Inside the ‘Saint/Sinner’: Scorsese Reveals Near-Fatal Drug Overdose That Led to Raging Bull

A new, revelatory five-part documentary series, Mr Scorsese, offers an intimate look at the life and work of legendary director Martin Scorsese, covering everything from a near-fatal drug overdose in the late 1970s to the enduring religious vision that shapes his cinematic universe.

The series, directed by Rebecca Miller, shows Scorsese, now 82, speaking with disarming frankness about his life’s defining moments, many of which are more fraught than his current status as one of the world’s greatest living filmmakers suggests.

De Niro’s Intervention: “What the Hell Do You Want to Die Like This?”

In one of the documentary’s most revealing segments, Scorsese recounts his near-death experience in the late 1970s after partying through Hollywood: his body, ravaged by drugs, landed him in a hospital with internal bleeding.

“I was dying,” he states. It was at his bedside that friend and long-time collaborator Robert De Niro issued a challenge that fundamentally changed his trajectory. Scorsese recalls De Niro asking him, “‘What the hell do you want to do? Do you want to die like this?'”

This stark intervention was the catalyst for the acclaimed 1980 masterpiece, Raging Bull. The segment concludes with a heartwarming, never-before-seen photo of Scorsese and De Niro in Hawaiian shirts and goofy hats on the Caribbean island of St. Maarten, where they went to work on the screenplay with Paul Schrader.

The Moral Compass: “You Enjoy the Sin”
The documentary establishes a clear throughline connecting Scorsese’s Catholic upbringing in New York’s Little Italy—which included a brief period of study for the priesthood—to his obsession with moral choices on screen.

As Isabella Rossellini, the third of Scorsese’s five wives, puts it, “Marty is a saint/sinner,” noting his endless quest to ask big questions about good and evil, even while admitting to personal failings.

Scorsese himself embraces this religious terminology, describing his drug-fueled years by saying, “The problem is, you enjoy the sin,” and later calling the gift of filmmaking a “religious connection,” a “sacred thing.” This internal vision has underpinned the kinetic, virtuosic style of his landmark films, from Taxi Driver (1976) and Goodfellas (1990) to Killers of the Flower Moon (2023).

From ‘Joe The Bug’ to Box-Office Flops
Miller’s series, which features archival access and interviews with collaborators like De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, and screenwriter Paul Schrader, also digs into the lesser-known struggles of his career.

Mr Scorsese features surprising details from his childhood, including the inspiration for Robert De Niro’s ‘Johnny Boy’ in Mean Streets: a childhood friend’s brother and his own uncle, Joe “The Bug” Scorsese. He attributes his famed “high-angle shots” to his asthmatic boyhood spent watching the street from an upper-floor window.

The documentary is a powerful reminder that his success was hard-won. After the commercial disaster of the now-celebrated The King of Comedy (1982), Scorsese faced a second career trough a decade later, with commercial flops like Kundun (1997) and Bringing Out the Dead (1999) leaving him “dead again.” It was DiCaprio’s influence that helped secure funding for Gangs of New York (2002), reversing the setback.

The series also touches on the controversies, including the intense public scrutiny and violence associated with Taxi Driver, which exploded into headlines after the 1981 John Hinckley shooting of Ronald Reagan. Scorsese, who wore a bullet-proof vest to the Oscars that year, confesses that the film taps into his own “anger, the loneliness, no way of really connecting with people”—a sense of being an outsider that continues to fuel his work.