Martin Scorsese says he seriously considered joining the priesthood as a teenager and was asked to leave a Catholic seminary for “behaving badly,” a revelation featured in the new docuseries “Mr. Scorsese,” which premiered at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 4 and will stream on Apple TV+ starting Oct. 17. In the series, the filmmaker describes the early pull of religious life and the moment administrators involved his father to remove him, while reflecting on how devotion and discipline later redirected into filmmaking.
The five-part portrait, directed by Rebecca Miller, is built from extended interviews and archival material, tracing Scorsese’s path from asthmatic kid in Little Italy to one of modern cinema’s defining figures. The episodes situate his seminary years within a larger thread that runs through his work, from “Mean Streets” to “The Last Temptation of Christ” and “Silence,” where faith, guilt, sacrifice, and redemption form recurring tensions. Early festival reactions have noted the intimacy of the conversations and the candor around personal turning points that shaped his art and public persona.
The series also includes family testimony about the costs of that artistic drive. Scorsese’s adult daughters recount limited contact during the 1970s as his career accelerated, juxtaposed with his more present role as a father later in life. Their accounts frame the seminary anecdote not as a detour but as a clue to a lifelong search for vocation—how to live with purpose, to whom one is accountable, and how to reconcile ambition with responsibility.
Public attention has centered on a brief passage in which Scorsese characterizes the seminary exit with wry specificity, saying officials summoned his father to take him home “because I behaved badly,” a remark that has traveled widely online for its mix of humor and confession. The timing aligns with a fresh promotional push, including a new trailer and a festival bow designed to seed conversation ahead of the Oct. 17 launch.
