Anytime a filmmaker like Martin Scorsese teams up with Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino, it is easy to forecast forward and predict what will be on screen. The director and acting trio are very accustomed to being associated with the gangster genre and while they are all linking up for the 2019 title The Irishman, Scorsese has stressed that the upcoming movie won't be fitted into the same category.
Speaking with The Independent this week, the New Yorker admits that the age of the cast makes the movie a very different experience. Much in the same mold as Logan in Marvel, the body cannot do what it used to, and it forces the protagonists to consider their place in the world.
Martin: The Mob Life Always Ends In Tears
Quizzed about the tone and narrative that he will create with The Godfather: Part II pair De Niro and Pacino alongside Joe Pesci, Scorsese admits that he rushed his other mobster flicks. That won't be the case this time around.
“I think this is different, I think it is," he remarked. "I admit that there are – you know, Goodfellas and Casino have a certain style that I created for them – it’s on the page in the script actually. Putting Goodfellas together was almost like an afterthought, at times I was kind of rushing, I felt I’d already done it because I’d played it all out in terms of the camera moves and the editing and that sort of thing. The style of the picture, the cuts, the freeze-frames, all of this was planned way in advance, but here it’s a little different. The people are also older in The Irishman, it’s certainly more about looking back, a retrospective so to speak of a man’s life and the choices that he’s had to make.”
Still unsure about one or two themes that will arise, the filmmaker says that a life of crime always catches up with those that go down that path.
"What makes a person this way, what makes them become a professional killer?” Scorsese ponders. “It’s about love, betrayal, remorse and the sadness and tragedy, ultimately, of a life led that way. And it’s about mercy too, I don’t know if there’ll be any of that in the picture yet, there might be.”
Scorsese Projects Have To Be Passionate To Sustain Success
Taking decades to make Silence work, the Andrew Garfield and Liam Neeson picture opened the director's eyes. Trust is now a major priority, above all other factors.
“One has to have passion for every project one does and, if it isn’t there, you find out immediately. I’ve done projects that weren’t generated by me or people that I necessarily trusted on an aesthetic level, and I found that I had to make it a passion, otherwise I really couldn't get through the process.”
Realizing that he can become too attached to a picture, the director understands that in order to progress, he must be able to let go once a film is complete.
“So it was a matter of, I think, approaching it finally, feeling comfortable with it, trying to create something and then having to leave it at that point in time; just leave it. It's still there, I'm with it every day, but I had to leave the film alone after a point, I guess it's somehow completed, but in my mind it's not.”
Source: The Independent
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