Martin Scorsese penned an emotional tribute to Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Reiner this Christmas, remembering his old friends with “profound sadness” and great joy.
In a guest piece for the New York Times, Scorsese recalled his first time meeting Reiner in Los Angeles of the 1970s. The filmmaker shared that they had an overlapping circle of friends and often ran into each other at comedy salons at those friends’ houses.
“Right away, I loved hanging out with Rob. We had a natural affinity for each other,” Scorsese wrote. “He was hilarious and sometimes bitingly funny, but he was never the kind of guy who would take over the room. He had a beautiful sense of uninhibited freedom, fully enjoying the life of the moment, and he had a great barreling laugh.”
Scorsese named “Misery” and “This Is Spinal Tap” as his favorites among Reiner’s work, calling the latter “a kind of immaculate creation.” The director also recalled how Reiner’s work made him “immediately” think to cast him as Leonardo DiCaprio’s father in “The Wolf of Wall Street.”
“I was moved by the delicacy and openness of his performance when we shot it, moved once again as we brought the scene together in the edit and moved as I watched the finished picture,” Scorsese wrote. “Now, it breaks my heart to even think of the tenderness of Rob’s performance in this and other scenes.”
Scorsese mourned that he now has to think of Reiner and his wife in the past tense, noting that he prefers to imagine them alive and well, and that they’ll be reunited once more at a dinner party one day.
“What happened to Rob and Michele is an obscenity, an abyss in lived reality,” the director wrote. “The only thing that will help me to accept it is the passing of time.”
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