But Scorsese happily provided her a list of films to watch to get the voiceover to click—“Of course if you ask him that question, you’re going to get a long answer.”
They stayed in touch, gave notes on each other’s films, and saw each other socially. Years later, Miller was chatting with her producing partner Damon Cardasis about making another documentary. Cardasis asked, “Who would be your favorite person?”
“The first person that popped in my head was Martin Scorsese,” Miller said. “And I think the reason was, it’s such a rich subject. I was really interested in his Catholicism and his fascination with violence, how those two things work together.”
They got together right before the pandemic, and when lockdown hit, they carried forward at Miller’s country house.
“We, in a weird way, were lucky that he was so bored and so stuck because he traveled all the way upstate,” she said. “We did it on the porch.”
Five years later, Mr. Scorsese is here in all its hours-long glory. The film rips, zipping ahead with the speed of one of its subject’s more frenzied flicks, dispatching quickly with hundreds of talking heads. It’s so expansive it seems definitive. One Apple exec compared it to The Last Dance, the documentary about Michael Jordan: a similarly focused, leave-no-stone-unturned look at an unquestionable GOAT.
But like The Last Dance, the doc shows its subject’s setbacks. As the panelists reminded the gathered faithful: This was not inevitable.
“So Marty made Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, and then he got this deal to do this Roger Corman-produced movie called Boxcar Bertha,” said Imperioli, who had a very early film role in Goodfellas as Spider, a lackey who meets a violent fate. “Cassavettes watched the movie and said to Marty, ‘You just wasted a year of your life on a piece of shit.’ This was his big thing in Hollywood, right? His second film. And he said, ‘You shouldn’t be doing stuff like this.’”
