While there are plenty of people who might call themselves Martin Scorsese fans, few of them showed up this winter for the director’s intense, spiritual drama “Silence.” As revered as the director might be, mainstream appreciation tends to only follow when he’s making more broadly entertaining pictures like the bawdy “The Wolf Of The Wall Street” or the gritty (and Oscar-winning) “The Departed.” And then there’s “Goodfellas,” easily his most popular movie ever, and for many, the kind of picture they want Scorsese to make again. However, while they might be pinning their hopes on “The Irishman” delivering that kind of experience, the director says it’ll have another kind of flavor.
“I think this is different, I think it is,” he told The Independent. “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.”
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“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,” he added.
It sounds like the film, which will star Robert De Niro as Frank Sheeran, a high-ranking officer in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters with rumored ties to the deaths of President Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa, will have a much more contemplative, ruminative tone that many might expect. But that’s fine by me, as Scorsese has already made “Goodfellas” and “Casino,” and I’d rather see the filmmaker pursue new creative avenues than simply run through the greatest hits of his cinematic tricks.
“The Irishman” is expected to start filming in August and is aiming for a 2019 release date.