What is it like to be inside the mind of one of the greatest filmmakers of all time? How does one go from a nobody born in Flushing, Queens to a world-renowned household name? Thanks to “Mr. Scorsese,” the recently released docuseries on Apple TV+, we don’t have to wonder anymore.
Originally intended to be a feature film, “Mr. Scorsese” tells the life story of prolific filmmaker Martin Scorsese’s life through interviews with Scorsese himself as well as Robert De Niro, Mick Jagger, Steven Spielberg, Leonardo DiCaprio, Margot Robbie and others. Due to the sheer amount of content gathered in the production process which began several years prior to the series’ release, the film had to be converted into a series of five, one-hour long episodes.
The series was created and directed by Rebecca Miller, a Connecticut native, hailing from Roxbury. She attended Yale University from 1980-1985 for painting and literature and later married renowned English actor Daniel Day-Lewis. Over the course of her career, Miller has directed several esteemed films: “Maggie’s Plan” (2015), “She Came to Me” (2023), and “Personal Velocity: Three Portraits” (2002), for which she won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival.
Scorsese is recognized as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, with a career unlike any other. He is responsible for 26 full-length narrative films and 16 full-length documentary films, including “Goodfellas” (1990), “Taxi Driver” (1976), “The Age of Innocence” (1993), “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013), and “Killers of the Flower Moon” (2023), just to name a few. In the series, he is acknowledged to be a cornerstone of the cinematic art form and Leonardo DiCaprio regarded him as “a master of exploring the dark side of the human condition.”
Throughout the series, we learn a lot of personal details about Scorsese’s life which molded him into the filmmaker he is today. For example, we discover in the first episode that his fascination with violence as portrayed in his films comes from his early life experiences, one of which involved watching his father get into a fistfight with their landlord as a child. Each episode peels back another layer of Scorsese’s complex psyche, blending recollection, regret and reverence for the art of storytelling. Miller’s lens humanizes the legend, showing not just the director behind the camera, but the anxious boy from Queens who dreamed of transcendence through cinema.
“Mr. Scorsese” is a tribute; a meditation on art, ambition and endurance that instills the audience with hope and motivation like few other pieces of media can (James Gunn’s “Superman” is another rare exception). I highly recommend it!