It Was All Martin Scorsese–Everything Weekend at the New York Film Festival

If the New York Film Festival was going to give a significant chunk of the weekend’s slate over to one living filmmaker, there are few choices more appropriate than Martin Scorsese. On Saturday, the festival held the premiere of Mr. Scorsese, a five-part, five-hour documentary about the quintessential New York director by his fellow filmmaker Rebecca Miller. There was one 30-minute intermission; apart from that, nobody moved.

But even that wasn’t enough Marty. On Sunday evening, the festival convened a panel—another 90 minutes of uncut Scorsese content, with Miller joined onstage by director Ari Aster, actor Michael Imperioli, and longtime Scorsese producer Margaret Bodde. And afterward, Rolex threw a dinner.

The scene: 8:30 on Sunday night, the lucky diners who snagged a res at Gotham’s finest subterranean prepped-out chophouse that is The Polo Bar were tucking into popovers, basking in the room’s great glow. Then everyone hushed as necks craned on Scorsese’s arrival. He was flanked by his daughter Francesca and other family members, as he walked to a few roped-off tables in the back, while the Ralph Lauren–clad servers pulled back a chair. He plopped next to Robert De Niro. “Little” Steven Van Zandt—guitarist for the E Street Band, Silvio on The Sopranos, Jerry Vale in The Irishman—sat across from him. Miller sat to his right. Peter Dinklage sat catty corner, screenwriter Jay Cocks one over. Wine was poured. Cue the pastrami. Everybody started talking. They were gonna be there for a while.

“Marty is so young,” Bodde, who runs the Scorsese-founded Film Foundation, said at the panel. “It’s like you were talking about him making The Wolf of Wall Street, he was in his late 70s or something. I always thought I would catch up as we aged. I was like, Oh, well, once he gets older, I’ll be able to keep up with him. I still can’t keep up with him. He is literally like energy.” (It was later pointed out that Scorsese was actually mostly in his late 60s while the film was developed and in production. But still!)

Kikka Domeneghetti, Francesca Scorsese, Martin Scorsese, Tony Frenzel, Domenica Frenzel, and Serafina Frenzel.Photograph by Landon Nordeman.

Miller concurred, adding that Scorsese, who is now in his 80s, happily sat for 20 hours of interviews. The doc had been in the making for years. During the panel, Miller recalled meeting Scorsese on the set of 2002’s Gangs of New York—at the time, her husband, the actor Daniel Day-Lewis, was returning after a three-year self-imposed exile from movies (he went to Italy to apprentice as a cobbler) to play Bill the Butcher. They were at Rome’s Cinecittà about to film the fight sequence between the Dead Rabbits and the other gangs. She wanted to ask about the voiceover technique she was going to work into her next film, Personal Velocity. She understood the stakes.

“I was watching this production, which the snack budget was about the budget of my whole film,” she recalled.

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 same speed as 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.’”

His next film, of course, was Mean Streets. Case closed—although the critics still piled on whenever they got the chance, panning films now considered classics. This was especially meaningful to Aster, who’s still in awe that Scorsese is a fan of the movies he makes. Not everyone is.

“As somebody who has made a couple films that were, um, divisive”—here the audience chuckled—“it is helpful to remember, Oh, right, The King of Comedy wasn’t…received well? Like, what? The Age of Innocence was…disappointing, was it? And even New York, New York to me is such a fucking exciting, playful, experimental, beautiful film. So much more valuable than some perfect little trinket.”

“So it’s just useful to remember that some of these films, they’ve now been canonized and they’re now undeniable,” Aster said later. “Where the fuck were the critics then?”

Back at dinner, there was plenty of table-hopping, as Aster started off the evening chatting with Jodie Foster at one table, before ending up sitting next to Scorsese. At one point, Miller ducked out from her table to check out the scene at Foster’s, as some of the doc’s producers, including Chris Donnelly and Cindy Tolan, sat at the other end. Various board members and programming chairs of the New York Film Festival talked about what movies they still wanted to see—but pointedly, they did not reveal what the secret screening Monday night might entail. During the evening, Scorsese talked to Rolex execs in town from Geneva—the watchmaker is a major underwriter of Film Foundation, which coincidentally supported the restoration of all but one of the films in the NYFF’s Revivals category.

It got late. It was Sunday night. But no one wanted to go anywhere—including Marty, literally like energy, still in the middle of his table strewn with half-full wine glasses and coffee mugs, as the evening stretched well past 11:30, everybody talking, nobody moving. Even after five hours of a documentary and an hour-plus of panelling, the conversation went on and on.

This story has been updated.