THE IRISHMAN
A year on from its release, MARTIN SCORSESE looks back at his final say on the gangster movie
Martin Scorsese talks to Empire about his crime epic as it hits Blu-ray.
“WELL, ALEX, I’M in New York,” says Martin Scorsese, as if it needed saying: through his office window, Manhattan towers around him. The city is in his bones, and throughout our video conversation, slices of his life, much of it from his youth, crop up — the sights, the sounds, the smells — and, of course, the wiseguys, whose behaviour he’s been studying for decades. In The Irishman, his 2019 adaptation of Charles Brandt’s book I Heard You Paint Houses, based on confessions from real-life labour union official Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) and his relationship with union leader Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), he returned to the crime genre, but from a different vantage point. This time, he would explore its corrosive effect on a person’s soul. Taking a break from prepping his next film, the De Niro/dicaprio FBI drama Killers Of The Flower Moon, he looks back on what has quickly become one of his defining works. A year since its release, we discover, he’s barely stopped thinking about it.
The Irishman had a theatrical run, it’s been on Netflix for a year — how do you feel about it being released as a physical entity, a Criterion release, on good old shiny discs?
Well, I like that very much, because it is a movie. Along with other films in The Criterion Collection, it takes its place as an actual film. Apart from releases, length, theatre windows, streaming, it is still a film. It’s not mitigated by the climate of the time that it was released.
When you read the book did you immediately know that you would focus on time, age, regret, as themes? Was that clear straight away?
That was pretty clear. Because the action throughout the piece, I’m familiar with. I have staged and expressed it in other ways in other movies. This was different. Because of the way the book was written, and because of the interviews that Charles Brandt did with Frank to the end of his life… it’s interesting to me. Because that’s where we’re all headed. The sense of longing. And some regret. And understanding his defeat as a person, morally... he understands it at that point. Can he change? It’s too late. Well, it’s too late to express that change, although he tries. So he has to feel it in himself, he has to come to some sort of peace with himself. I’m not quite so sure he gets there, but he’s trying. I just thought it was interesting that at the end, some do reach that point, do think about their lives, and do think about meaning.
The way it’s filmed and edited is different from the likes of Goodfellas. Because of the milieu it’s dealing with, was it interesting to you to subvert what had been done before?
Well, pretty much I felt that it was a reaction against it. It was time to stop it. The core of Goodfellas was the provocation, the allure of crime, and irresponsible behaviour. Which I was then criticised for. Greatly, by a lot of people,
and by wonderful directors. In America, a couple of Italian restaurants wouldn’t allow myself and [co-screenwriter] Nick Pileggi to frequent them. I wanted to infuriate people that way because, what is that joy of irresponsibility? I have it in myself, in different ways. What is that joy, is it just immaturity? What is our fascination, or our embracing of the Johnny Boys of the world? The ones who won’t play by the rules. You find that a lot in politics now, too. I can understand as a young person there’s that impulse to be violent. But you could see in Goodfellas, too, how far that could go. Pesci’s character is killed off. Henry winds up in the Witness Protection Program. Jimmy winds up in jail. There is that danger of the allure. In Goodfellas, by the end of it, I wanted people to be angry at themselves for enjoying it. I really did! We have to understand that in ourselves, we may be capable of such a thing. In different ways. There are people in finance, in politics, in certain stratas of society who are in the same kind of delirious, hallucinatory life. And so what is that? The moth to a flame in our human nature. I wanted to get people thinking about that. But the danger there is that you’ll also enjoy it.
Right.
It’s the same thing with The Wolf Of Wall Street
when he takes the Quaaludes and he has to crawl to the car. We’re laughing, but why are we laughing? Are you trying to get it both ways as a filmmaker? I don’t know. I know that that’s funny. I’ve been in situations like that. [Laughs]
It’s not nice. But a lot of things that are not nice are funny. And let’s explore it. By the time you get to Irishman, there’s no more time for that. And he’s gotten past that. The Irishman is dealing with the sense of who we are, the violence in us. I said, “I know what to do here — it’s gotta be, will he and can he review his life? And the price he has to pay.” The priest forgives him, God forgives him, he can’t forgive himself. So that’s where we were going, right from the beginning. I said to [screenwriter] Steve Zaillian, “It’s about mortality.”
Let’s discuss some sartorial choices. Firstly, the pyjamas scene with Frank and Jimmy. There’s a Bert and Ernie vibe to it.
Yes. You know, these are men on the road. He’s a bodyguard confidant. You think he’s gonna sleep in another suite down the hall? He’s gotta be with Jimmy, he’s gotta be next to him. There’s a gun on the night table. Very important. And they hang around in their pyjamas. It reminds me a little of a scene I loved in Don Siegel’s The Killers, with Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager talking in a hotel room and they’re washing their drip-dry shirts [cackles]. The drip-dry shirt in the ’60s was a big deal. You just wash it and you didn’t have to press it. It’s just practical, guys, come on! It’s very intimate because Jimmy’s got to be there, and they trust each other that way. It’s kinda nice.
Then you have Tony Pro [Stephen Graham] in his little shorts...
That’s outrageous. Actually, it’s Florida. You do that. We were kids from the Lower East Side, there were no pools. To go to a pool was a big deal, and that was a place called Ravenhall, a public pool in Coney Island. That was where the neighbourhood people went, but also the wiseguys. Wiseguys would never go in the pool, they’d be playing cards in these little cabanas. And they’d be wearing cabana sets just like what Tony’s wearing. A jacket that had a collar with lapels, terrycloth, nice design, Hawaiian usually. That’s what they wore. So Tony, in Florida, that’s what he’s wearing, what’s the problem? Highly disrespectful to come to a meeting like that, dressed that way.
That scene is almost like something from Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Really?
In a good way.
I love Curb Your Enthusiasm.
I mean when they’re discussing how late is late. Ten minutes, 15 minutes, 12-and-a-half ?
Yeah. Because Bob’s character’s trying to make a joke of it. Because this is all gonna go wrong. You know what it took to get that meeting? And it’s gonna go wrong because they’re arguing over ten as opposed to 15? Somebody’s gonna get shot. Somebody’s gonna die in that moment [laughs]. They’ve gotta make a joke about those extra few minutes. But I take it as a compliment in terms of Curb Your Enthusiasm. And it is funny. If there’s a glimmer of humour, Frank is gonna jump in there and make it funnier. [Laughs] The poor guy’s sitting there, Tony Jack, saying, “Yeah, it was bumper to bumper.” Bumpertobumper is one word. “Yeah, it was bumpertobumper, whaddya want from me.” [Laughs] We were laughing!
The build-up to Hoffa’s murder is so loaded with foresight and anticipation, but when it happens it’s so underplayed and grounded. There’s no music, the drama comes purely from the way that De Niro carries himself...
That’s right. De Niro goes into this house, and there’s a guy that we’ve never seen before, Sally Bugs [Louis Cancelmi], and he says, “Hey, Frank,” and he says, “Hi, Sally.” Frank doesn’t know that Sally’s gonna be there, he wasn’t told. We never met this guy. Yet they know each other. Hmm. “Is Sally there to kill me?” Interesting. Then De Niro just cases the house. He walks through to the kitchen where there are two other guys sitting at a table, whom he doesn’t know. He then goes behind the wall, opens the door to the back. He comes back, he goes to the window. The way he moves through the house is when I realised that that was basically the essence of the movie. Every step he takes there could be somebody with a gun to shoot him. When he kills Jimmy he looks for a moment to see if there’s anybody there to kill him. I wanted you to stay in that experience. And also the method of the whole operation. The methodical nature of what he has to do. Every moment, every second, every breath he takes, is leading to catastrophe. And he’s gotta do it. He has to do it. And so we do, with him. And the simpler, I thought, the better. It’s about the deliberate nature of his own suicide, morally.
How do you feel about the film now that it’s been out a year, absorbing reactions to it?
I like that people appreciated it. I was very touched by that. This Covid, this pandemic, has stopped a creative process. I turned in on myself. Particularly the first couple of months, when we were locked in our houses, it eliminated a lot of distraction. I have to find a way to get back to a singular creative impulse for my new film the way I had for Irishman. Cut away all the award ceremonies, all that stuff, and get back to being in a room alone with a project and wondering if I can do something again. With Irishman, we achieved what I wanted to do. Whether it’s great or good or not, I don’t know. I know I could watch it. What I mean is I have to go back and find that spark. I don’t know if I can. But the pandemic has made it almost obligatory to go and find it. Because everything else is gone, normal life is not there anymore. So what do you have? You have people you love, family, and you hope, a creative spark, and maybe that can be rekindled for a new film. But I keep going back to Irishman. Thinking on Irishman. I use Irishman as… I use that experience as the lesson.
THE IRISHMAN IS OUT NOW ON CRITERION COLLECTION BLU-RAY AND DVD