“Mr. Scorsese”: Rebecca Miller and Damon Cardassis on Capturing the Man Behind the Myth
When Rebecca Miller and Damon Cardassis first began tossing around ideas for their next project, they didn’t expect to land on one of cinema’s greatest living legends. But when the two longtime collaborators found themselves talking about who could anchor a documentary worth making, the answer came almost instantly.
“We were trying to figure out who would be a really fantastic subject,” Miller recalls. “And immediately we came up with Marty.”
The Marty in question, of course, is Martin Scorsese, filmmaker, film historian, preservationist, and arguably the last of the great American auteurs still pushing boundaries well into his eighties. Their Apple TV documentary series Mr. Scorsese peels back layers of the iconography to reveal something more intimate: a portrait of a man still in conversation with his own art.
The project began, improbably, during the pandemic.
“We started making it in 2020,” Cardassis explains. “We were financing it independently at the beginning.”
The global lockdown forced them to reimagine how to approach such a monumental subject. Rather than a grand, globe-trotting retrospective, Miller and Cardassis leaned into intimacy, a project that could exist in conversation, rather than spectacle.
“It became about how to tell the story through the man himself,” Miller says. “The idea was to strip away everything that’s been said about Scorsese and get to the voice of Scorsese himself.”
Over the decades, Scorsese has been interviewed countless times. But Miller saw an opportunity to ask different questions and to give the filmmaker space to reflect.
“He’s such a great storyteller that you just want to get out of his way,” Miller says. “My job was to listen and shape that into something cinematic.”
Cardassis adds that Scorsese’s memory and passion are undimmed. “He remembers everything, not just his own films, but the texture of film history itself,” he says. “He can jump from Fellini to the Beatles to his father’s barber shop in one breath. You realize how his whole life is one long piece of cinema.”
For both filmmakers, working with Scorsese wasn’t just about chronicling a career, it was about preserving a living, breathing dialogue with cinema.
“What’s beautiful about Marty is that he’s still searching,” Miller says. “Even when he talks about his early films, there’s this humility. He’s looking back with curiosity, not nostalgia.”
That energy, Miller believes, is what gives Mr. Scorsese its pulse. The series moves through time and memory with the rhythm of a conversation, fragments of film history colliding with personal confession.
“We wanted it to feel like being in the room with him,” she explains. “Not just the clips and the accolades, but the thought process, the doubt, the humor, the love of storytelling.”
