Martin Scorsese Remembers His Friend Rob Reiner: ‘It Breaks My Heart’

Martin Scorsese paid tribute to his longtime friend Rob Reiner in a moving essay for The New York Times published on Christmas Day. “Rob Reiner was my friend, and so was Michele,” the legendary director wrote, including Reiner’s late wife in his thoughts. “From now on, I’ll have to use the past tense, and that fills me with such profound sadness. But there’s no other choice.”

Scorsese recalls crossing paths with Reiner for the first time in the Los Angeles comedy scene of the early 1970s, when both of them were just starting out in their careers. “Right away, I loved hanging out with Rob,” he wrote. “We had a natural affinity for each other. He was hilarious and sometimes bitingly funny, but he was never the kind of guy who would take over the room.”

Decades later, Scorsese cast Reiner in a key supporting role in 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street, playing the father of reckless money man Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio). “He could improvise with the best, he was a master at comedy, he worked beautifully with Leo and the rest of the guys, and he understood the human predicament of his character: The man loved his son, he was happy with his success, but he knew that he was destined for a fall,” Scorsese wrote.

He particularly noted Reiner’s fine acting in a pivotal scene where DiCaprio’s character considers walking away from his swashbuckling life of high-finance fraud. “The look on Rob’s face, as he realizes that Leo is hesitating and that he ultimately won’t stop, is so eloquent,” Scorsese wrote. “‘You got all the money in the world,’ he says. ‘You need everybody else’s money?’ A loving father, mystified by his son. I was moved by the delicacy and openness of his performance when we shot it, moved once again as we brought the scene together in the edit and moved as I watched the finished picture. Now, it breaks my heart to even think of the tenderness of Rob’s performance in this and other scenes.”

Reiner famously based Marty DiBergi, his documentary-filmmaker character in 1984’s This Is Spinal Tap, on Scorsese’s on-screen presence in The Last Waltz. “He didn’t like it at first,” Reiner told Rolling Stone earlier this year. “When he first saw it, he said, ‘Ah, you are making fun of me.’ But now he’s come to really love it.”

In the Times essay, Scorsese celebrates Reiner’s work in Spinal Tap (“a kind of immaculate creation”), and says that 1990’s Misery is his favorite of Reiner’s films.
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Since the Reiners’ tragic deaths on Dec. 14, tributes have poured in from across the entertainment world. Harry Connick Jr., who did the music for 1989’s When Harry Met Sally, wrote that Reiner “changed my life” in an exclusive tribute for Rolling Stone. Meg Ryan, who starred in that film, grieved the “impossible tragedy” in a social media post.

The couple’s 32-year-old son, Nick Reiner, is facing first-degree murder charges in the shocking crime.