The flop Ron Howard movie almost directed by Martin Scorsese: “I’d never get out of that picture”
There’s no such thing as a guaranteed winner in Hollywood, although the best directors in the business often tend to develop a better nose for sniffing out worthy projects as their careers progress. Few have been churning out greatness for as long as Martin Scorsese, and one film he sidestepped proved to be an inspired decision in more ways than one.
Having spent more than half a century working at the top of his game, Scorsese’s status as one of the all-time greats was secured long. As a result, he’s earned himself the position of being able to pick and choose which stories he wants to tell on the silver screen, even if he was to persevere with some of them for decades.
Gangs of New York, Silence, and The Irishman were all a long time coming, and while they each spent a lot of time on the back burner, the fact they were Scorsese passion projects ensured they would all be made eventually. Of course, he can also take on new movies on a whim – like when he stepped in to helm The Aviator when Michael Mann dropped out – but hitting the open water was a bridge too far.
In the early 2000s, Scorsese was looking for something to stoke his creative fires, and plenty of scripts came across his desk. One of them was sent to both the filmmaker and his new muse, Leonardo DiCaprio, but it quickly fell down the pecking order when a loose remake of the Hong Kong crime classic Infernal Affairs piqued his interest.
Speaking to Collider alongside DiCaprio, Scorsese revealed The Departed “was sent to us at the same time” and “there were a couple of other scripts, too.” One of them was an adaptation of a nonfiction book that had originally been announced in 2000 with Barry Levinson at the helm, but the director knew he didn’t really want to do it.
“There was one about the actual attack of the real whale that attacked the real whaling ship that Moby Dick was based on,” he said. “But, I realised that I’d never get out of that picture with the boats. Forget it!” The book in question was Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, which eventually hit cinemas in December 2015 with Ron Howard as director.
Unfortunately for the guy who eventually made it, the seafaring drama tanked at the box office amid a tepid critical reception and lost a fortune after failing to recoup its budget. Scorsese instead focused his attention on The Departed, and it would be an understatement to say it worked out exponentially better when the duplicitous thriller won four Academy Awards, including ‘Best Picture’, and finally snagged the living legend his long-awaited ‘Best Director’ prize at the sixth time of asking.
