Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us, and thanks for showing up for us during our fall pledge drive. We really appreciate it. Coming up on the show today, we'll speak to Director Yorgos Lanthimos and actor Jesse Plemons about their new movie Bugonia, which just hit theaters this Friday. We'll also speak to a New York Times puzzle editor. He's the creator of their Mini Crossword and editor of the new book Puzzle Mania.

We'll learn about a new exhibition, Emma Stebbins: Carving Out History, which is at the Heckscher Museum in Huntington, Long Island. That is our plan. Let's get this started with a new documentary series, Mr. Scorsese.

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Alison Stewart: When he was a young boy growing up in Little Italy, director Martin Scorsese had terrible asthma. When it was really hot, he couldn't play outside with the other kids. His parents would take him to one of the only places in the city that was cool, the movie theater. That is one of the many great stories and anecdotes that emerge in the new five-part documentary Mr. Scorsese. It was directed by Rebecca Miller. The film walks viewers through each steps of Scorsese's career. It goes into nearly every one of his movies, in his filmography, from Who's That Knocking at My Door to Goodfellas to The Last Waltz.

We hear from longtime collaborators like Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, and editor Thelma Schoonmaker. It also takes an intimate and a candid look at Scorsese's personal life, his marriages, his daughters, his relationship with faith, and his issues with anger and addiction. The documentary really shows how his life has fueled his work and how his work has shaped his life. All five parts of Mr. Scorsese are available to stream now on Apple TV+. I'm joined now by Rebecca Miller. It is nice to see you.

Rebecca Miller: So nice to be here.

Alison Stewart: Who was someone you knew you needed to talk to to fully understand Martin Scorsese, the person, not the filmmaker?

Rebecca Miller: I was very excited to meet his childhood friends. That was one of the main things that felt like a real victory for me was meeting some of the guys that he grew up with and hearing their voices.

Alison Stewart: They are something else to say the least. What did they tell you about him as a little kid that maybe surprised you, and then maybe it made sense?

Rebecca Miller: I love the idea that he was making these drawings that they would come and look at and were just amazed by. Because he was quietly working on storyboards, which he understood film language so completely as a young child, because partly having spent so much time in the movie theaters, and also just his innate genius. They would talk about looking at these things, and then they would make films together. There was one film that they made on the top when he became an adolescent, like in 16 or so, they made it on the top of his rooftop. It was a private detective in ancient Rome trying to-- Everybody's in sheets for togas, and it's just amazing to watch this film with them.

Alison Stewart: When you first started on this project, what was the main question you wanted to answer?

Rebecca Miller: Initially, I was really intrigued by his faith and his spiritual journey alongside his interest and curiosity, and obsession, maybe with violence. I thought, "That's really interesting." I knew much less about him at that time, but I was really interested in that conundrum, and I thought it might be a portal that I could go through.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting because he sits for the documentary. You interview him in the documentary. Was anything off limits?

Rebecca Miller: No. He didn't say that up front. It never really came up that anything was off limits. I think he decided to be pretty honest with me as much as anyone can be.

Alison Stewart: Why do you think he decided that? Do you think it was his age? Do you think he wanted to just tell the truth about his life?

Rebecca Miller: I'm not sure. I think it had to do with a combination of things that had to do with maybe the him plus me equals us doing this together. It was really a conversation.

Alison Stewart: The voice appears in the documentary quite a bit, in a good way.

Rebecca Miller: Yes. I wanted it to be clear that it's a conversation and not just his questions aren't coming-- or rather, his answers aren't coming out of nowhere with no questions. I didn't know that much about him going in, so I was genuinely asking questions, getting answers, feeling my way through. I think to some degree, it wasn't like he decided up front. It was more like it was something that he felt out. It was an instinctive thing on his part to just let go and just tell the story.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting. His first interview isn't the last interview you did with him. Initially, when you first started doing them, were they different? Were they more structured? Then it got looser or?

Rebecca Miller: You know what? He came in with really good will, I would say. We went from being people that knew each other a little bit socially. He knew my films, I knew, and he knew my documentary, and he knew my other films. He knew me in a way. The way that one does when-- through knowing films. Then we got to know each other as people over this five-year period. Then by the time-- Also, I started to do interviews where I asked the crew to all leave and really just leave the cameras up and leave the lights up. Then it's just him and me in the room, and it became more and more personal in a way. It felt more and more like just conversations between two people.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Director Rebecca Miller. We're talking about her new five-part documentary, Mr. Scorsese. It's available to stream now on Apple TV. He was born in Corona, Queens-- He was born in Little Italy, right?

Rebecca Miller: Yes. Then they moved to Corona.

Alison Stewart: 232 Elizabeth Street, where his parents lived. 232, 241. Then they moved to Corona, Queens, and they moved back to Little Italy. That's part of the story, actually.

Rebecca Miller: Yes. He talks about it as a exile from paradise because Corona for him was a paradise where all his family members were living there on the Kappa side, his mother's side, his aunts, his cousins, his uncles. Then there was this immense fight between him and the landlord, that he talks about witnessing a big physical fight. Then they had to leave. I think they both had important friends in the community, men who had power, and their guys lost, and they just had to go.

Alison Stewart: What did he witness when he witnessed what happened with his family?

Rebecca Miller: It sounded like it was a really big physical fight. He said there was an ax involved. His father's sister in law, I guess his aunt, was pulling them off, the landlord off the father. I mean, it was a big physical fight, and we actually-- That was one of the first times I realized that there was this one-to-one ratio between his experience and his work. There's a moment in Raging Bull, which we use, where there are two kids witnessing this intense violence scene when Jake Lamotta comes in and starts dragging Joe Pesci along the floor, and the two kids are witnessing that. It was the first time we used a film as evidence, in a way.

Alison Stewart: He's in a lot of his films, whether we know it's him or not.

Rebecca Miller: For sure.

Alison Stewart: Which was fascinating, I found.

Rebecca Miller: Absolutely. His films are so personal, and yet he manages to also make them about much bigger things in the culture, too.

Alison Stewart: What do you think is special about the way that he portrays New York City in his films?

Rebecca Miller: There's so many layers of how he portrays it. It's funny because he's not always shooting in New York to portray New York. Actually, New York, New York, for example, was mostly shot on sets. Gangs of New York was shot in Rome, and Mean Streets was also shot largely in California, except for a few shots that were done in New York. Yet you feel such an authenticity of New York, because New York is a state of mind, really, and I think a dream of sorts. In his work, particularly, that's true.

Alison Stewart: We hear a lot about Taxi Driver and Goodfellas. What was a movie that you ended up spending more time on in this film than you anticipated?

Rebecca Miller: New York, New York, ended up taking a lot of time because it was complex. It was like a really-- almost like a nerve cluster, because it had his daughter's experience, or rather, of course, she was a newborn, but she's talking a little bit about the experience that she heard about or knew about a little bit through her mother or whatever. Then the relationship. Just the ways in which life paralleled art and art paralleled life got quite complicated in that particular one.

I feel like that happened also in Taxi Driver. Shutter Island was a film I didn't know that I was going to spend as much time on. It ended up being something that had gotten under his skin in such a way that we had to really try and unpack that, too.

Alison Stewart: It was so interesting. I was watching Taxi Driver last night. Not the film. I was watching your film, and it was interesting-- just sidebar, that Jodie Foster ended up doing all the promo for it because she could speak French.

Rebecca Miller: Yes.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] When it won [unintelligible 00:10:06]. That was amazing.

Rebecca Miller: Also, they weren't coming out of their hotel room because they thought everyone hated it. It was so violent. There she is at 12 years old, talking to the press. It's hilarious.

Alison Stewart: There's this motive that comes through in the film, Marty, saint versus sinner. His two sides, faith and spirituality, is a big part of Martin Scorsese's life. He thought about becoming a priest at one point. How did you want to explore this in a documentary without banging us over the head with it?

Rebecca Miller: Yes, I was just interested in how, in a way, the identification with the sinner, that's something that has been brought up in the documentary, that in a way he identifies with the sinners in his work. He also talks about in his life that his brother was very mischievous and always in trouble. He was the good-- Marty was the good one, and the brother was the bad one. Internally, he knew it wasn't true. There's a sense that it was actually him that was the bad one. That's very, very interesting to me. These layers of guilt and getting down underneath the surface.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Director Rebecca Miller. We're talking about the new five-part documentary, Mr. Scorsese. It's available to stream now on Apple+. It's so interesting hearing his mother and father talk in this documentary because I was like, "Oh, he's just like his mom." Like, "Oh no, he's like his dad." It's like his mom, but then his mom's voice is so spectacular.

Rebecca Miller: I know.

Alison Stewart: Could you decide which one he was like after watching so much video?

Rebecca Miller: I feel like he made that great documentary, Italian American, which is just such a goldmine for them. It's basically all about them, and her-- When I was watching, I was like, "She's really an artist. She has the personality of an artist. She's ebullient and imaginative and brilliant and unafraid of the camera and a natural actress." I think there is a big part of Marty that is like that woman. I think she had an immense influence on him. I do think that his father, as somebody who was very grounded in the neighborhood and understood how to speak to people of power and deal with some of the things that they had to deal with, which were very serious things, also had a big influence on him. Yes.

Alison Stewart: Scorsese, excuse me, he gets candid about his struggles with drug addiction at one point in his life. First of all, how did he get out of it?

Rebecca Miller: I mean that's what I ask him. As he says, his thing is like, "I didn't until it took-- I didn't get out of it." He collapses. That's what you see in the documentary. Then I think for him, the answer, his despair, and his savior is always his work, really. There's the religious connection, again, his words, where I think that the despair prior to Raging Bull had to do with a sense that he had lost the muse, that he had nothing to say, that he couldn't function as a filmmaker anymore, and so wasn't really a person anymore. Then De Niro comes in and says, "Let's do Raging Bull." There's this-- His saying, "Okay, let's do it," is the beginning of a resurrection, I guess, of sorts.

Alison Stewart: Yes, you get this idea that depending on where he was depended on how the film was going. DiCaprio shares that during Shutter Island, a very dark mood, Scorsese was in a bad funk. During Wolf of Wall Street, he was in a great mood. What sense did you get from him how different projects affected him mentally?

Rebecca Miller: Josh Safdie says something great in the film. He says he's almost like a method director. He identifies so deeply with the work. He also even changes the way he dresses depending on what he's actually portraying. There is a sense that it goes so, so deep. Thelma Schoomaker also talks about that, about how he identifies with the work very, very deeply. Sometimes that's very painful to do that, and sometimes it can be dangerous to do that.

Alison Stewart: Please tell people who Thelma Schoonmaker is, because she's so important.

Rebecca Miller: Thelma Schoonmaker is really his editor since-- from Raging Bull on, which is 40, maybe 50 years. She's been his absolute partner, a real creative rock. She does unpack some of the films so beautifully in the film. She's really one of the most brilliant editors alive, certainly, and has had a big impact on this iconic work.

Alison Stewart: There are two big muses that loom large in Scorsese's career. Robert De Niro, as you mentioned, and Leonardo DiCaprio. You speak with both of them for the film. What do you think, these relationships, why they continued on creatively?

Rebecca Miller: I think you go where the nourishment is. Of course, film is a practical medium, and in some ways, there's that moment in the film where we joke about how Martin is dead again because, once again, his films aren't making money. Then he says, and yet. Then you meet Leonardo DiCaprio, who comes in. Not only is he this wonderful young actor who does gangs with him, and so he's both extremely talented, full of capacity to be as open as Marty likes to be with actors, but at the same time he also has the capacity to bring some money with him because these are large canvases that he's working on.

I do think that a lot of it has to do with trust. That he talks about the trust of when you have these core collaborators, which are his actors, that there's immense trust that they can keep going further into areas that you didn't anticipate. There's an immense-- With Scorsese, I think there's this combination of being extremely prepared on the one hand, and on the other hand extremely open. Margot Robbie talks at length about rethinking a very big sequence the night before in Wolf of Wall Street. There are very few people who are that confident that they would be just like, "Oh, yes, let's just try this completely different way of expressing this passage." Yet, there he is doing that. It's an unusual combination.

Alison Stewart: You mentioned Margot Robbie, and I'm thinking back to Sharon Stone, who shared that at the beginning of Casino, she felt excluded, like it was a boys club. How do you think Scorsese's work with women and female characters has changed over the course of his career?

Rebecca Miller: Even very early in his career with Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, he was really moving toward the challenge of working on a story that was really from a female point of view and trying very hard to not see things through the lens of masculinity, but to try and see things from her point of view, work with as many women as possible, et cetera. Having said that, the worlds that he's interested in exploring were often male-dominated worlds. The women who ended up being in those worlds, like the characters, like, for example, Sharon Stone's character, always end up being fantastic performances.

Her story is really of her finally saying, "Listen, I need more attention. You're spending so much time in the trailer with De Niro and with Pesci. I need also my time. He stops, he thinks, "Oh, no, you're right." He goes back, he starts to pay this time with her, and then becomes-- the work with her becomes very, very beautiful and personal. Then they bloom into this wonderful performance. I would say he treats all actors, whether they're male or female, with that same, I would say, love and interest and care. At the same time, it is true that the worlds that he's interested in have sometimes been dominated by male characters.

Alison Stewart: We learn he's been married five times. We learn about his relationships with his daughters. How much-- That's another whole section of it. I'm curious, in spending time with him, how much at this point in his life does he care about critical success versus commercial success?

Rebecca Miller: I think there's somebody who asks him-- I think Leslie Stahl asked him in the film, "If you're not really box office and you're not getting the Academy Award, like, what, what makes you value? What are you striving for? What makes you the work work for you?" He says the value of the work. There's this sense, like in an absolute sense, he has to believe in it and love it. He knows that critical acclaim is-- sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not. There's films like The King of Comedy that just didn't work in terms of the Zeitgeist at that moment. Nobody went to go see it. It was called the flop of the year. Yet now it's like adored. You learn, I think, to take things with a grain of salt.

Alison Stewart: My guest has been Rebecca Miller. We were talking about her new five-part documentary, Mr. Scorsese. It's available now to stream on Apple TV+. Thank you for coming into the studio.

Rebecca Miller: Thank you so much.