The story of one of cinema's giants explored in new doco Mr Scorsese

Back in 1995, Martin Scorsese made a film called A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies. It was one of dozens of films made around the world to celebrate a hundred years since the invention of motion pictures – you may recall that Sam Neill made the New Zealand entry, Cinema of Unease – and it was one of the most staggering works of cinema scholarship that I’d ever seen.

Coming in at nearly four hours, Scorsese’s film traced the history of American film with often startling observations and remarkable illustrations. He believed that American film was almost entirely a director’s medium and that was his focus: the director as storyteller, the director as illusionist, the director as smuggler and the director as iconoclast.

It was riveting and helped change the way I looked at movies. At the time he made it, he was in one of those doldrums periods that have punctuated his career. The Age of Innocence had been a box office flop, and it looked as if his future might well be talking about other people’s films rather than making them himself. But shortly afterwards, he released Casino and – boom – he was off to the races again.

Now we have a five-part documentary series about Mr. Scorsese’s career – coincidentally called Mr. Scorsese – and we can only hope that it will encourage people to seek out and watch his catalogue of films as he encouraged me to watch others back in 1995.

Directed by Rebecca Miller – Arthur Miller’s daughter and a gifted filmmaker in her own right – Mr. Scorsese is structured like a television series because that’s what it is. The first four episodes end on something of a cliffhanger and the last four all start with a recap of what you’ve seen before. It’s not necessary to binge them to get the full effect but, trust me, you will want to.

The first episode is the artist as a young man – the struggles to establish himself and his voice. The second sees him meeting Robert De Niro and how that partnership flourished while Scorsese’s personal demons took greater control of him.

He talks about his contemporaries – DePalma, Spielberg, Coppola – and how he never really felt like he belonged in that company. But as the episodes go on, and Scorsese’s unsentimental assessment of his own work becomes clear, you can’t imagine him ever doing what Lucas and Coppola have done to theirs – endlessly tinkering with edits and effects until there’s almost nothing of the original left.

Miller’s film isn’t full of talking heads but the ones she’s got are the ones you want. Childhood friends from the Village in New York recall the mean streets of Scorsese’s youth and how it inspired his earliest work.

Of his collaborators, we get the ones who were closest to him. De Niro tearing up as he recalls visiting Scorsese in hospital after the overdose that nearly killed him and basically bullying him to work on Raging Bull. DiCaprio describing how their work together gave him a palette to work on that he couldn’t have conceived of before Gangs of New York in 2002. And the famously reclusive Daniel Day-Lewis, looking about as relaxed as you can get, possibly because the interviewer, Rebecca Miller, is his wife.

Something that Mr. Scorsese doesn’t do is definitively settle the question of how we should be pronouncing his name. Everyone seems to have their own variation but it’s interesting that nobody appears to call him Marty. Even to Daniel Day-Lewis, he’s “Martin”.

Back in 2006, I read an article from the set of The Departed – the Boston crime film that was a remake of the Hong Kong hit Infernal Affairs – that said that Scorsese was very unwell, that he required an oxygen mask, and that, at the age of 63, this might be the last film that he makes. Well, the Oscar for Best Director for that film – finally – gave him something of a second wind and he’s made six epic features and eight documentaries since then with reportedly another seven films in development.

The final episode contains some moving personal revelations and Miller’s careful build up to them is commendable. You won’t see him and his later career in quite the same way again. Mr. Scorsese humanises the man as well as telling the story of an artist. At the end, it draws an elegant line from the Catholic altar boy in 1950s New York and the self-destructive and rebellious young man to the elder statesman of today, using one of my very favourite films of his, the 2016 film Silence, as the guide.