Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, AND Al Pacino? Why We're Rooting for ‘The Irishman’
If a deal can be struck, Martin Scorsese would direct Robert De Niro for the first time in more than 20 years and Al Pacino for the first time ever in The Irishman. (Photos: Getty Images)
UPDATE: STX struck a deal for international rights to ‘The Irishman’ for $50M, and the film is reportedly planning to start production in January 2017.
ORIGINAL STORY: If there were monuments to director-actor teams, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro would definitely have a spot on Mount Rushmore. Their two-decade collaboration, from 1973’s Mean Streets to 1995’s Casino, gave us three undisputed contemporary classics in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas.
Even with a 21-year break in their professional relationship since Casino (excepting their lighthearted participation in the DreamWorks cartoon Shark Tale), their rapport clearly endures. Appearing alongside each other at a 40th anniversary Tribeca Film Festival screening of Taxi Driver in April, Scorsese and De Niro easily traded stories about how they brought mentally unstable cabbie Travis Bickle to life.
Related: Watch Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway Talk About the First Time They Fell in Love With Acting
Cut to a month later, and that Taxi Driver event may just have been a prelude to something bigger. Variety is reporting from the Cannes Film Festival that not only could a deal for the long-planned Scorsese/De Niro reunion project, The Irishman, finally be made available to international financiers, but that the project would also include De Niro’s Heat co-star and fellow acting icon, Al Pacino (believe it or not, this would be the first time for Pacino in a Scorsese film), and Oscar-winning Goodfellas co-star Joe Pesci.
Watch Martin Scorsese’s Awesome Impression of Robert De Niro:
According to the Variety story, The Irishman, a ’70s-era gangster film, has been languishing at Paramount, the studio that released Scorsese’s 2013 hit, The Wolf of Wall Street. Now, Variety reports, the studio may allow it to find new backers for the right price. (No matter who ends up financing it, Paramount would be the movie’s U.S. distributor.)
Related: Liam Neeson Says His Intense Weight Loss Was for a Martin Scorsese Movie
Based on Charles Brandt’s 2003 book, I Heard You Paint Houses, The Irishman would focus on the bloody career of hit man Frank Sheeran, famed for being Jimmy Hoffa’s best friend — and possible killer. De Niro would play Sheeran. The Variety piece also reports that the actors would play younger versions of their characters in flashbacks, using the same digital trickery that de-aged Robert Downey Jr. to his Less Than Zero self in Captain America: Civil War and restored Michael Douglas to his Wall Street prime in Ant-Man.
No matter how many years he gets shaved off onscreen, the prospect of De Niro teaming up with Scorsese one more time should make any film lover feel young at heart. In the years since Casino, the director — whose next film, Silence, is expected to arrive later this year — has pursued an artistically rewarding (and financially lucrative) collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio, while De Niro’s recent track record has been a bit … well, spottier. (Scorsese’s past and present muses both appeared in his 2015 short film, The Audition, which has only screened at a Macau casino.)
Related: Leonardo Di Caprio and Martin Scorsese Reteam for ‘Devil in the White City’
What’s so exciting about The Irishman is the hope there’s one more career-defining De Niro role in a Scorsese film yet to add to Travis Bickle, Jake LaMotta, Rupert Pupkin, and Max Cady. The two men have rarely spoken about what the exact nature of their dynamic is, which makes it feel that much more rare and special. “I’d like to think we melted into each other kind of in a way,” Scorsese told Jimmy Fallon during an appearance on The Tonight Show in February. And keeping it vague is probably for the best. After all, it’s the end result of their process that most concerns — and benefits — us. With 2016 already providing us with plenty of evidence that we shouldn’t take any of our beloved artists for granted, clearing the way for Scorsese and De Niro to put a capstone on their career-long collaboration with The Irishman seems like a global cinematic imperative.
Watch a trailer from the Martin Scorsese-Robert De Niro classic ‘Raging Bull’:
