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Martin Scorsese Reflects on His Decades-Long Collaboration with Musician Robbie Robertson

Oscar-nominated for his “Killers of the Flower Moon” score, the late Robertson worked with Scorsese on movies from “Raging Bull” to “The Irishman.”

When Robbie Robertson and The Band performed their final concert at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom in November 1976, it was clearly an ending for the group, as expressed in the title of the 1978 filmMartin Scorsese made about the event, “The Last Waltz.” While that movie — by virtually any imaginable criteria, the greatest rock and roll film ever made — documented a farewell, it itself represented a new beginning: a collaboration between Scorsese and Robertson that would last nearly 50 years and yield an astonishing series of masterpieces including “Raging Bull,” “The Wolf of Wall Street,” and most recently “ Killers of the Flower Moon,” for which Robertson — who died last August at the age of 80 — posthumously scored an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score. After that, Robertson helped Scorsese assemble the rollicking onslaught of rock, pop, and punk needle drops in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” worked with music at the other end of the emotional and spiritual spectrum for “Silence,” and composed the brooding, propulsive score for “The Irishman.” “When the soundtrack was curated, he and I would share and talk about music constantly, and every single choice he sent me was carefully thought through, grounded in a real sense of the world of the picture and what it needed.

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