Martin Scorsese on why Al Pacino felt “unreachable”
It took more than four decades for Al Pacino and Martin Scorsese to finally work together. The legendary film figures had been in the same circles from their early days in New York City all the way through the 2000s. They even had some shared friends, most notably Robert De Niro. But it wasn’t until 2019’s The Irishman that Pacino finally agreed to star in a Scorsese flick.
It’s not like Scorsese hadn’t been trying to get Pacino involved in his projects. As far back as 1970, Pacino and Scorsese had at least been made aware of each other. When Scorsese sat down with the American Film Institute to discuss The Irishman in 2019, he acknowledged the long road he had to travel in order to get Pacino in one of his films.
“I’d been wanting to work with Al for years,” Scorsese told the crowd. “Francis Coppola introduced me to him in 1970. Then he’s in Godfather one and two, and he’s in the stratosphere,” Scorsese said. “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 said, ‘Oh, he’s great. You’ll see.’”
The friendship between De Niro and Pacino, plus the relationships that’s Scorsese has with De Niro and fellow co-star Joe Pesci, was essential to getting The Irishman off the ground. “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 director said.
“We were actually talking about this project going back to the 1980s,” Scorsese claimed about the film.“It started with wanting to make … our version of The Bad and the Beautiful and Two Weeks in Another Town,” Scorsese said, referencing two films directed by Vincete Minnelli.
“During that time, Bob [De Niro] grew one way and I grew another,” Scorsese admitted. “We found ourselves in different poles, but we kept trying to come back together to see if there was something else we could do besides King of Comedy.” The stars finally aligned at the end of the 2010s, so much so that Pesci agreed to come out of retirement in order to be a part of the film. It seems unlikely that we’ll get another Pacino-Scorsese collaboration, but we’ll always have The Irishman.
Check out the trailer for The Irishman down below.
