Robbie Robertson-Martin Scorsese Collaborations are Subject of Book, ‘Insomnia’

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For four decades, Robbie Robertson produced music for Martin Scorsese’s movies, and now the story is finally being told about the rock legend’s collaborations with the iconic filmmaker—in Robertson’s own voice. Insomnia, described as an intimate portrait of a remarkable creative friendship between two titans of American arts and their A-list friends, was published on November 11, 2025, via Crown. It’s available in the U.S./worldwide here, in Canada here and in the U.K. here.

From the publisher’s April 17 announcement: The rock legend tells the story of his wild ride with Scorsese—as friends, adventure-seekers, and boundary-pushing collaborators—with all the heart of his New York Times bestselling memoir Testimony. Robertson was born on July 5, 1943. He died, at age 80, on August 9, 2023.

For four decades, Robertson produced music for Scorsese’s films, a relationship that began when Robertson convinced Scorsese to direct The Last Waltz, the film of the Band’s farewell performance at the Winterland Ballroom on Thanksgiving 1976.

The closing of the Band’s story with that landmark concert thrust Robertson into a new and uncertain world. With his relationship with his bandmates deteriorating and his marriage collapsing, Robertson arrived on Scorsese’s Beverly Hills doorstep only to find his friend in similar straits. Before the night was out, Scorsese had invited him to move in. Both men, already culture-transforming stars before the age of thirty-five, stood at a creative precipice, searching for the beginning of a new phase of life and work. As their friendship deepened into a career-altering collaboration, their shared journey would take them around the world and down the rabbit hole of American culture in the long hangover of the seventies. Buffeted on either side by temptation and paranoia, veering closer to self-destruction than either wanted to admit, together they had devoted themselves to a partnership defined by equal parts admiration and ambition.

Insomnia features a cast of characters that includes Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Harvey Keitel, Federico Fellini, Sophia Loren, Liza Minelli, and many more. At London’s Savoy Hotel in the late ’70s, Robertson encountered Nicholson who was filming interiors for The Shining with director Stanley Kubrick.

“After we passed around a fat spliff,” writes Robertson, “[Jack] had us in stitches with stories about Kubrick, who wasn’t exactly known as a barrel of laughs. Jack described shooting what would become the classic scene in the film, where his character, Jack Torrance, having gone completely mad, hacks a hole into a door with an axe to get at his terrified, screaming wife. There was no line in the script for when the character breaks through, but Jack had peered through the hole and ad-libbed the line ‘Heeere’s Johnny!’”

The director normally eschewed his actors’ spontaneity. “But in this case, Jack told us, Kubrick broke up laughing, and said he intended to use the line in the movie.”

Eric Clapton recorded “It’s In the Way That You Use It,” which he wrote with Robertson. The song was featured prominently in the 1986 film The Color of Money, which starred Paul Newman and Tom Cruise.

Insomnia is an intimate portrait of a remarkable creative friendship between two titans of American arts, one that would explore the outer limits of excess and experience before returning to tell the tale.