From Mean Streets to Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese recounts his ten films with De Niro (part 2)

In half a century, this legendary duo has left an indelible mark on modern cinema.

After getting off to a flying start, with 5 films in 9 years (!), the pace of collaborations between Martin Scorsese and Robert de Niro seriously slowed down thereafter. The two men will in fact only shoot 5 new feature films over the following four decades. 8 years after La Valse des Pantins, they found themselves in the nineties for Les Affranchis, Les Nerfs à Vif and Casino. Before beginning an interminable 23-year break until their reunion in The Irishman.

However, they never stopped discussing various projects (De Niro almost starred in Gangs of New York and The Departed), and even if the director found a new favorite in Leonardo DiCaprio, Bob remains the actor Marty’s fetish. And he was finally able to bring together his two privileged partners in his latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon, currently in theaters.

From Mean Streets to Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese recounts his ten films with De Niro (part 1)

The Freedmen (Goodfellas1990)

The reunion film. While they made five films together between 73 and 82, in total artistic symbiosis, Scorsese and De Niro spent most of the 80s leading parallel careers. Hollywood had changed and the period saw the two men secure their backs by making more commercial films, such as The Color of Money (for Marty) or Midnight Run (for Bob).

The Freedmen is a return to basics: the Mafia, Italian-American identity, blood on the walls and the Stones on the soundtrack. De Niro has aged, he will not be able to play the main role, which falls to Ray Liotta. But the actor nevertheless reads the book by Nicholas Pileggi on which the film is inspired, and calls Scorsese to tell him that the character of the Irishman, Jimmy “the Gent” Conway, interests him. Once considered for the role, John Malkovich will therefore give way to De Niro… Scorsese, in any case, prefers to film with actors close to him, from his world: “ Lots of great actors were lining up to star in The Freedmen and I would have liked to employ them, but they would have had to research this lifestyle at length. I chose comedians like Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco, De Niro, who had been exposed to it growing up. It had marked them. They were able to draw on their memories. »

Nerves on edge (Cape Fear1991)

This remake of a sixties thriller by J. Lee Thompson starring Robert Mitchum is the most overtly – and almost aggressively – commercial film shot by Scorsese and De Niro. The character of Max Cady, who terrorizes Nick Nolte and his family, can be seen as an almost cartoonish version of the Archangel of Death that De Niro played in Taxi Driver. Another film that the actor pushed his friend to make.

Scorsese: “ Originally, it was De Niro who wanted to do it. The role of Max Cady excited him; he saw the potential of the subject. Him and Steven Spielberg. They asked me to read the script when I was in the middle of editing the Freed. I read and reread it. Thrice. And every time I hated it. The happy family was far too cliché. Martians! Max was a bogeyman and it was with him that I sympathized: let him rid us of these holy bastards! Bobby and Steven insisted. When I told him I hated this family, that I hated this script, Steven finally said, “If you don’t like it, you can change it.” Why don’t you rewrite it? That’s what I did. By starting from scratch with Wesley Strick. There were 24 drafts of the script before we started shooting. »

Casino (1995)

The Freedmen squared. The landmark of the mafia film, in which De Niro plays a character inspired by Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, the man who managed the Las Vegas Stardust on behalf of the Chicago mafia. The film will benefit from the proverbial investment of its star in its preparatory work.

Scorsese: “ Bob helped us develop certain sequences, to give greater coherence to his role, and we incorporated the results of our sessions with him into the script. Same with Joe Pesci, to a certain extent, but it was Bob who was the main character and the main thread. Bob spent some time with Rosenthal in Florida. He had to do a lot of preparation work. It wasn’t easy for him to master all the games offered in a casino. When he took over the management of the Stardust, Rosenthal himself did not know them all. It was above all a handicapper. Knowing how to bet, and how much, is one thing, but running a casino is another matter entirely. »

The Irishman (2019)

Nearly a quarter of a century after their last collaboration, De Niro and Scorsese meet again. In the meantime, the director has chosen a new favorite actor in the person of Leonardo DiCaprio. A son rather than a brother. But his old accomplice is never far away. It was he who the actor first thought of for the roles of Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New Yorkthen Frank Costello in Infiltrators (ultimately held by Daniel Day-Lewis and Jack Nicholson). And De Niro comes knocking on Scorsese’s door to offer him the direction of Mafia Blueswhich the filmmaker politely declines (“ I told Bob : “we already made this film, it’s called The Freedmen ! “). The two men cross paths occasionally for an American Express ad, or in the voice casting of the cartoon Shark Gang.

They end up deciding to tell the story of Frank Sheeran, the man who allegedly killed Jimmy Hoffa. Another project that De Niro brought to Scorsese: “ Before I even read the first page, Bob described the book to me in great detail. As he talked about it, he became very emotional. »

Time has passed, and this $200 million Netflix madness in which De Niro indulges in the joys of de-aging, will talk about precisely that: the passing of time. “ Bob and I are in our seventies now, we have a new perspective on life and we can approach this kind of story with fresh eyes. (…) It’s a reflective film, about elderly people. Almost a closed door in a way. There is action, energy, a real narrative breadth, everything you want, but also the rhythm of memory, of reminiscence. »

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

After the warm-up round The Audition in 2015 (an ad for a Manila hotel-casino in the form of a comic short film), Martin Scorsese brought together for the first time his two favorite actors, De Niro and DiCaprio, in a full-length feature film. Legend has it that when Bob was filming Secret woundsby Michael Caton-Jones, with little Leo, in the early 90s, he called Marty to tell him that this kid had something special…

This is De Niro’s tenth Scorsese, DiCaprio’s sixth: a project initiated by Scorsese and DiCaprio, inspired by David Grann’s investigative book on the murders of Osage Indians in Oklahoma in the 1920s, and on which De Niro is a transplant, attracted by the prospect of adding new nuances to his old job as a cold-blooded mafia monster.

Scorsese: “ With Robert, we experienced periods of intense collaboration and others where our careers kept us apart for a long time, even if we remained in contact. I had really hoped he would play the lead role in Gangs of New York in 2002 (performed by Daniel Day-Lewis – editor’s note) but that didn’t really interest him. We were already working on the script for Killers of the Flower Moon when we started filming The Irishman, and everything happened quite naturally. He was intrigued by the darkness of the character of the rich farmer William Hale and, like me, by his ambivalence, the feeling that these terrible crimes were in the order of things. » With DiCaprio, the work involves a lot of discussions, questions, documentary research. The method is different with De Niro, based on a tacit understanding: “ I started cinema with him, we come from the same place, we speak the same language and we developed an almost instinctive understanding. »

Sources: Martin Scorsese, interviews with Michael Henry Wilson (Pompidou Center / Cahiers du cinéma), Conversations with Martin Scorsese by Richard Schickel (Sonatine), Telerama No. 3848, First, Deadline