M artin Scorsese is the most alive he’s been in his work in a long time, brimming with renewed passion for filmmaking and invigorated by the reception that has greeted his latest gangland magnum opus, The Irishman.

And what he wants to talk about is death.

Just to be clear, he’s not talking about the deaths in his movies or anyone else’s. “You just have to let go, especially at this vantage point of age,” he says one Saturday afternoon.

The 77-year-old director is stretched out in a comfortable chair in a living room of his Manhattan townhouse, a seat he rises from several times when a whimsical mood strikes him during a spirited conversation about mortality and its inevitability.

As he explains, Scorsese is talking about setting aside his expectations for The Irishman. But he also meant relinquishing physical possessions: “The point is to get rid of everything now,” he says, in his trademark mile-a-minute clip. “You’ve got to figure out who gets what or not.” And the last step in this process is to let go of existence itself, as we all must.

The best films of 2019 Show all 20 1 /20 The best films of 2019 The best films of 2019 20. Minding the Gap One of the year’s biggest cinematic curveballs occurs at the midway point of this stirring documentary. Billed as a film about small-town US skate culture, Bing Liu’s Minding the Gap grows into a haunting depiction of class and masculinity, and how once inseparable groups of friends tend to untangle and diverge as they come of age. Few of 2019’s films cast quite as long a shadow. Adam White Hulu The best films of 2019 19. The Farewell The Farewell rips your heart out of your chest. Then it hands it back to you, wrapped gently in cotton wool. Director Lulu Wang loosely adapts a chapter in her own life, as we follow a young woman (Awkwafina) travelling back to China to say goodbye to her terminally ill grandmother. Delving into all the intricacies of immigrant identity and family politics, it’s a comedy of warmth and bracing honesty. Clarisse Loughrey A24 The best films of 2019 18. Us An opportunity for Jordan Peele to cement his status as one of horror’s modern maestros, Us reels us in with old-fashioned thrills. Then it leaves us with the terrible dread of realising we’ve been looking into a mirror this whole time. Lupita Nyong'o delivers two of this year’s best performances in one film, both as our hero and as her sinister doppelgänger – one of an army of “Tethereds” that emerge from underground seeking vengeance. Clarisse Loughrey Universal Pictures The best films of 2019 17. Pain & Glory All of Pedro Almodovar’s films feel autobiographical in one way or another, but Pain & Glory couldn’t be more lived-in if he stepped out in front of the camera to introduce every scene. A lushly romantic ode to cinema, shared history and cruelly interrupted love, it features a career-best performance from Antonio Banderas – Zorro at his most tender and vulnerable. Adam White Sony Pictures The best films of 2019 16. Vox Lux Vox Lux is 2019’s most damning filmic portrait of American culture. We begin with a teenage girl (Raffey Cassidy), who survives a school shooting and ends up a pop star. As an adult, she’s played by a breezy, vicious Natalie Portman. Her strut is one part Sia, two parts Lady Gaga. It’s an ugly, despairing film that comes gift-wrapped in sequins, presenting art as the cavernous pit we throw our traumas into. Clarisse Loughrey Neon The best films of 2019 15. Under the Silver Lake A paranoid puzzle box of a mystery, Under the Silver Lake is far more interested in the directions down the rabbit hole than allowing star Andrew Garfield to crawl his way out of it. That’s also the most pleasurable aspect of David Robert Mitchell’s film, a sunny LA noir which is sinister, hilarious and (potentially ruinously) male. It’s probably 2019’s most polarising film, adored and reviled in equal measure, but undeniably a work of striking creative autonomy. Adam White Mubi The best films of 2019 14. High Life High Life has its silly sub-Barbarella moments (Juliette Binoche testing out the spaceship’s very own orgasmatron machine) and clearly wasn’t made on a Hollywood budget. Nonetheless, veteran French auteur Claire Denis’s first English language film is a typically provocative and subversive affair. Binoche plays Dr Dibs, a scientist on board a ship full of criminals and trying to harvest healthy foetuses. Geoffrey Macnab A24 The best films of 2019 13. Ad Astra Ad Astra is a space movie with an Oedipal undertow. Brad Pitt gives a fine, understated performance as the introspective astronaut trying to save the world and find his father at the same time. Writer-director James Gray throws in references to Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now. This is a slow-moving but beguiling film with an unexpected emotional kick. Geoffrey Macnab Fox The best films of 2019 12. Happy as Lazzaro A bee keeper’s daughter, Italian director Alice Rohrwacher is one of European cinema’s visionary young talents. Happy As Lazzaro, her best film yet, is a magical realist fable that combines hard-hitting social comment about the exploitation of rural workers with flights of astonishing lyricism. The film also has one of the best performances of the year from newcomer Adriano Tardiolo, an 18-year-old economics student who plays the holy innocent, Lazzaro, with an ingenuousness which rekindles memories of Peter Sellers in Being There. Geoffrey Macnab Simona Pampallona/Netflix The best films of 2019 11. Burning Based on a Haruki Murakami’s short story, Burning – from South Korean maestro Lee Chang-dong – is a meditation on dealing with isolation and the tricks being alone might play on your memory. Jong-su (Ah-in Yoo) is forced to play detective when Steven Yeun’s affluent bachelor rolls into town – an event that coincides with the disappearance of a schoolfriend. Burning is a searing drama whose central unanswered mystery unnerves long after the credits role. Jacob Stolworthy Thunderbird Releasing The best films of 2019 10. For Sama News coverage has hardly been short of harrowing, violent footage of the Syrian Civil War. But too often missing are the human moments inbetween the bombings and the bloodshed. In Waad Al-Kateab’s first person account of the uprising’s aftermath, her camera’s gaze never flinches from the horrors it sees – as she and her husband try to maintain a rebel hospital amid a reign of bombing from President al-Assad – but nor does it stop rolling while she falls in love, has a baby, and jokes around with her friends and neighbours. This is the story of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. It is an important, powerful, astonishing documentary. Alex Pollard Republic Film Distribution The best films of 2019 9. Can You Ever Forgive Me? It feels almost blasphemous to be glad of Julianne Moore stepping down from a role, but Lee Israel – the cantankerous, lonely literary forger who found herself the target of an FBI investigation in the Nineties – feels like a part Melissa McCarthy was born to play. Nimbly directed by Marielle Heller (who was shunned by the Oscars in the Best Director category), Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a sharp, funny and deeply compassionate examination of loneliness and self-destruction. Richard E Grant and Dolly Wells give wonderful supporting performances, too. Alex Pollard AP The best films of 2019 8. Booksmart As deeply indebted to the teen movie genre as it is formally and narratively rebellious, Booksmart grounds its traditional night-before-graduation plot (teenagers eager to crash a party) in touching character-driven drama. Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever, both instant stars, convey the ever-shifting dynamics and heightened dramas of adolescent best-friendship perfectly. Behind the camera, meanwhile, actor-turned-director Olivia Wilde demonstrates a staggering amount of emotional empathy and technical mastery for someone so green. Adam White Annapurna Pictures The best films of 2019 7. The Irishman Comparisons to Martin Scorsese’s previous films (Goodfellas, Casino) are unfounded considering The Irishman is unlike any other gangster film you’ll see. With his three-hour-30-minute-long opus, Scorsese places the harsh spotlight on mortality. Instead of tracking the rise of Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) from regular family man to seasoned hitman with glitzy panache, we see him shamefully confess his crimes as an elderly man ruminating on his past in a nursing home. The result is an unsettlingly moving character study unafraid to ask the big questions.​Jacob Stolworthy Netflix The best films of 2019 6. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood With his ninth feature, Quentin Tarantino took a breath and crafted an unhurried, oddly heartwarming fable, one that came with a career-best performance from Brad Pitt. Its release rolled around with the usual smattering of discourse-steering controversy but, for all the complaints about the director’s depiction of his film star subjects, including the scant usage of Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate, the fact remains that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is one of the filmmaker’s most accomplished films – a free’n’easy sun-soaked delve into Sixties Hollywood, whose much-discussed final 20 minutes provided topics of conversation all summer long. Jacob Stolworthy Andrew Cooper/Sony-Columbia Pictures via AP The best films of 2019 5. Eighth Grade For too many years the internet was exclusively evil in movies, something for tech boffins to hack, or used to steal Sandra Bullock’s identity. Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade felt so comparatively real because it felt like the real internet, which has been as toxic and terrifying as it has been helpful to a generation of young people. Elsie Fisher, as a 13-year-old girl chronicling her confidence and anxieties in a vlog, is an adorable delight here, in a film that is devastatingly, heartbreakingly and endearingly human. Adam White Rex The best films of 2019 4. The Favourite Yorgos Lanthimos’s delightful, subversive vision has shaken the cobwebs out of costume drama. Set in the 18th century, it follows a trio of women – two cousins, Sarah (Rachel Weisz) and Abigail (Emma Stone), and the ruling Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) – as they vie for power over each other and England. Desire, savagery, and manipulative vulnerability all become weapons in the hands of those who have no choice but to fight dirty. But, then, Colman’s childless, gout-ridden Queen Anne tenderly reveals her shattered soul – it’s an Academy Award-winning performance that brings a slice of tragedy to an otherwise sublime farce. Clarisse Loughrey AP The best films of 2019 3. If Beale Street Could Talk The marriage of disparate talents united to ensure If Beale Street Could Talk is worthy of mention alongside Barry Jenkins’ previous film, Moonlight – The Independent’s film of the decade. With his film, Jenkins takes the words of James Baldwin and translates them into visual poetry. From Nicholas Britell’s mesmerising score to Regina King’s towering supporting performance (that Oscar was well deserved), the result is a creative tour de force. Jacob Stolworthy Photos Annapurna Pictures The best films of 2019 2. Marriage Story Here is a love story about divorce. Noah Baumbach writes and directs this aching, empathetic depiction of a couple whose marriage has fallen apart. As ruthless divorce lawyers driving a wedge between two people already hanging by a thread, Ray Liotta and Laura Dern are magnificent, while Scarlett Johansson gives her best performance in years as a woman trying to do the right thing without knowing what that is. But the real star is Adam Driver, who – hulking as he is – makes himself seem small and fragile. For his rendition of Sondheim’s “Being Alive” alone, Marriage Story deserves all the awards coming its way. Alex Pollard Netflix The best films of 2019 1. Little Women Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel – the story of four Massachusetts sisters coming of age during the American Civil War – may be a period piece, but there is nothing staid or stuffy about it. The girls, played by Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Emma Watson and Eliza Scanlen, talk and clamber over one another, their hair messy, their dresses scorched, their ambitions unfettered. It is a lively, profound adaptation. 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“Often, death is sudden,” he continues. “If you’re given the grace to continue working, then you’d better figure out something that needs telling.”

He found that inspiration in The Irishman, his mammoth dramatisation of the life of Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), a mob enforcer who claimed to have killed Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino).

It was not an angst-free undertaking for Scorsese – his movies never are – as he struggled with the idea of making another film set in the world of organised crime and hesitated about pursuing the project with Netflix instead of a traditional studio.

But what compelled him to abide these uncertainties was a story that went well past the scope of Goodfellas or Casino, to the waning days of Sheeran’s life, when he is left alone to contemplate the morality of his deeds. In words that Scorsese knew would resonate beyond the framework of The Irishman he says, “It’s all about the final days. It’s the last act.”

He may occasionally talk like someone with nothing left to lose, when he is candidly holding forth on comic book movies, the treatment of women in his films or what he feels is his tenuous place in the current film industry.

But Scorsese remains deeply invested in his career, after more than half a century, and while The Irishman could easily provide a fitting coda, he has no intention of stopping here

Robert De Niro as Frank Sheeran in ‘The Irishman’ (Netflix)

What motivates him now, he says, is not fear of death but acceptance that it happens to everyone, an understanding that provides him with perspective.

“As they say in my movie, ‘It’s what it is,’” he says. “You’ve got to embrace it.”

Like the man himself, Scorsese’s home is a monument to filmmaking. Aside from the stately fireplace portrait of Gouverneur Morris, a Founding Father and ancestor of the director’s wife, Helen, the most prominent decorations surrounding him are oversized posters of beloved films by Jean Cocteau and Jean Renoir, including three for Grand Illusion in this room alone. Across the hallway is the dining room where he had edited portions of The Irishman, Silence and The Wolf of Wall Street.

Scorsese is perpetually reliving this history, telling tales of revelling in Citizen Kane when he watched it on a butchered TV broadcast years ago or being awestruck when John Cassavetes, a hero and mentor, was given what seemed like the princely budget of $1m to make Husbands, his 1970 comedy-drama about men in midlife crisis, for Columbia Pictures.

Being an avid film fan is no guarantee that you’ll be a great filmmaker. But Leonardo DiCaprio, who has starred in five of Scorsese’s features, says that the director’s cinephilia never causes him to lose sight of what his performers need.

“He’s learned as much as he can about the history of his art form and he’s brought that all into his filmmaking process,” DiCaprio says. “But he’s always focused on what the actor gives, and that one-on-one dynamic. Plot to him is secondary. His focus is finding the heart of the story through the actors that he works with.”

Scorsese has equally vivid memories of his childhood, growing up in Little Italy where his formative influences included his parents, his Catholic priests and the local hoodlums who would inspire films like Mean Streets. If his past movies tended to glamourise criminals and the violence they perpetrate, Scorsese says, “Well, it is glamorous and attractive, is it not? It’s glamorous at first if you’re young and stupid, which a lot of people are. I was.”

His youth was also an initiation into the culture of death: serving as an altar boy for requiem masses at St Patrick’s Old Cathedral (“‘Dies Irae’ was my favourite song,” he says), helping a friend deliver floral arrangements to funeral services. As a teenager, he lost two friends in close succession – one died of cancer, another in an accident – and one of the burials, at a graveyard near a factory, left a lasting impression on him.

“I said, ‘This is what it comes to?’” Scorsese recalls. “To squeeze us in a little plot of land in Queens somewhere, against this ugly, destructive backdrop? It was a shock and an awakening – an awakening to what, I’m not sure, but a change.”

An eye for macabre details and an unflinching willingness to depict them have served Scorsese well, but somewhere around the making of his Vegas mob saga Casino (1995) – particularly the scene in which Joe Pesci’s character is beaten to death and buried in a cornfield – the director began to wonder if he had pushed this skill set to its limit. “I said I can’t go any further with it,” he recounts.

Over the next two decades, he largely avoided projects in the crime-drama genre. (An exception was The Departed, for which he finally won an Academy Award.) But whatever the subject matter, Scorsese says he felt drained by these films, usually near their conclusions, when he inevitably found himself butting heads with studio executives who wanted the running times shortened.

“The last two weeks of editing and mixing The Aviator,” a co-production that included Warner Bros and Miramax, among others, “I had left the business from the stress,” he recalls. “I said if this is the way you have to make films then I’m not going to do it anymore.”

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as director and aviator Howard Hughes in Scorsese drama ‘The Aviator’ (IMDB)

He did not quit, of course, but he has increasingly turned to independent financiers to back his projects, believing that he and the studio system had become mortal enemies. “It’s like being in a bunker and you’re firing out in all directions,” he says. “You begin to realise you’re not speaking the same language anymore, so you can’t make pictures anymore.”

When De Niro approached him with the source material for The Irishman, in the midst of work on another potential Paramount film they would ultimately walk away from, Scorsese did not necessarily see it as an opportunity to make a grand pronouncement on his body of work or the mafia milieu. “I saw it as a danger,” he says, fearing that it would be dismissed as yet another mob drama on his CV.

The only reason to do The Irishman, Scorsese says, was if it addressed ideas he hadn’t previously confronted. “Is it going to be enriching?” he asked himself. “Are we going to learn about the invisible, the afterlife? No, we’re not.”

But the film could say something about “the process of living and existence, through the work we could do – you could depict it, the actors could live in it”. And he could not resist the story of criminals whose lengthy life spans become a curse that burns their misdeeds into their souls. He quotes a lyric from the Bruce Springsteen song “Jungleland”: “They wind up wounded, not even dead’,” Scorsese says. “And that’s even worse, in a way.”

The Irishman, he says, was not a repudiation of his previous crime dramas nor an expression of regret for how he’d depicted their swaggering characters. “I don’t think it’s regret,” he says. “This is different. Here, it’s the dead end, and everybody has to reckon at the end. If they’re given the time. And that’s where we’re headed.”

Pacino, Scorsese and De Niro attend the international premiere of ‘The Irishman’ at the BFI London Film Festival on 13 October 2019 (AFP/Getty) (DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS/AFP via Getty Images)

The Irishman took more than a decade to make, and as its cast grew to include Harvey Keitel, Pesci and Pacino (who had never worked with Scorsese), the director could feel the stakes getting higher.

That anxiety of influence was palpable, too, for collaborators like Steven Zaillian, the Irishman screenwriter, who strove not to duplicate other Scorsese films.

“It’s very hard to get all his movies out of your head and not write a scene that’s reminiscent of another scene – ‘Oh, oh, that’s what I did in Goodfellas or that’s what I did in Casino,” Zaillian says.

But such pressures also led to innovations like the captions that appear throughout The Irishman, describing how various criminals eventually met their fates.

Pacino, though a novice to Scorsese’s process, says he nonetheless developed an easy shorthand with the director and found him unafraid to express his opinion, in his own unique manner.

After one take, Pacino recalls, “I have a memory of Marty looking at the scene on a computer and sticking his head out of the tent that he was in, as if to say, ‘What the f*** are you doing?’ He didn’t actually say those words, but it felt like it. And I got the message.”

With a laugh, Pacino adds that he welcomed such indications that a director was invested in his performance. “Actors like that,” he says. “You think, I’m glad you’re seeing me and I’m glad you’re actually evaluating what I’m doing. It’s saying, we’re not alone here.”

De Niro, who has starred in nine features for Scorsese, says the director’s openness to experimentation and in-the-moment discovery has remained a constant throughout their decades-long collaboration, dating back to Mean Streets (1973).

Directors who have made cameos in films Show all 21 1 /21 Directors who have made cameos in films Directors who have made cameos in films Steven Spielberg in The Blues Brothers (1980) He’s had some cameos in his own films including the voice of the radio operator in Jaws and as a man watching the news in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. He's turned up in other people’s films too, such as Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky and Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black. But in John Landis’s The Blues Brothers, he is unforgettable as a bureaucrat who stamps a receipt for the Blue Brothers, played by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. Universal Pictures Directors who have made cameos in films John Huston in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) John Huston played a background blackjack player in his Marilyn Monroe-starring film The Misfits in 1961 and as a barman in Moby Dick in 1956. But perhaps most memorable is his cameo as a well-dressed American tourist who is pestered for money by drifter Fred C Hobbs (Humphrey Bogart) in his Oscar-winning drama The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Apparently, Humphrey Bogart directed the scene and took pleasure in making Huston perform it over and over again. Warner Bros Directors who have made cameos in films Quentin Tarantino in Little Nicky (2000) The director has had roles in many of his own films: his voice was the answer machine message in Jackie Brown; he plays one of 88 masked ninjas in Kill Bill and Jimmy Dimmick in Pulp Fiction. But his intermittent appearance in Steven Brill’s film as a blind deacon, who recognises Adam Sandler’s character as the son of the devil, is perhaps the weirdest. Rex Features Directors who have made cameos in films Peter Jackson in Hot Fuzz (2007) Like Hitchcock, the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit director is known for making cameos in his own films. Though his most notable cameo was “carrot man” in Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, more surprising was his brief turn in Edgar Wright’s police comedy. Dressed up as a Father Christmas, he stabs Simon Pegg’s Sergeant Angel in the hand at the beginning of the film. Universal Pictures Directors who have made cameos in films Wes Craven in Scream (1996) Principal Himbry (Henry Winkler) is working late at school when he hears a knock at his door. The only person he sees when he goes to open it is the janitor, played by director Wes Craven, who is dressed as Freddie Krueger, his own creation. Dimension Films Directors who have made cameos in films Terrence Malik in Badlands (1973) The famously reclusive director made a brief and unexpected cameo in his film Badlands. The actor he hired to play “caller at rich man’s house” where Kit (Michael Sheen) and Holly (Sissy Spacek) are hiding out, didn’t turn up, so Malik played the part himself. Warner Bros Directors who have made cameos in films Stanley Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut (1999) He’s not credited, but Stanley Kubrick is sitting in a booth at the Sonata Café in this thriller starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. When Dr Bill Hartford (Cruise) is invited to an orgy by Nick Nightingale (Todd Field), Kubrick – understandably – glances twice at Bill. Moviestore Collection/REX/Shutterstock Directors who have made cameos in films Alfred Hitchcock in North by Northwest (1959) The director was known for his signature cameos, and found ingenious ways to insert himself into his own films. In North by Northwest, he plays a man missing a bus just after the credit “directed by Alfred Hitchcock” passes on screen. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Directors who have made cameos in films Rob Reiner in Misery (1990) The When Harry Met Sally director makes a cameo in his psychological-horror film, Misery, about a psychotic fan (Kathy Bates) who holds an author (James Caan) captive and forces him to write her stories. Reiner plays a helicopter pilot helping the local sheriff Buster search for Paul’s car. Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images Directors who have made cameos in films Martin Scorsese in Taxi Driver (1976) The director makes cameo appearances in nearly every film he makes. But playing a twisted passenger in the taxi driven by Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) has to be one of his best. When the cab stops at an apartment, the silhouette of the passenger’s wife can be seen. He then describes to Bickle how he would like to kill the woman with a 44 Magnum pistol. Columbia Pictures Directors who have made cameos in films Clint Eastwood in Breezy (1973) He has directed himself in many of his films, including Million Dollar Baby and Unforgiven, but Eastwood also gave himself a cameo role in his third film Breezy. In the romantic drama, starring William Holden and Kay Lenz, he can be seen briefly, leaning on a pier in a white jacket. Getty Directors who have made cameos in films Roman Polanski in Chinatown (1974) Roman Polanski’s cameo in Chinatown as “man with knife” is memorable. He slashes the nostril of leading man Jack Nicholson, who plays snooping detective Jake Gittes. Polanski pulls out the knife and says: “You're a very nosy fellow, kitty-cat, huh? You know what happens to nosy fellows? Huh, no? Want to guess? Huh, no? OK. They lose their noses.“ Paramount Pictures Directors who have made cameos in films Oliver Stone in Platoon (1986) The director has a small cameo role in his film Platoon, as an officer at the US bunker which gets destroyed by a suicide bomber. It’s not the first time he has made appearances in his films: he was an investor in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and a UCLA film professor in his biographical film The Doors. Directors who have made cameos in films David Cronenberg in The Fly (1986) Most of the director’s cameo roles are in other people’s films, including John Landis’s Into the Night and Gus van Sant’s To Die For. But he makes a brief appearance as an obstetrician delivering a giant larva in his film The Fly, after Martin Scorsese observed that he resembled a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon. Cronenberg delivers a maggot-baby to Geena Davis’s Veronica, the girlfriend of Jeff Goldblum’s scientist Seth Brundle. Directors who have made cameos in films George Lucas in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith After 28 years behind the camera, the Star Wars creator made his one and only cameo appearance in Revenge of the Sith, as Baron Papanoida, a blue-coloured alien statesman who appears in the opera house scene. He gave three of his children – Jett, Amanda and Katie Lucas – cameo roles in it, too. Getty Images for AFI Directors who have made cameos in films Cameron Crowe in Minority Report (2002) Cameron Crowe had already put Steven Spielberg in his film Vanilla Sky, so perhaps this was a return favour? Crowe can be seen as a passenger on a train, along with another extra, the actor Cameron Diaz. Getty Images Directors who have made cameos in films Hal Ashby in Harold and Maude (1971) The Shampoo director had several cameos in his films, including playing a passenger in a Porsche who is flashing a peace sign in Coming Home, his Oscar-nominated 1978 film. But in the darkly humourous love story Harold and Maude, in which Harold, a lonely teenager intrigued by death, has a romantic relationship with a 79-year-old Holocaust survivor, Maude, Ashby pops up as a bearded man watching model trains. Saboteur Media/Rex Directors who have made cameos in films M Night Shyamalan in The Sixth Sense (1999) M Night Shyamalan's parents are doctors, while the director considered becoming one as well. So it is perhaps no surprise that he cast himself as Dr Hill in his supernatural horror The Sixth Sense. He plays a psychiatrist who talks to young Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) after he is locked inside a closet by bullies at a birthday party. Getty Images Directors who have made cameos in films Todd Philips in Old School (2003) The director has some creepy cameos in his films, including as a suspicious man in an elevator in The Hangover, and a man with a foot fetish in Road Trip. But he really comes into his own as “gang bang guy”, who turns up late to an orgy in Old School. When Luke Wilson’s character finds out his wife is into group sex, he opens the door to Philips who says: “I’m here for the gang bang.” DreamWorks Pictures Directors who have made cameos in films David and Jerry Zucker in Airplane! (1980) All three directors of this spoof aeroplane disaster movie make cameos in their film. The Zuckers play two distracted air traffic controllers who accidentally guide a jumbo 747 jet into the LAX airport terminal. Jim Abrahams turns up as one of the religious fanatics in the Chicago airport terminal. Paramount/Rex Directors who have made cameos in films Francis Ford Coppola in Apocalypse Now (1979) The director plays a TV news director, with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro playing the cameraman by his side, in his film Apocalypse Now. As they film mock news footage of the combat, Coppola shouts at Michael Sheen’s character Captain Benjamin L Willard, who is fighting in the Vietnam War: “Don't look at the camera! Just go by like you're fighting. Like you're fighting. Don't look at the camera! This is for television. Just go through, go through.” Rex Features

“If he feels that something’s not within the parameters, that it’s too out-there, he might say no, or he might even say, ‘Try, let’s see,’” says De Niro, who is also an Irishman producer. “He can always cut it out. That gives you freedom to try things and it makes everybody comfortable.”

But De Niro says he and Scorsese also share a kind of fatalism – the expectation that any time their work is celebrated, a barrage of rejection will swiftly follow, even in the case of The Irishman, which has been widely acclaimed.

“You’re waiting for, what’s the bad?” De Niro says. “What’s the downside? What’s going to happen? The other shoe to drop. You’re saying, yeah, this is great, but let’s not all get too excited.”

In ways both subtle and substantial, Scorsese sees the world changing and becoming less familiar to him. He gratefully accepted a deal with Netflix, which covered the reported $160m (£122.7m) budget for The Irishman. But the bargain meant that, after the movie received a limited theatrical release, it would be shown on the company’s streaming platform.

That means some viewers are watching the three-and-a-half-hour movie incrementally, instead of in one sitting, as its director would prefer. But Scorsese says he’d rather the film be available somewhere, in some form, than nowhere. “Even if it’s going to be shown on a street corner, maybe someday it’ll be shown in a theatre as part of a retrospective,” he says. “I really thought that.”

Netflix said The Irishman was watched by more than 26.4 million accounts in its first week on the site, but the realm of smartphones, tablets and streaming devices is largely invisible to Scorsese

Sarcastically describing his day-to-day reality, he says, “I go out, they put me in a car, they take me somewhere, they take me out, put me back on a table, take me in. I go in a room, somebody talks to me, I say, ‘Yes’. Then I come home and try to get in this door without the dogs going crazy.”

He is capable of adapting and evolving: in his fifth marriage (he and Helen wed in 1999), this former one-man tempest recast himself as a homebody and family man. They have a daughter, Francesca, and he has two daughters, Cathy and Domenica, from his first two marriages.

But you also know that Scorsese is hardly a wallflower if you’ve followed his recent remarks against Marvel movies, which he said were “not cinema” and closer to “theme parks” in an October interview with Empire magazine. (He expanded on these remarks in a November op-ed in The New York Times.)

That prompted Robert A Iger, the chief executive of the Walt Disney Co (which owns Marvel) to tell Time magazine that Scorsese’s remarks were “nasty” and “not fair to the people who are making the movies”, adding that he was seeking a meeting with the director.

Scorsese tells me that he had reached out to Iger several months earlier, on behalf of his nonprofit Film Foundation, which is seeking to restore and preserve movies in the 20th Century Fox library that Disney now owns. “Then all this came up,” Scorsese says with a chuckle. “So, we’ll have a lot to talk about.” (A Disney spokeswoman said the company was trying to set up the meeting between Scorsese and Iger.)

Scorsese has also been faulted by critics and others who have said that the female characters in The Irishman are not fully realised and exist only to react to the male characters; as their prime example, these critics often point to Anna Paquin, who plays the adult incarnation of Sheeran’s daughter Peggy and who has almost no dialogue.

But the director argues that Paquin’s character – whose wordless rejection of the ageing Frank devastates him – was in no way diminished by her silence. As Scorsese explains, “Don’t go for the surface. The surface says, ‘I’m going to say something and there’s going to be two or three big scenes between me and my father’. She doesn’t need to. She saw what he did. She knows what he’s capable of.”

The director believes Anna Paquin’s character wasn’t diminished by her silence (Netflix)

Scorsese says he was aware of the wider debate about the representation of women in his films, acknowledging that The Irishman is a “more sequestered” movie but not solely representative of his body of work.

Emma Tillinger Koskoff, who is president of production at Scorsese’s Sikelia Productions company and has made films with him for more than a decade, vehemently rejects the notion that Scorsese has historically overlooked women.

“It’s silly,” she says, adding that Scorsese “is responsible for some of the greatest female characters in cinema history”. She cited the roles played by Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Lorraine Bracco in Goodfellas, Jessica Lange and Juliette Lewis in Cape Fear and Sharon Stone in Casino, among others.

Koskoff also notes that Scorsese has supported female directors by helping to produce films like Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir. “I could go on and on and on,” she says. “He’s not making Lady Bird but it’s not like he’s opposed to that.”

Scorsese is circumspect when asked about movies from the past year that he had enjoyed, pleading modesty and the fact that he still needed to watch a lot of films, though he says he had seen and liked Bong Joon-ho’s dark satire Parasite.

And he is well aware that Joker, the hit comic-book thriller, contained many homages to his own work – he had passed on an offer to help produce it, though Koskoff worked on the movie – but does not seem to be in a hurry to view it.

“I saw clips of it,” Scorsese says of Joker. “I know it. So it’s like, why do I need to? I get it. It’s fine.”

Despite his professed aversions, Scorsese is going back to the Hollywood studios for his next movie, Killers of the Flower Moon, which is adapted from David Grann’s nonfiction book about the murders of Osage Indians in 1920s Oklahoma and which will be financed by Paramount.

Scorsese has other aspirations but they have nothing to do with filmmaking. “I would love to just take a year and read,” he says. “Listen to music when it’s needed. Be with some friends. Because we’re all going. Friends are dying. Family’s going.”

The Irishman: Official Trailer Premiere

One impediment, Scorsese admits, is himself and a disposition that compels him to tell stories in the medium he knows best.

“I’ll read a book or I’ll meet a person and I’ll say, ‘Ah! I’m going to make a film on this’,” he explains. “Over the years I’ve been able to do it. Now it’s narrowing way down.”

Then there is the other boundary – you know, death. But just because it’s unknowable and non-negotiable doesn’t mean it isn’t worth contending with every day.

“The problem is, time is limited and energy is so limited – the mind, also, of course,” he says. “Thankfully, the curiosity doesn’t end.”

The Irishman is available to watch on Netflix