Martin Scorsese Unpacks His Darkest Chapters in New Documentary

One of the most surprising realities of Martin Scorsese’s success is just how often he was on the brink of losing it. The 82-year-old auteur’s setbacks occupy as much real estate as his victories do in Mr. Scorsese, a five-part docuseries covering his film career, now streaming on Apple TV.

Directed by Rebecca Miller, daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and wife of Daniel Day-Lewis (who starred in Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and Gangs of New York), Mr. Scorsese follows the director from his rough-and-tumble adolescence in New York’s Little Italy neighborhood to his making of the 10-time Oscar-nominated Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)—touching on every set in between. Scorsese discusses his oeuvre in great detail—with assists from family, friends, and former collaborators such as Day-Lewis, Francesca Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mick Jagger, Steven Spielberg, Jodie Foster, and Cate Blanchett, as well as Casino’s Sharon Stone and The Wolf of Wall Street’s Margot Robbie, both of whom speak candidly about working on their respective male-dominated Scorsese projects.

After exploring the Mob violence he grew up near on film, Scorsese was often reduced to his gangster dramas (Mean Streets, Goodfellas), but nearly as much of the filmmaker’s work is rooted in his Catholic religion (The Last Temptation of Christ, Silence). Even Scorsese’s otherwise secular titles ponder questions like, “Who are we? What are we, I should say, as human beings?” as he says in the series’ opening. “Are we intrinsically good or evil?… This is the struggle. And I struggle with it all the time.”

That dichotomy is reflected in some of Scorsese’s darker chapters, which range from a drug addiction during the 1970s to four divorces before his marriage to his current wife, Helen Morris, in 1999. “The problem is that you enjoy the sin!” Scorsese says in the series. “That’s the problem I’ve always had! I enjoy it. When I was bad, I enjoyed a lot of it.” Ahead, some of the most revealing moments from Mr. Scorsese.

Scorsese credits his childhood asthma with facilitating his love of cinema.

“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster,” Ray Liotta’s character memorably declares at the end of Goodfellas’ opening scene. But Scorsese himself actually pursued the priesthood before his love of movies took root. He grew up first in Corona, Queens, then in New York City’s Lower East Side after witnessing an altercation between his father, Charles, a Garment District worker, and their landlord. “There was an axe involved. I remember seeing an axe,” Scorsese says in the doc, without elaborating much further. “Violence was imminent all the time.”

When not braving the mean streets or finding refuge in the Catholic Church, an asthmatic Scorsese often visited air-conditioned movie theaters and engaged in people-watching from his apartment window. In the series, Scorsese even credits that particular vantage point with instilling his love of high-angle shots in movies.“Marty’s life depended upon going to movies,” says Goodfellas and Casino screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi. “That’s where he could breathe.” Or as Spike Lee more colorfully puts it: “Thank God for asthma!”

Scorsese fantasized about destroying the rough cut of Taxi Driver after it received an X rating.

After helming the Roger Corman–produced exploitation film Boxcar Bertha (1972), his first De Niro gangster epic, Mean Streets (1973), and Ellen Burstyn’s Oscar-winning turn in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), Scorsese had his major industry breakthrough with Taxi Driver in 1976—which had a fraught journey to the screen.

The studio took issue with the violence, coarse language, and “seedy” subject matter involving an increasingly isolated cabbie and the child prostitute he befriends (a then 12-year-old Foster). When the MPAA slapped Taxi Driver with an X rating, Columbia Pictures told Scorsese to edit it down to achieve an R rating—or it would. “That’s when I lost it,” Scorsese says in the documentary. Scorsese’s fellow filmmaker friends Spielberg (whom Scorsese called for advice at the time) and Brian De Palma (who recalls Scorsese “going crazy”) set up Scorsese’s claim that while he never bought a gun, he was “gonna get one” to confront executives. In his fantasy, “I would go in, find out where the rough cut is, and break the windows and take it away,” he says. “They’re gonna destroy the film anyway, you know? So let me destroy it.” (A similar storyline plays out with a fictional Olivia Wilde production in Seth Rogen’s The Studio, on which Scorsese also had a cameo.) Scorsese ultimately desaturated some of the blood in his goriest scenes to appease the suits and earn that elusive R rating.

Scorsese was prone to angry outbursts on set and at home.

Years later, during the filming of Gangs of New York (2002), a disagreement arose between Scorsese and now disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein—a conflict that escalated until a desk eventually flew out a window. “He could demolish a room,” Isabella Rossellini, Scorsese’s third wife, whom he married in 1979, recalls in the doc. She remembers mornings when he would wake up angry, cursing underneath his breath. “[It] gave him that stamina” to get through shoots, she says. Scorsese also credits therapy with saving his life: “If it wasn’t for the doctor—five days a week, phone calls on the weekend, strong, steady work on straightening my head out—I’d be dead.” He adds that he’s learned about “pulling back and quieting the anger…. The anger is still gonna be there, but keep the shouting down in the back of your head.”

A near-fatal overdose inspired Scorsese to make Raging Bull.

Explosive anger wasn’t the only demon plaguing Scorsese during his early professional chapters. He admits in the documentary that “there was some drugs going on” during production of New York, New York (1977)—an homage to Hollywood’s Golden Age movie musicals that starred De Niro and Liza Minnelli, with music from Broadway legends John Kander and Fred Ebb. As Taxi Driver and Raging Bull screenwriter Paul Schrader puts it in the series, “These were the cocaine years, [and] New York, New York was a very coke-y set.”

The film’s cocaine-fueled improv, supersized budget, and ultimate box office failure led Scorsese to spiral. “We were trying to find something, find the muse again, I guess. The joke is always, ‘It makes me work better,’” the director says of the drug in the doc. “Meantime, you’re dead!” That was almost true in 1978, when Scorsese collapsed—landing himself in the hospital with a near-fatal overdose. “A very, very major part of me wanted to [die],” he says of this bleak period. “I didn’t know how to do the work anymore. I didn’t know how to create anymore.”

When De Niro visited Scorsese in the hospital, he pitched what would become Raging Bull, the story of embattled boxer Jake LaMotta. “I couldn’t understand Bob’s obsession with it, until, finally, I went through that rough period of my own,” Scorsese recalled to Vanity Fair in 2010. “I came out the other side and woke up one day alive…still breathing.” Said De Niro in the same story, “Mostly I told him to do it or not do it, that we had to get real. That was the ‘Come to Jesus’ moment.” If Scorsese had rejected this new appeal, “I’d have found some other way to get him to do it,” De Niro cracked. After Scorsese’s recovery, the longtime friends sipped piña coladas in Hawaiian shirts on the Caribbean island of St. Maarten, seen in the photo below.

Scorsese has been married five times—and he sometimes struggled to show up as a parent for his older children.

These days, Scorsese is known as the jovial father who makes viral TikToks with his 25-year-old daughter, Francesca, whose mother is film producer Helen Morris. But his eldest two daughters—Cathy Scorsese (her mother is Scorsese’s first wife, Laraine Marie Brennan) and Domenica Cameron-Scorsese (her mother is second wife Julia Cameron)—openly share that their dad was not the most present parent during their respective childhoods. In fact, Cameron-Scorsese says she found “a sense of safety” with her father while performing a small role in his 1993 film, The Age of Innocence. “It was funny to find it there,” she admits, also comparing her father to a lighthouse. “If he’s working on the film, it’s right there, he’s on the film. And then if you’re not in the sphere of that light…you can feel its absence.”

All three of Scorsese’s children speak of their father warmly, and the director has now been married to Morris for nearly three decades. In the series, Scorsese says he had panic attacks while making Shutter Island (2010) because, as he vaguely puts it, “people are sick.” The documentary then flashes to a photo of Scorsese and his wife. As Francesca explains, her mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s even before she met Scorsese. That is all that is said on the subject. “There’s a lot invested in my personal life at home,” Scorsese told GQ in 2023. “And there are only a few people who understand that and are gracious enough to be part of it. And so where we used to have dinner parties and things, that’s all becoming much, much less. And so I’m pretty much alone. And invariably if I’m meeting with people, it’s business.”

Films like The King of Comedy and The Last Temptation of Christ sparked major backlash.

Younger audience members may be surprised by the stunning real-world impact of some Scorsese films. The violent, volatile antiheroes at the center of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy (1982) were controversial, as was the fact that a then 12-year-old Foster was cast in the role of a child prostitute. Things hit a boiling point when John Hinckley Jr., motivated by his obsession with Foster and hoping to emulate De Niro’s Travis Bickle, attempted to assassinate US president Ronald Reagan in 1981. The Academy Awards were postponed by a day following the shooting, and Rossellini recalls that Scorsese wore a bulletproof vest to the Oscars. “Did I like what happened? No. Did we feel that we were right in making that film? Yes,” Scorsese told The Guardian last year. “Is violence ultimately the deciding factor in what makes a man a man? I don’t think so.” In the docuseries, Scorsese says showing violent acts onscreen is valuable “if it’s truthful violence,” because all humans are capable of such actions if pushed.

There was similar outrage surrounding The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Before having even seen the movie, members of the religious right called for the film to be banned because of a dream sequence in which Willem Dafoe’s Jesus has sex with Mary Magdalene (Barbara Hershey). Screenings were accompanied by protests; the film was, in fact, banned in different countries.

But decades later, even Scorsese’s most divisive work has earned a second life—if King of Comedy and Taxi Driver had a love child, it would be Todd Phillips’s Joker. That’s fitting for a filmmaker who himself rose from the ashes. While shooting Raging Bull, Scorsese met “a famous Native American medicine man,” who told him that he’d been revived by the production. “You died,” the director recalls him saying in the series, “in that hospital, before your friend came and said, ‘Come out, let’s make this movie.’ You died, but now you’re alive again.” As a far mellower Scorsese now believes: “People die in life, [and] they come back.”