Scorsese, De Niro and Pacino on time and
THEY COME INTO the room not like the moveable Mount Rushmore that they are but like three old friends, energised by being in each other’s company. They are chatting about movies.
Martin Scorsese comes first, then Al Pacino, then Robert De Niro. They’re trailed by a small army of publicists and assistants that quickly recedes out of the room. Constant through the momentary commotion is Scorsese enthusiastically remembering Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s
A Matter of Life and Death,
and quoting its lines to a rapt Pacino.
Their movie, The Irishman,
also deals majestically with matters of life and death. Like Powell and Pressburger’s time-traversing afterlife fantasy, The Irishman takes the long view on a life, albeit one — that of mafia hitman and Jimmy Hoffa associate Frank Sheeran (De Niro) — less certain to stand up in final judgment.
In Scorsese’s solemnly operatic crime epic, time is one of the three-and-halfhour film’s principle subjects. And in a conversation filled with reflections of the past and uncertainty about the future, time is much on the minds of its power trio. The
Irishman was made by 70-something Hollywood legends acutely aware that they have only so much of it left.
“As they say in the movie, it’s gonna happen. We’re all human. We’re gonna die,” says Scorsese. “The contemplative nature of it has to do with an accumulation of detail. Details, details. It’s a good thing for our culture to be able to take the time and experience it. You may like it, you may dislike it. But things move so fast now. We see the result of that in what’s happened to our country. We get a soundbite without context. People are too busy.
“It’s time to take time.”
Getting together
And it took ages to get Pacino, De Niro and Scorsese together.
The Irishman is their first film as a threesome. That alone gives the film the feel of a historic occasion. A last stand. Their collective response to a movie world where Scorsese’s kind of cinema is increasingly extinct, where three-plus hour movies are usually reserved only for Marvel.
The Irishman was pushed from the start by De Niro. He was attracted to Charles Brandt’s book about Sheeran,
Heard You Paint Houses,
Iand saw in it the potential to give a more ruminative spin on the organised crime genre that he, Scorsese and Joe Pesci (who plays Mafia don Russell Bufalino) are so intertwined with. It took more than a decade to make it happen, and only then did it get traction thanks to improving digital de-aging effects that stretch the actors’ performances across decades, and because of Netflix’s backing of a film that ultimately cost $159 million to make.
But, for them, the long wait was worth it. “We couldn’t have asked for anything more. Period. That’s it,” says De Niro.
“It really was an exceptional kind of situation. It was funny. Marty, there, Bob. It was so easy. It’s what we do,” agrees Pacino.
Their names ring out with a phonetic symmetry but it would be hard to find three more rhythmically different people. Scorsese’s ferocious verbosity hasn’t dimmed even slightly with age. Pacino, evereager to improvise, is more prone to slapdash riffing. De Niro is, as per his reputation, more taciturn. But the main thing they had in common on a recent fall day, shortly after The Irishman earned ecstatic reviews at the New York Film Festival, was a simple joy at being together. They look like aged robbers who just pulled off the heist of their lives.
Long collaboration
Scorsese and De Niro, of course, have a long-running collaboration numbering nine feature films. But it’s been a while, 24 years since Casino.
And Pacino has, despite the odds, never made a film with Scorsese. He compares the experience to walking a high wire “only Marty was the net.”
They’ve been close to working together before.
“Al, I always wanted to work with. We met through Francis Coppola,” says Scorsese. “By the time other projects came up, I didn’t have the cachet, or certain types of stories, you had already covered the territory, like in Scarface
or Carlito’s Way.”
“The big one I wanted to do — there
is the first film to bring together Hollywood legends Robert De Niro, Martin Scorcese and Al Pacino.