great filmmaker martin scorsese Wrote an essay in the New York Times Thursday, remembering his late friends Rob and Michelle Renner.
“Rob Reiner was my friend, and Michele too. From now on, I have to use the past tense, and it fills me with very deep sadness. But there is no other option,” Scorsese opened the essay.
Renners was found dead of stab wounds in his Los Angeles home on December 14. A few days later their son, Nick Renner, was charged with the murder of his parents.
Scorsese described meeting Rob Reiner through mutual friends in Los Angeles in the early 1970s. They became close to each other as East Coast transplants and their shared “New York humor”, Scorsese wrote.
Scorsese said of his fellow filmmaker, “Immediately, I loved hanging out with Rob. We had a natural attraction to each other.” “He was hilarious and sometimes extremely funny, but he was never the kind of person who would take over the room.”
He said “Misery” tops the list of Scorsese’s favorite films, created by Rob Reiner, and said that “This Is Spinal Tap” is “in a category of its own”, calling it “kind of an immaculate creation”.
“And a big part of that film’s greatness is Rob himself as a director and actor,” Scorsese wrote.
Scorsese recalled casting Rob Reiner to play Leonardo DiCaprio’s father in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” saying that he “immediately” thought of the late director for the role because “he could improvise with the best, he was a master of comedy, he worked beautifully with Leo and the rest of them,” Scorsese said.
Rob Reiner’s character in “The Wolf of Wall Street” was a man who “loved his son, was happy with his success, but he knew he was destined to fall. … A loving father who was obsessed with his son.”
Scorsese wrote, “I was struck by the delicacy and openness of her performance when we shot it, moved once more when we brought the scene together in editing, and moved again when I saw the finished picture.”
He said, “Now, it breaks my heart to even think about the tenderness of Rob’s performance in this and other scenes.”
Scorsese called Rainers’ murder “an obscenity, a gap in lived reality” in the essay.
“I must be allowed to imagine them alive and well…” Scorsese wrote, “And that day, I’ll be at a dinner or a party and find myself sitting next to Rob, and I’ll hear his laugh and look at his handsome face and laugh at his stories and enjoy his natural comic timing, and feel lucky again to have him as a friend.”
