David Bianculli

Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster talk about how their improv sessions during rehearsals defined their characters and led to some of the movie's most indelible scenes.

The film's screenwriter, Paul Schrader, talks about how both the director and the actors elevated what was written on the pages of his script.

And Schrader, when asked by Miller, also talks very chillingly about how the pent-up, potentially violent loner of Taxi Driver is a much more familiar character today in real life.

One of Scorsese's friends and fellow directors, Steven Spielberg, offers some taxi driver's insights, too.

He tells how Scorsese avoided an X rating for that movie, which the film board threatened to impose because of its bloody climax, by adjusting the color of the blood on the finished prints from bright red to a much more muted brown.

Scorsese learned that lesson well.

Later, for his brutal boxing epic Raging Bull, he drained the color of blood completely, shooting the entire film in black and white.

Most of Scorsese's films are dissected with this same loving detail, by those who know him and his movies best.

The people interviewed include not only De Niro, Foster, Schrader, and Spielberg, but actors Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, Sharon Stone, Joe Pesci, Margot Robbie, and Cate Blanchett, directors Spike Lee and Brian De Palma, and rock stars Mick Jagger and Robbie Robertson.

Then there are his other creative collaborators, such as Thelma Schoonmaker, and his grown children, his wife and ex-wives, and childhood friends.

All of them have some informative and wild stories to tell.

Early on, Scorsese sits down with some guys from the old neighborhood, including De Niro, to talk about old times.

But even while growing up in that tough neighborhood, young Marty Scorsese found solace in the local movie theater and began drawing his own make-believe stories.

Essentially, they were comic strip storyboards for the movies in his mind.

Violent period epics with titles like The Eternal City, complete with gladiators and bloody battles, and with credits that read, even at age 11, directed and produced by Martin Scorsese.

I'm still doing it.

It doesn't quite work all the time.

The documentary Mr. Scorsese spends its first installment on his early days.

His childhood, making student films at NYU, being on the movie camera crew at Woodstock, and eventually getting his break with low-budget movie producer Roger Corman to direct a Bonnie and Clyde knockoff called Boxcar Bertha.

When Scorsese showed it to his filmmaking friends, they were unimpressed.