Doc Talk Podcast: Rebecca Miller On Her Emmy-Nominated ‘Mr. Scorsese’, A Journey Into The Mind And Mastery Of Martin Scorsese

Director Rebecca Miller calls Martin Scorsese “the maestro,” and who would disagree with that? Scorsese has been making cinematic masterpieces for many decades now – Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, GoodFellas, Casino, The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street, to name only a few.

Miller explores the filmmaker’s complex personality and extraordinary career in her Apple TV documentary series Mr. Scorsese, which is nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series and Outstanding Directing For a Documentary/Nonfiction Program. Miller (who is married to one of Scorsese’s on-screen collaborators, actor Daniel Day-Lewis) joins the latest edition of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast to share insights from her five-part examination of Scorsese and his work.

Miller explains why 1972’s Boxcar Bertha became pivotal in the director’s career – not because of the film’s quality but rather its pointlessness (she relates how a conversation with John Cassavetes about Boxcar Bertha set Scorsese on a new course). Many of his later films became noted for their depiction of violence; Miller traces that preoccupation to the director’s youth in New York City where it wasn’t unusual for Marty and his pals to stumble across a body dumped in an alley (the youngsters once used a pencil as a forensic instrument to assess a corpse).

Among the many people Miller interviewed for her series is Robert De Niro, an integral part of Scorsese’s success (Miller tells us why she thinks De Niro’s facial expressions during their conversation communicated more than his words). Miller delves into how one of the many films Scorsese and De Niro made together – The King of Comedy – became such an ordeal for the director, and why a scene from another of their films – GoodFellas –  tells us so much about the director’s approach to cinema. She also touches on one of the roughest times in Scorsese’s life when a serious drug addiction nearly killed him.

That’s on the new episode of Doc Talk hosted by Oscar winner John Ridley (12 Years a Slave, Shirley) and Matt Carey, Deadline’s senior documentary editor. The pod is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios.

Listen to the episode above or on major podcast platforms including Spotify, iHeart and Apple.