Martin Scorsese is the most alive he’s been in his work in a long time, brimming with renewed passion for filmmaking and invigorated by the reception that has greeted his latest gangland magnum opus, “The Irishman.” And what he wants to talk about is death.

Just to be clear, he’s not talking about the deaths in his movies or anyone else’s. “You just have to let go, especially at this vantage point of age,” he said one Saturday afternoon last month. The 77-year-old director was stretched out in a comfortable chair in a living room of his Manhattan townhouse, a seat he would rise from several times when a whimsical mood struck him during a spirited conversation about mortality and its inevitability.