The Movie That Left the Legendary Director Martin Scorsese Stressed and Anxious

In the pantheon of Martin Scorsese’s legendary collaborations with Robert De Niro, The King of Comedy stands out as a particularly pitch-black exploration of the American obsession with fame.

Starring De Niro as Rupert Pupkin, a man whose desperation for respect veers into the sinister, the film required an unsettling level of character study. To grasp the mindset of a true obsessive, De Niro took the extreme step of meeting with a man who had actually been stalking him for several years.

Scorsese recounted this bizarre encounter in the biography De Niro: A Life, describing how the stalker had been waiting for the actor alongside his wife, a woman who seemed visibly embarrassed by the situation.

The man’s requests were surprisingly mundane; he simply wanted De Niro to join them for dinner at their home, a long drive outside of New York City. When De Niro directly asked why he was being followed and what the man truly wanted, the stalker simply replied that he wanted to have a drink and chat, and mentioned that his mother had asked him to say hello.

The production of the film was as frayed as its lead character’s psyche, plagued by Scorsese’s declining health and immense pressure from 20th Century Fox. To keep the project moving, the director leaned on his most trusted partners, including editor Thelma Schoonmaker, yet his perfectionism led to a total psychological breakdown.

Scorsese admitted in Scorsese on Scorsese that he reached a point where he would see a message about a production issue and simply decide it was impossible to work that day. Despite the intervention of friends who reminded him that the studio was going crazy over rising interest costs, the film was a massive failure upon its 1983 release.

It earned a meager $2 million against a budget of nearly $20 million, a blow that forced Scorsese to pivot toward much smaller, more controlled productions like After Hours. This commercial disappointment also delayed his long-held dream of filming The Last Temptation of Christ, which he only managed to finance after the success of 1986’s The Color of Money.

As of February, Robert De Niro continues to be one of the busiest octogenarians in Hollywood, recently receiving an honorary Palme d’Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. He is currently starring in the Netflix political thriller series Zero Day and is earning critical buzz for his dual roles in the mob drama The Alto Knights, which hit theaters in March 2025.

Fans are also anticipating his upcoming role in the crime thriller The Whisper Man. Meanwhile, Martin Scorsese is currently in Prague as of February 12, preparing for his latest directorial effort, What Happens at Night.

This eerie, snowbound “ghost story” marks his seventh collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio and also stars Jennifer Lawrence and Mads Mikkelsen. The film, which centers on a couple’s unsettling experience at a deserted European hotel, is expected to be a major awards contender for the 2027 season.

Do you think the box office failure of The King of Comedy was simply a case of the film being decades ahead of its time in predicting today’s celebrity-obsessed social media culture? Share your thoughts in the comments.