David Bartner’s love of film began in high school, when he’d walk to the Kennebunk Free Library to check out VHS tapes of classic old movies like Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” and Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.”

Last week Bartner was nominated for his first Emmy, as editor of an Apple TV documenatry series called “Mr. Scorsese.” Bartner sifted through and wove together footage from about 80 recorded interviews and more than 30 of Scorsese’s films, including “Taxi Driver.”

“It was definitely a career highlight,” said Bartner, 38, who lives in Brooklyn, New York. “To be able to study his life in film, and immerse yourself in it, was really a great experience.”

Bartner was nominated Thursday in the category of outstanding picture editing for a nonfiction program, for the first episode of the series, “Stranger in a Strange Land.” That category will be part of the Creative Arts Emmy Awards ceremony, focused on technical and behind-the-scenes fields like editing or cinematography, and will be presented Sept. 5-6. The Emmy Awards, including awards for acting and directing, will be presented Sept. 14, in a ceremony seen live on NBC and Peacock.

Bartner graduated from Kennebunk High School in 2006, and credits a film class taught by Joe Foster there with nurturing his love of movies. He attended the University of New Hampshire and then graduated from the University of Texas, where he studied film.

He got into editing soon after graduation, at a time when reality TV was hot and there were lots of shows being made. He worked as an editor on the A&E show “Shipping Wars” in 2014 and has been working in editing ever since. He was an additional editor on the 2020 ESPN documentary series “The Last Dance,” about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls.

Bartner worked as editor on the 2017 film “Arthur Miller: Writer,” directed by the playwright’s daughter, Rebecca Miller. When Miller began working on “Mr. Scorsese,” she called Bartner and asked him to edit that as well. The five-part series premiered in October on Apple TV.

Scorsese, 83, is considered one of the most influential directors in American cinema, with a career that began in the late 1960s and continues today. Some of his best-known films include “Raging Bull,” “Goodfellas,” “The Age of Innocence,” “Casino,” “The Departed,” and “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

Bartner plans to attend the Creative Arts Emmy Awards in Los Angeles, in September. He did not meet Scorsese before working on the project, and only briefly afterward. But by poring over his films and interviews with him, he’s made a study of him.

Bartner said as an editor, he likes to try to organize the material into themes and subjects. For the first episode of the series, he came up with a phrase to help him keep its theme in focus: “an uncompromising artist on a spiritual quest.”

“That episode was about the struggle to become a filmmaker. He grew up in a three-room tenement apartment in New York’s Little Italy, working class, with no books in the house,” said Bartner. “How does somebody like that go out and become a filmmaker?”