Highlights From a 50-Year Partnership
‘We speak the same language in a sense,’ Robertson said of Scorsese. Here are six films that captured the filmmaker and musician in dialogue
‘The Last Waltz’ 1976
Robertson first heard Scorsese’s name when his manager, Jonathan Taplin, told him about a young guy directing a movie he was producing
(that would be Mean Streets). When it came time to enlist a filmmaker to capture the Band’s final concert in San Francisco, on Thanksgiving Day 1976, Scorsese was the first person he thought of. The result remains an era-defining concert film, matching Robertson’s incendiary solos with the restless camera movements. Scorsese’s idea of shooting “The Weight” on an MGM soundstage like an old-school musical number impressed Robertson to no end. DAVID FEAR
‘Raging Bull’ 1980
Scorsese enlisted Robertson to produce the soundtrack for his masterpiece about champion boxer Jake La Motta; he’d also end up scoring and arranging three pieces, and co-wrote some of the source music. Robertson recruited Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel to help record covers of period standards, but he himself didn’t play with his old Band-mates, since, he said, “I had recently broken my hand in an unfortunate confrontation.” La Motta would have been sympathetic. D.F.
‘The King of Comedy’ 1983
The soundtrack Robertson pulled together for this film about a would-be comedy star balanced New Wave pop (Talking Heads’ “Swamp” and Ric Ocasek’s “Steal the Night”) with more ruminative picks like Ray Charles’ “Come Rain or Come Shine,” and Robertson’s own atmospheric “Between Trains,” which demonstrated what he had to offer outside the Band. Van Morrison’s simmering takedown “Wonderful Remark” wasn’t the movie’s theme song, but easily could have been. DAVID BROWNE
‘The Color of Money’ 1986
Robertson made his debut as a score composer on Scorsese’s sequel to 1961’s The Hustler. Eric Clapton’s “It’s in the Way That You Use It,” co-written with Robertson, was its signature blues-rock tune, and Robertson’s two largely instrumental tracks, recorded with jazz composer and bandleader Gil Evans, enhanced the film’s pool-hall vibe. And Robertson captured the competitive, macho verve of the movie’s setting in tracks by Warren Zevon, Don Henley, and a Robertson-produced song by blues icon Willie Dixon.
‘The Irishman’ 2019
Scorsese’s epic mob movie takes place over 50 years, which meant Robertson’s contributions to the score had to work across decades. His main theme combines a John Bonham-esque backbeat with a starksounding harmonica and a genuinely haunting cello — it’s not the sound of a gangster movie so much as a ghost story. That feeling is beautifully repeated in “Remembrance,” which plays over the end credits and features some of the bluesiest guitar playing of Robertson’s career. D.F.
‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ 2023
For Scorsese’s truecrime tale about murders among the Osage Nation in the 1920s, Robertson said he “created what I called a North American Indian jukebox,” drawing on his own Mohawk and Cayuga background to compose bits and pieces of soundscapes that he’d send to Scorsese. Though he composed the score, that’s also him playing the slide guitar on the movie’s opening track, adding an otherworldly drone to the tune’s percussive momentum. “That’s all me,” he said. “That was my gift to Marty.”