Rebecca Miller had been directing acclaimed movies for 30 years by the time she was tasked with making a documentary about one of the greatest directors of all time. The Connecticut native, best known for The Ballad of Jack and Rose and Maggie’s Plan, signed on to helm a five-part series about Martin Scorsese knowing they’d have to go deep together. They knew each other casually beforehand, with Miller’s husband, Daniel Day-Lewis, having starred in Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and Gangs of New York, but as they settled in for hours upon hours of conversations — about Scorsese’s family life, his dark days earlier in his career, the legacy he hopes to leave — they developed a bond that’s evident in the finished Apple TV series. Mr. Scorsese shows its subject willing to go anywhere and everywhere, illuminating the fascinating overlap between his life and his art. THR recently spoke with Miller about the doc.
You use a split-screen format to parallel Martin Scorsese’s personal story with the content of his films. How did you land on that style and what did it reveal?
The split-screen idea came from me not wanting this to be “talking heads of older people talking about the past.” I want to see what they’re talking about. One of my favorites came quite late in the game when I was talking to David Bartner, the editor, and I was like, “Let’s do [Taxi Driver’s] Travis Bickell taking his gun out and then Reagan gets shot.” You see that sometimes art really does leap into life. Marty is such a personal filmmaker, but he managed to leap from the personal sphere into the cultural sphere, which is really unusual.
