a grand jury winner at the sun den's film festival she's made a few films since then She's written a few books since then. She's made a few documentaries since then. In fact, she has just completed a five-hour documentary series for Apple TV. The series is Mr. Scorsese. First of all, Rebecca Miller, it's always a pleasure to have you. It's nice to actually be able to see you. It's so fun to see you again. I guess the first thing I want to ask you about this incredible thing is, tell me your first memory of meeting Martin Scorsese.

0:59This may not have been the very first time I met him, but it's the time I remember. It was on the set of Gangs of New York. And he was about to shoot the big battle scene where, you know, the initial big battle scene, like when he comes out on my challenge and all that. And I was watching him and he was he seemed so kind of nervous. He was kind of a live wire and he seemed like a really young person who was making this film. And he was already a kind of maestro and made so many films and was not what I expected. He was so vivid with life. And I remember that really clearly. 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.

1:46And just to let him talk and not hear the question, but just hearing him talk. Yeah. Because so often you hear him responding to a question. And it was terrific that you give him so much time to just vent to what he's thinking. 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.

2:21But we did. Some of the interviews lasted four and five hours. It used to be 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. 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. The interview was done. We would keep talking. And some of the best stuff comes out of that.

2:49Because 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. 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. What surprised you? 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.

3:31I didn't know that story. I didn't really know the story of what happened when he almost was overcome by drugs. There were all sorts of stories I didn't know. And then, I mean, of course, the big one of the big reveals was just when I looked at all the pictures that he had brought. A lot of them were 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. That's the real meathead for me, is that these guys who haven't changed— they probably haven't changed their style of clothing since 1985.

4:06They could be still played by De Niro and Richard Romanes and Harvey Keitel. They still talk exactly the same. They still use their hands in the same way. it's still Mr. Gaga, I will call him, as they would call him in the New York Times. The way he's kind of constantly looking around as if somebody's going to come and take him out of the room. There is such electricity in that. It's also that thing that I kind of associate with you, where you kind of let people, as a director, you kind of let people's real sort of star quality shine through. And it happens in those interviews. Yeah. I mean, they are stars.

4:40You know, the magnetism and the charisma of these guys, it's incredible. And you can see how young Marty was transfixed by Robert Uricola and also Salvatore Uricola, who nobody thought would ever sit for an interview. And I never even thought. And he turned out, you know, his brother just called him and he happened to be down the street. And he was really, like, as Marty says, the model for Johnny Boy. So that was like, you know, just an amazing experience. But of course, I was completely unprepared then because I hadn't thought he was coming. 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.

5:20You don't have permits. Let's go do this before we get arrested. Oh, yeah. And there is that quality to this. 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 like listening that I think was helpful, probably. It's the treatment. We're talking about the project, the five-hour docuseries. Mr. Scorsese with his director, our old friend Rebecca Miller, she's sitting in front of me. But his body language is very different than this. He just decided whether, you know, he's decided unconsciously.

5:58So many of these decisions are unconscious, you know, that he was going to really talk to me in a frank way. But I mean, he is a really self-honest person. He's an unbelievably honest person to himself. He can also, of course, like anybody who's been interviewed as much as he has, he has a certain shtick that he does, you know, like, you know, and he talks about film endlessly. But once a lot of that is burned off, you know, underneath that, there's this immense ability to see himself in a clear eyed way. And that's part of, I think, you know, how he creates his characters, like that thing of being so honest to yourself, you're able to then give that to other people.

6:31But I was really amazed by sometimes it felt that we went so deep and I didn't expect that sometimes. 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. But that, you know, immediately when you said that, I thought of his mother.

7:05I 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. It was as if the camera 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. But these are people who who can't help us sort of talk about the best and worst of themselves at the same time.

7:40And 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. I know. They're the best advertisement for living after 85 years old or 80 years old. It's amazing. Like Nick Bledgy's in his 90s, I think, and is still like that. Mr. Scorsese, I'm calling them 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. And you go, oh, I see why directors put him in films, because there is this power that he has.

8:20I mean, he's the kind of guy who would play a director in a movie. So it's interesting that he became one. 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 you could make 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. And 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.

8:50Because I do feel like all the nerve endings of his work end up in that place. 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. Yeah. And I wonder if that was something that influenced you. Because I wonder how he influenced you as a filmmaker, as an artist. In that 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?

9:18I knew I needed a lot of voiceover for the film. And I said, do you have any suggestions for films that I should watch? I mean, obviously, his films aside. And he gave me this amazing list. And I watched some of those, 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. 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.

9:53It's a really telling piece about a man who sort of like made a series of journal entries using genre films to do that. Yes. And the thing that's so amazing about him is that as personal as his films are, that they've leapt from that personal sphere into the culture. That's amazing. Like that he sort of set fire to people's brains way outside of him in spite of the fact that he really kept, for the most part, to make these films that were very personal to him. It's really a phenomenon, I think. he talks about the making of Boxcar Bertha. But if he hadn't made Boxcar Bertha, he doesn't meet Barbara Hershey.

10:30If he doesn't meet Barbara Hershey, he doesn't meet The Last Temptation of Christ. Yes, yes. I mean, so for me, the way that women impacted him is for me felt throughout this piece. Absolutely. But you see also Thelma, like the moment that Thelma... Who are we talking about? Thelma Schumacher. His editor. His editor. And his alter ego. Yeah, I mean, that relationship began 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. I would say with her, just because she's the one person who always has his ear, always has his ear.

11:12And she's the one person who sees them at his 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. That may be true. And he had also read my books, which is interesting because that became such a surprise to me that he had read Jacob's Folly. I mean, I was like, what?

11:43What did he think of Jacob's Folly? What did he say to you about it? 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 he's a sponge, you know, and he was interested in me as an artist. So he read me, 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. Take a break on my guest thing. I'm probably right. It's the treatment. She is Rebecca Miller. Her newest project is for Apple TV, the five-hour docuseries, Mr.

12:18Scorsese. I meet you right in the second half. We'll see. If there's more to come, stay with us. It's the treatment. We're moving on with this lack of trust from my guest towards me. Her newest project for Apple TV is the docuseries, Mr. Scorsese. We're talking to our old friend, Rebecca 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. 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.

12:51Yeah, 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.

13:28And I think that he definitely has that. 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. They still have a narrative in their head that they end up creating around them.

14:02That fascinated me to just sort of see those linkages and make me understand that's why he let you do this with him. 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. I think you use narration in almost a kind of a musical way.

14:39It's almost like needle drops. And for me, as he's talking about, and as I was talking about music, it hit me. Again, I'm watching some of your stuff too again after just to sort of complete this picture in my head. There's a quality of musicality that comes from narration that I think you both share. That's very true. Because it's all units of energy that are musical, right? That's what film is, kind of. It's like this weird, this incantation that you're trying to hypnotize people with that has a lot about music. I mean, when he talks about the weird structure of Casino and how he's using a musical structure and throwing the idea of three acts out the window, which everybody to this day, we're all talking about three acts.

15:17It seems like it's theater. That's theater, you know? And instead, he's looking at it in this very different way where he's kind of instinctively trying to grab hold of the audience. And that's like in this film, there was a lot of that, of like using his voice as voiceover and then music and then just try. And then also the way that we use split screen so that like there's this kind of constant syncopation that's going on between images and the voiceover. And, you know, it's not really voiceover. It's just his voice as he's talking and then using images in archival. As you talk about that, I mean, I think there's a new excitement to that scene.

15:56In Main Street, we see Johnny Boy blowing up the mailboxes. And we hear Salvatore talking about it. And we still see the delight in his eye 70 years later about having done that. I mean, there's still that sort of gleam, that same sort of gleam that De Niro has. And that almost dance that he's doing is he's running away from. Because he's not running from it. He's jogging away because he wants to be seen doing this thing. And Salazar's talking about it in that same way. And it's using the language of cinema, including music and the musicality. And first of all, that's such a great piece where you join those together, was doing all these things that you're talking about.

16:32Yeah. It's really trying to kind of find a total way of using all the tools that you can use. And that's the thing about documentaries, that there's all this freedom, which sometimes it just reminds you making a documentary of how free you can be, I guess, in film in general. It's not that you can't in cinema, in feature films, but there's something about documentary that because nobody, there's no set way it has to roll out. All the pieces are yours to put together and figure out how to do it. It's very free. We're talking about liberation with my guest, Rebecca Miller. Her news project for Apple TV is Mr.

17:06Scorsese's The Treatment. I guess I keep going back to Eith Wharton, which makes me think about you just because there's this sort of sense of the French definition of nostalgia, which is sort of death and that sort of ruefulness that comes from that. And there is a kind of a rueful quality that exists throughout this entire thing. Despite all this exhilaration and all this self-discovery, what it's cost him in every decade of his life to keep doing this. Each episode is about the cost for during each decade, which I just found to be a monumental achievement. It's true. It's like the wages of the obsession, like what it costs to throw yourself into the fire that way every time you get burnt.

17:50And certain things get burnt out. And hopefully certain things, other things grow. But you definitely, it's one of Nick Pelleggi's things that he says is like, what did it cost him? You know, it does cost something. But we're aware of that cost throughout. And I just wondered, that was, I thought you were talking about literary constructions here. That was something you started off wanting to keep alive, that idea of the constancy of cost? Or if it happened as you were cutting this thing together? Well, definitely. I mean, like the gains and the losses, like, you know, it's something I think a lot of a lot about as a writer of, you know, as a writer in general, but there's a vampiric quality to it.

18:30Like you can't help it. You have to use other human beings as your raw material. You're looking at people, you're always observing them. And by observing them, you're sort of stealing something from them. And so it's like that moment where he made Mean Streets about the people that he grew up with. And then he made the film and then the film propelled him out of the neighborhood and he was gone. And yet, you know, that very poignant moment where I feel like, you know, Salvatore Yuricola, Sally Gaga is sitting there and he says, Marty did a good job. I mean, there's something so it's for me a very, very heartbreaking moment, actually, of somebody left behind in a way.

19:05It's hard to think of another filmmaker who still feels the same exhilaration from filmmaking that he felt when he was in his 20s. Maybe Paul Thomas Anderson. There aren't many who that kind of you talked about when you're seeing on the set of Gangs of New York. There's something about him that's it's a kind of a youthful quality that can never be entirely snuffed out. Right. I mean, just when you thought it was gone, then suddenly the way the camera moves through Killers of the Flower Moon, and you're going to, well, this is like something a 20-year-old would do. Absolutely. And it's really interesting to see what's the same.

19:40Like in some ways, I feel he's exactly the same little boy that was watching films with that wonder in the cinemas where he had to sit there so he could breathe in the air conditioning. But at the same time, there's all the loss and all the hurt, you know, and the pain. There's a lot of pain. A lot of, like he had to go through a lot of pain. And so there's a calmness, I think. A kind of wisdom, I guess. but yet there's still that edge and that's still that hunger and that's what's amazing. Let me ask you this because so many of these films are about people not learning anything. They're observing.

20:14Even Oscar Bertha about somebody watching the world going on around them. You can see every Scorsese movie there's the protagonist is somebody who's watching and they're capable of acts of violence themselves but they're all observers. And a lot of these are observations they're anecdotal where these they add up to being a great story but nobody's learned anything by the end of them. I mean, Henry Hill hasn't learned anything by the end of Goodfellas. I just found that's maybe this thing that he's able to keep observing and still move on to the next thing because there's excitement, but there's a loss when you move on to the next thing.

20:48You're leaving a world behind. And for me, that's kind of this kind of sort of stanching, sort of tragic comic thing about it is that his exhilaration and moving on to the next thing, there's that, again, the personal cost that we're talking about. Yeah. Yes, definitely. But I think you also see on the personal level the way in which anger has a different place in his life now. I think that that's really interesting. You know, like meditation and family and like sort of like it gives you hope like that preserving the flame but at the same time not getting destroyed by the passion and the kind of rage that you have to have or that it felt you had to have to make the films in the first place.

21:30I guess I was going to ask you, too, because I just found in this latest part of his life where he's like, in effect, making short films with his daughter almost every day. There's still that sort of that youthful exuberance that exists there because he's not asking questions like that. He's asking, well, what is this? So he's walked in for another culture. Tell me what this is. What are you guys talking about? What does this mean when you say this? Yeah. Again, that kind of impetuousness has never disappeared for him. No. And he's also kind of an anthropologist. One of the things that Nick Pelleggi talked about, and he'll always say, well, what really happened?

22:03What did they really do? How did they really eat? What really happened? And there's a kind of, because also he's interested in ancient history, very interested in Greek-Roman history and early Christianity, all these things. So it comes to everything, including TikTok, including everything. He wants to know how human beings behave. I mean, that is fascinating to him. And it's fascinating 200 years ago, 500 years ago, or yesterday. Finally, fulfillment comes from within. For all these sort of things he's looking for from the outside, again, from how this is kind of about an evolution of spirit.

22:35Yes. Is that he comes to realize that after all these decades of looking at other people, he can now look within and find some fulfillment there too. Which, again, I just want to ask you where that comes from and sort of letting that explicate itself in that way. Because it's really satisfying the way you want this story to be. Yeah, I mean, I think maybe unlike some of his characters, he did learn something. I mean, that part of it really just evolved and talking to people and being interested. I'm so interested in character in general and how people can change and how they don't change. It's like one of my big things.

23:12Your big thing is how people don't change, but they keep moving on. They keep moving on. But how do they, what are the losses and what are the gains? And when people burn things out, there's a bad thing to that. But sometimes there's a good thing to that, because in that burnt out forest is a kind of peace sometimes and a kind of wisdom that can happen. You know, like I experienced it myself, you know, like in some ways I feel like I'm so much like I used to be. But then I know that there's other ways in which I'm really quite different. And I don't it's hard for me to see it from the outside, but I I perceive it.