NOVEMBER
FA
LLMOVIE
PR
EVIEW
very important phrase! Look
at [Hoffa’s] face! He went to jail.
They’re not in jail. He went. It’s
going to end badly.”
For fans of Mob movies (Scor-
sese dislikes this term, preferring
“organized crime”), The Irishman’s
lineup is an all-star dream team:
Scorsese, De Niro (who got the
project underway after finding
Charles Brandt’s 2004 book
I Heard You Paint Houses), Pacino
(who somehow has never appeared
in a Scorsese picture before), and,
emerging from semiretirement,
Joe Pesci, who previously starred
with De Niro in Scorsese’s Raging
Bull, Goodfellas, and Casino and
was reportedly asked 50 times to
join the Irishman cast as an under-
world kingpin. Perhaps Pesci was
really only asked seven or 35 times.
What’s certain is De Niro repeat-
edly pushed to get him on board. “Alot of what I was saying was, ‘Come
on, who knows if we’re ever going
to have this chance again?’ ” recalls
De Niro. “Let’s just do it.”
Scorsese similarly had to try and
sway backers to fund the film for a
decade, a process made more diffi-
cult by his use of pricey CGI toenable actors to play younger ver-
sions of their characters for a
significant stretch of the story.
“People just weren’t interested in
financing it—and that was before
the CGI,” Scorsese says. “Nobody
would give us the money. But I
really felt that De Niro and I had↓ Pesci (as Mafia leader Russell Bufalino) breaks bread with De Niro (as hitman Frank Sheeran)↑ Scorsese (far right) directs De Niro in their ninth film collaboration