Martin Scorsese names the one actor who remained “unreachable”
In the chapters of Hollywood history, Martin Scorsese is one of the most prolific and well-respected directors in the cinema. Shaping how 20th-century movies were made and digested by audiences, the American filmmaker was responsible for such classics as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas, among several other classics that catapulted iconic stars to astronomic new heights.
Every director has their acting muse. For Wes Anderson, it’s Bill Murray, for Quentin Tarantino, it’s Samuel. L Jackson, and for Scorsese, it is most definitely Robert De Niro. Starring in ten feature films from the director, including the Palme d’Or winner Taxi Driver and, most recently, the American epic Killers of the Flower Moon, where the actor arguably gave one of his best-ever performances.
The pair were so close that De Niro played a significant role in saving the director’s life after he succumbed to depression and drug abuse following the failed release of New York, New York and the dramatic success of Taxi Driver. “What is it you want to do? Do you want to die? Is that it? Don’t you want to live to see your daughter grow up and get married?” De Niro recalled saying to Scorsese in the hospital, with the rousing words being enough to kickstart a new chapter in the director’s life.
Friends with De Niro, as well as many of Scorsese’s other acting collaborators like Harvey Keitel, was Al Pacino, a Hollywood star who enjoyed a dramatic rise to success that mirrored De Niro in many ways. Both finding fame in a whirlwind of artistic triumph in the 1970s, the pair received plaudits for their work on Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy, with many believing that Pacino joined De Niro in the many hit gangster movies of the 20th century.
Yet, the pair have only worked together on a handful of occasions, and only once has Pacino worked with Scorsese, playing Jimmy Hoffa in the 209-minute epic The Irishman. Nominated for ten Academy Awards, including ‘Best Director, the film followed De Niro’s Frank Sheeran, a hitman who becomes involved with a mobster played by Joe Pesci (who came out of retirement to play the role) and his crime family. Pacino’s role as the powerful International Brotherhood of Teamsters leader earned him a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ nomination at the Academy Awards.
Speaking about his time working with the celebrated actor, Scorsese started in an interview at the AFI Festival in 2019: “I’d been wanting to work with Al for years. Francis Coppola introduced me to him in 1970. Then he’s in Godfather one and two, and he’s in the stratosphere. For me, Al was always something unreachable. We even tried to make a film in the 1980s but couldn’t get the financing for it. I said, ‘What’s he like to work with?’ Bob [De Niro] said, ‘Oh, he’s great. You’ll see”.
Turning down the chance to play Travis Bickle back in 1976’s Taxi Driver, Scorsese made it clear for many years that he wanted to work with Pacino, yet the opportunity never quite came. Then, when he saw the chance to work with both De Niro and Pacino in one go, the opportunity was too tempting: “What you see in the film is their relationship as actors, as friends, over the past 40, 45 years. There’s something magical that happens there”.
The result of the Hollywood veterans working together is something special. Featuring countless acting greats, The Irishman is likely the last time the stars will all work together – at least on such an epic scale. Not only was The Irishman Scorsese’s longest film, but it was also his most expensive, partly due to the extensive use of digital de-ageing effects used that required a three-camera rig set-up. This all amounts to one of the director’s most undervalued successes, too, with The Irishman taking audiences back to the heyday of the filmmaker when he was reinventing cinema with some of the finest gangster movies ever made.
It is, indeed, only apt that Scorsese was finally able to get Pacino to star in one of his films alongside some of cinema’s most iconic stars, seeing that The Irishman will likely be one of his final career triumphs.
