The Irishman is now on Netflix. Though the new three-and-a-half hour gangster epic from director Martin Scorsese is still screening in some select theaters, it’s also available on the streaming platform and can now be viewed in all the ways Netflix can be watched: On a phone on the subway, on a treadmill at the gym, etc. Screenwriter Aaron-Stewart Ahn (Mandy) even posted a popular video to Twitter of himself watching The Irishman on his phone while driving a motorbike. Scorsese, for one, would prefer you not do this.
Watching THE IRISHMAN exactly as Martin Scorsese intended #cinema pic.twitter.com/fquUXAphDN
— Aaron Stewart-Ahn (@somebadideas) November 29, 2019
“I would suggest, if you ever want to see one of my pictures, or most films, please, please don’t look at it on a phone,” Scorsese said recently on Popcorn with Peter Travers, though he did suggest that “a big iPad” could possibly work as an option.
Even more than movies, people are used to watching TV shows on Netflix, and that association has led some to wonder whether this epic story might’ve worked in smaller chunks as a TV series. Others wonder if there’s a way to split the movie’s runtime into digestible chunks. Scorsese, who previously told EW that The Irishman works best as a movie “because the point of this picture is the accumulation of detail,” insists on a single-sitting viewing if possible.
“Ideally, I’d like you to go to a theater. Look at it on a big screen from beginning to end,” Scorsese told Travers. “And I know, it’s long. You’ve got to get up. You gotta go to the bathroom, that sort of thing. I get it, but also at home, I think if you can make a night of it, or an afternoon thereof, and know that you’re not gonna answer the phone, or you’re not gonna get up too much, it might work.”
Watch the full Scorsese interview above.
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