A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
When Steven Spielberg says this about another film director, you know he's describing a visionary.
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STEVEN SPIELBERG: He is a cornerstone of this entire art form. There's been nobody like him. There never will be anybody like him again.
MARTÍNEZ: Spielberg is talking about Martin Scorsese, who has demonstrated that artistry in films such as "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull," "Goodfellas" and "Gangs Of New York" - intense films, violent films.
REBECCA MILLER: Violence was something he genuinely experienced in his life. And it's particularly powerful in his films because it's coming from such a real place.
MARTÍNEZ: That is Rebecca Miller. She's directed a new documentary series called "Mr. Scorsese" that explores how his vision came into focus. In one scene, Miller was able to get Scorsese together with some of the friends he grew up with in the Little Italy section in New York.
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MARTIN SCORSESE: That was when Mulberry Street was still...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: The dumping ground.
SCORSESE: ...The place where they dumped the bodies.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Yeah.
SCORSESE: They called it Murder Mile.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Yeah, yeah.
SCORSESE: Used to be called. And the Bowery was called Devil's Mile. So we were in between Murder Mile and Devil's Mile.
MARTÍNEZ: His parents protected him as best they could, but the mob was everywhere, as Scorsese's mother once explained.
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CATHERINE SCORSESE: They saw plenty. And they didn't say anything because we used to tell them, if you see something, you don't say anything.
MARTÍNEZ: Scorsese's upbringing on the mean streets of New York set him apart in later years as he joined the fraternity of America's hottest young filmmakers in the 1970s. He even moved to LA for a while, but never quite felt like he was a part of the Hollywood scene. That isolation even shows up in one of his most polarizing characters.
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ROBERT DE NIRO: (As Travis Bickle) All the animals come out at night.
MARTÍNEZ: In "Taxi Driver," Robert De Niro plays Travis Bickle. And he drives around New York isolated from the people around him and sneering at their moral decay.
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DE NIRO: (As Travis Bickle) Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.
MARTÍNEZ: Screenwriter Paul Schrader says in the documentary that Scorsese felt a kinship with the character.
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PAUL SCHRADER: In my original script of "Taxi Driver," there's a line that Travis Bickle watches the campaign headquarters like a wolf watching campfires in the distance. And I think that was an image that struck Marty. You know, he was always one of those kids at the edge of the playground. He's short. He's asthmatic. That idea of being a wolf and seeing the fires of civilization and not being able to be fully accepted.
MARTÍNEZ: Scorsese himself acknowledges what he shares with the character.
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SCORSESE: He has the resentment and the anger, the self-loathing, the loneliness. No way of really connecting with people. Even though I may have been very, you know, social, it was very difficult to connect other ways. You're kind of an outsider.
MARTÍNEZ: Director Rebecca Miller noticed another trend in Scorsese's work, what triggers a lot of violence in his films, and that's humiliation.
MILLER: I think there's something perhaps universally true in particular about male characters, or perhaps men, that humiliation is something which sometimes leads to violence. And I think that Marty understands that deeply and reflects it in his work.
MARTÍNEZ: Like Travis Bickle when a woman he took on a date ridiculed him and then left. Or in "The King Of Comedy," yet another collaboration with Robert De Niro. In that one, he plays struggling comedian Rupert Pupkin, who is slighted by a late-night TV host.
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JERRY LEWIS: (As Jerry Langford) Did anyone ever tell you you're a moron?
MARTÍNEZ: Pupkin then kidnaps him at gunpoint.
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DE NIRO: (As Rupert Pupkin) I'm glad what you did to me today, you know that? Because now I know I can't rely on anybody, not you...
MARTÍNEZ: As violence loomed over Martin Scorsese's childhood, he found refuge in the church. He even studied to become a priest, but he was kicked out of seminary due to bad behavior.
MILLER: I was really curious about his Catholicism and how it jibed with his apparent fascination with violence. I had an instinct that his spiritual quest was somehow central to his films.
MARTÍNEZ: Take this line from the end of "Shutter Island," one of the six feature films he's made with Leonardo DiCaprio.
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LEONARDO DICAPRIO: (As Andrew Laeddis) Which would be worse, to live as a monster or to die as a good man?
MILLER: He's asking these essential questions about the nature of human beings, of whether they are essentially good or evil. Or how does good and evil fight it out in a human soul? And that's talking about violence on the highest level, you know? It's not kind of reducing everything down to violence. It's trying to figure out, like, what are we as human beings? What a mysterious thing we are.
MARTÍNEZ: In the documentary, Scorsese considers his own struggles with making the right choices, like how he focused more on his filmmaking than on his own wives and children at times and how some of the real-life figures he based his movies on wouldn't always appreciate how ugly they'd appear on that screen.
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SCORSESE: It sometimes hurts people. One begins to realize, well, you know, artistry involves cruelty. You have to be cruel enough to be an artist.
MARTÍNEZ: Now, to be fair, not all of Scorsese's films fit the intense, violent description I gave earlier. His filmography is actually quite diverse, from the road trip of "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" to the dark humor of "After Hours," to the sweeping Howard Hughes biopic "The Aviator." Again, here's Rebecca Miller.
MILLER: One of the things that happened to me while I was doing this project is the depth and breadth of what he's accomplished really landed with me in a new way in terms of the level of craft and the level of commitment and sheer humanity that was poured into these films. I was kind of overwhelmed by it.
MARTÍNEZ: Miller is the director of the documentary series "Mr. Scorsese." It's streaming now on Apple TV+. And just a note, Apple is a financial supporter of NPR.
(SOUNDBITE OF DEREK AND THE DOMINOS SONG, "LAYLA") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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