You can have The Wolf of Wall Street. I’ll take The King of Comedy. My favorite Scorsese movies have Robert De Niro in them, not Leonardo DiCaprio. So when the Raging Bull star revealed that they are still entertaining the notion of doing The Irishman, you can see why I’m swallowing that news like it’s a plate of spaghetti and meatballs.
It has been a long time since either Casino or Heat. Has too much time passed? De Niro doesn’t think so, and he told The New York Post that the project is still very much in the works. De Niro stated:
"We have been trying to do [the film] for the last few years, and I think we will do it. It’s based on [the] book ‘I Heard You Paint Houses’ by Charles Brandt. It’s about a guy who . . . confessed that he killed Hoffa and Joe Gallo. I’m gonna play that character. That’s something I’m looking forward to very much . . . I think it will [happen] . . . we’re really working towards making it happen."
Long before Scorsese found a bright and shiny new "toy" in DiCaprio, the Oscar-winning director crafted a series of brilliant (and violent) collaborations with De Niro. Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy… the duo was on fire for decades. In the process, they redefined the crime genre with Goodfellas and Casino, and audiences have been begging for them to reunite and try to put a new stamp on familiar material. Now it sounds like they are getting closer.
Scorsese and De Niro have been circling The Irishman for years, seeing it as an opportunity to "get the band back together," so to speak. The film would tell the story of mobster Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran, and would be based on a book by author Charles Brandt. Even better, as earlier reports stated, there would be parts in the film for fellow Goodfella Joe Pesci as well as Al Pacino. Be still my beating, Italian heart! Excuse me while I go home and get my fucking shine box. These amazing clips should keep you busy. Obviously, these are NSFW:
Scorsese has been on fire ever since teaming with DiCaprio. He won the Oscar for The Departed, and recently watched Wolf become the highest-grossing film of his career. Yet even though he has Silence on his agenda next, he never drifts too far away from the mobsters in his past, and it sounds like we might see him reunite with De Niro and Pesci before all is said and done.
