New York Film Festival was the only sane place for Rebecca Miller to premiere her superb five-part documentary on the life and work of Martin Scorsese. Mr Scorsese – coming your way on Apple TV+ – throbs to the city’s beats throughout. Miller gathers together the director’s old chums from Little Italy. Clips from Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Goodfellas illustrate New York’s pungent flavours and varied colours.
As it worked out, this year’s festival turned out to be a family affair. A few days before we speak, Miller strode the red carpet for the world premiere of Anemone, a rugged drama directed by Ronan Day-Lewis, her son, and starring Daniel Day-Lewis, her husband of 29 years. That feels like pressure. Ronan is making his feature debut. Daniel is returning to acting after a seven-year hiatus.
“It was lovely,” she says. “It was such an amazing coincidence that my premiere for this is in the same section of the festival as them. It’s wonderful. I feel very, very proud.”
I noticed that, at the premiere, the older Day-Lewis, whose father, the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, was born in Laois, wore a brooch in the shape of a harp on his lapel. The family has, of course, spent much of the past 30 years in and about Co Wicklow. They have discreetly become an institution.
RM Block
How much time to they spend there?
“It really depends,” she says. “Every year is different. Sometimes many months. Sometimes it’s fewer. It really depends on work and kids and who’s doing what. But Daniel’s heart is in Ireland, so we have to go as much as possible. And I love it.”
Miller is, no doubt, well used to being asked about famous family members. She grew up as the daughter of Arthur Miller, the legendary US playwright, and the brilliant photographer Inge Morath. In 2017 she directed a documentary about her dad, called Arthur Miller: Writer, for HBO that revealed a gift for balancing recollection with dispassionate analysis.
Come to think of it, her current trip to New York counts as a personal homecoming. She is, on her father’s side, one of three successive generations born in the city.
“I really grew up in the countryside,” she clarifies. “I was littler in the 1960s. In the 1970s I remember the Chelsea Hotel a little bit, which is where we hung out.”
[ Martin Scorsese: ‘One has to take chances. At this age, what else can I do?’Opens in new window ]
Golly. The storied Manhattan establishment that played home to Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, Janis Joplin and the rest of that crew.
“It was a crazy place. But I’m kind of jealous of my friends who really grew up in New York and got to really see it in the 1970s. Because I feel like I didn’t. So it’s a little bit exotic to me.”
A few years ago Miller told me that, as a kid, she thought she would end up as a nurse or a flight attendant. But the creative genes eventually showed through. She is a hard person to pin down. She had a decent career as an actor, playing in a stage production of The Cherry Orchard for Peter Brook and in films such as Mike Nichols’s Regarding Henry and Alan J Pakula’s Consenting Adults.
But it is as writer and film director that she found her niche. Angela, a family drama, won strong reviews in 1995. Personal Velocity, an anthology drama with Kyra Sedgwick and Parker Posey, took the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival in 2002. Acclaimed pictures such as Maggie’s Plan and She Came to Me followed.
The mere mention of a five-hour documentary on Scorsese, structured around a wide-ranging interview, has sent cineastes into a frenzy. There is, after all, no better man for talking about the art of film. But Mr Scorsese turns out to be even better than expected. Miller has corralled all the important players – Robert De Niro, Brian De Palma, Jodie Foster, Steven Spielberg – and cut them into a free-flowing montage that, at times, emulates the rock’n’roll energy of the film’s subject.
The cracking end of the first part, echoing a famous scene in Mean Streets, make tremendous use of The Rolling Stones’ Jumpin’ Jack Flash.
“I wasn’t consciously doing that,” she says of the comparison with Scorsese’s style. “Once you have certain music it infects the rhythms of things. And then it was so important to me that we get the Stones. And I’m so grateful that we were able to have that music in the film.”
Licensing such tracks can be very expensive.
“Well, yes, but they made it possible for us to have them, which we couldn’t have done otherwise. I think that, overall, I would say that Marty’s essence was absorbed by the film in some unconscious way.
“Part of this was me learning how to create episodes that were almost like little films of their own. They end on an up note – so you want to go to the next one.”
I imagine she already knew Scorsese well. Daniel Day-Lewis first acted for him as far back as The Age of Innocence, in 1993. He received an Oscar nomination for the director’s epic Gangs of New York, a decade later. And Scorsese surely doesn’t need much encouragement to start talking.
“I wouldn’t say we had a social relationship,” Miller says. “But we did have a moment when Daniel made Gangs of New York where I was a little bit more present. And I was about to make Personal Velocity, which had a lot of voiceover in it. I asked his advice.
“And he gave me films to watch with voiceover in them. He gives film-makers wonderful advice. The next couple of films he gave me notes. That was our relationship.”
The opening episodes, going among Scorsese’s boyhood friends from lower Manhattan, are particularly charming. One remarkable moment sees Miller discovering on camera that Salvatore Uricola, the character who largely inspired Johnny Boy, Robert De Niro’s character in Mean Streets, is still aloft and willing to speak.
“I was talking to his brother, Robert Uricola, and I never thought that we could meet Salvatore. I never thought it,” she says. “I was given to believe that he was just unreachable. I said: ‘I’m so sorry we can’t talk to your brother.’ And then he just called him and it was great. Neither he nor I were prepared at all. So what do I do? Ha ha! It was really like one of those moments where the film gods were with us that day.”
Salvatore, now an older gentleman, proves every bit as charismatic as fans of Mean Streets might have hoped.
Mr Scorsese has space to cover all aspects of the career. We see the young man, briefly a trainee for the priesthood, retreat into air-conditioned cinemas as his asthma takes hold.
We see him enter another world when he travels a few short blocks to study film at New York University. We hear a lot from the women in his life: ex-partners such as a delightful Isabella Rossellini, colleagues such as the editor Thelma Schoonmaker and the always articulate Foster.
This gets at an oddly persistent and misguided criticism. People still accuse Scorsese of being a man’s man. Yet few male directors of his generation have collaborated so frequently with women. Who else has directed so many to acting nominations at the Oscars (with wins for Ellen Burstyn and Cate Blanchett)?
“I think it has to do with the fact that, at a certain point, he became branded ‘the gangster director’,” Miller says. “Because he made these great gangster movies – one of which, by the way, contains one of the great cinematic performances by a woman of all time, which is in Casino.”
Miller moves on from that Sharon Stone performance to note others in The Age of Innocence, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and the recent Killers of the Flower Moon. We might also mention his indomitable late mother in Goodfellas and The King of Comedy. Catherine Scorsese, seen here in amusing archive footage, remains an enormous presence.
“His mother was a very powerful, dynamic, hilarious figure who he adored,” Miller says. “You just need to look at how many women he works with to see that he has immense respect and love for women. But, inevitably, there is that stamp of the great triumvirate – Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Casino. And then also The Irishman. So that became ‘who he is as a film-maker’. But he’s made so many films beyond that.”
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In the later episodes we get the sense that, despite being the most respected US director of his generation, Scorsese still feels he doesn’t quite fit in among the Hollywood elite. Too awkward. Too angular. Too New York. Nicholas Pileggi, writer of Goodfellas, recalls a senior member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences urging him to mind his language at the Oscars. They really thought these New York interlopers were the wise guys they depicted on screen. Does Scorsese still feel like an outsider?
“Oh, definitely,” Miller says, remembering his asthma. “There is a sense of that baked in from the beginning. He couldn’t go outside and play, and he was looking down through the window at the street. He had friends, of course. But he’s also a little bit isolated by his own talent, his own interests, which are so different from the kids around him. Yet he’s very drawn to them. But there’s a sort of separateness in each phase of his life.”
She remembers a quote from Paul Schrader, writer of Taxi Driver, about the disturbed protagonist of that film.
“Travis Bickle looks in through a window, where Betsy is, ‘like a wolf watching campfires in the distance’ – that lonesome isolation,” she says. “Marty talked about really having identified with that. I thought that was interesting.”
Mr Scorsese premiered to deserved hollers in New York. Now the nights are drawing in. There is rain on the wind. Is this a time to retreat triumphantly to Wicklow?
“We’re both very busy trying to get these things out, but it’ll be great to get back,” she says.
They have raised two children since setting up home in Annamoe: Ronan, the film-maker, and Cashel Day-Lewis, a musician. I imagine some Irishness must have rubbed off on them.
“Definitely. They have deep connections to it,” Miller says. “Cashel, the youngest, just spent a year playing trad fiddle in Ireland and also bartending at the Cobblestone pub. So he is very steeped in Irish culture.”
The Cobblestone in Smithfield, Dublin 7?
“Yeah!”
Now there’s an experience he wouldn’t have got growing up in southern California.
“We’ll be back. I don’t know exactly when, but, definitely, soon, soon, soon.”
Mr Scorsese streams on Apple TV+ from Friday, October 17th
