Friday,
September 22, 2006
"The Departed" Martin Scorsese's IRISH-American Mob in
The
ANNOTICO Report
The
new TV Series "The Brotherhood" (Irish Mob) will hopefully start
a "new fad". Thank you Martin for building
on that fad by making the Irish Mob the centerpiece of your film "The
Departed" !!!!!
Perhaps
too, the audience might be getting "tired" of
the "Spaghetti Mob" and open to a "Whiskey Mob" :)
"The
Departed" attracted a stellar cast, with Leonardo DiCaprio
as the good guy, and Matt Damon as the dirty cop, Jack Nicholson as the mobster
and Alec Baldwin, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen and Ray
Winstone in supporting roles. As if that wasn't
star-studded enough, the film is produced by Brad Pitt.
By
Mike Goodridge,
September
21, 2006
Fans of Martin
Scorsese who were disappointed with his bloated Howard Hughes biopic, The
Aviator, are understandably excited about his latest film, The Departed.
For the first
time since Casino, 12 years ago, the maestro has returned to the dense and
dangerous world of organised crime. Even though
there's not a bowl of spaghetti in sight and the
action revolves around the Irish-American mob in
From the opening
scenes, you know you're in a Scorsese film. The script is profanitystrewn
(the C-word has never been used so liberally in a
"I try to do
different milieus and stories," Scorsese began in
What was
different about making The Departed for the 64-year-old director, however, is
that unlike GoodFellas (1990) or Casino, it isn't a
saga spanning many years, but a nail-biting cops-and-robbers
thriller based on the 2002
Even though
Scorsese says he didn't see the Hong Kong film before starting his version, The
Departed is a fairly faithful adaptation with a few new twists and, of course,
the Irish Boston setting. Naturally, Scorsese attracted a stellar cast, with
Leonardo DiCaprio as the good guy and Matt Damon as
the dirty cop, Jack Nicholson as the mobster and Alec Baldwin, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen and Ray Winstone
in supporting roles. As if that wasn't star-studded enough, the film is
produced by Brad Pitt.
"It wasn't
an easy picture to make," Scorsese says. "I didn't know if I was really
going to make it at first. I kept on stepping in and stepping out. What kept
pulling me back was the story of trust and betrayal within almost incestuous
family relationships. As I found myself doing scenes I said to myself, 'I've
done this picture before.' Sometimes it was Gangs of New York, sometimes Raging
Bull. It was like a disease or something. I couldn't get it out of my system.
It had these themes that kept on drawing me back into my own movies and so I
felt comfortable."
Indeed, unlike
Infernal Affairs, with its sleek
"When I went
to
It's the kind of
microcosm that Scorsese knows from the Little Italy neighbourhood
of Fifties New York where he grew up. He came from working-class stock and his
father, Luciano, and mother, Catherine, both worked
in the city's garment-district. Before developing a passion-for film, Scorsese
had thought about becoming a priest, even entering junior seminary although he
was expelled at the age of 15 and transferred to a high school in the
His upbringing
has informed his entire oeuvre, he says, but most especially the films dealing
with the thin line between the right and wrong side of the law.
"I used to
listen to my father talk every night about what's right and wrong in the world.
My neighbourhood was a microcosm of
"I was like
walking a tightrope for him," he continues passionately. "He was one
of nine children and one of his brothers was one of these troublesome figures.
Later on, when I made Mean Streets, I thought I was making it about myself and my
old friends, but after my father died, I realised I
made it about him and his brother." Scorsese was a sickly child and he
still suffers from chronic asthma, but his time off school enabled him to
develop a love for movies and, in 1964, he entered
By 1967, he'd
made his first feature, Who's That Knocking at My
Door? and had become friends with a group of young
film-makers who were about to have a profound effect on American cinema -
Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Scorsese made his
breakthrough in 1973, with Mean Streets, and went on to create landmarks of
that decade, including Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980).
The film that
started the Seventies new wave of great American cinema was Easy Rider in 1969,
which also introduced Jack Nicholson to the world. It's fascinating, almost 40
years later, to see two titans of that period - Nicholson and Scorsese -
working together for the first time.
"I wanted a
real presence to carry over Francis Costello, so that even if he were only in
three scenes, you'd still feel the presence of a character who's
almost a god-like figure in the story," says Scorsese.
"I said to
Jack, 'Look, I've done this kind of film before. We dealt with major crimeland figures or gangsters, but audiences are going to
be expecting something different with this character because of the combination
of Nicholson and myself.' So Jack wanted to do a character that
was entirely fictional and not based on the character in the script nor
based on any real-life crime figure."
The result is
explosive. Nicholson has played varying shades of evil before, in The Shining,
The Witches of Eastwick and Batman, but in The
Departed he is a fully realised, cold-blooded monster
whose sick sense of humour is combined with acts of
sickening violence. Scorsese even had to temper down Nicholson's role because,
he says, "with Jack, a little bit goes a long way".
"There was a
scene we shot where Jack winds up with two women in a hallucinatory cocaine
fantasy, but we ultimately decided it would be more interesting if that was
implied. The relationship between sex and violence in the picture, particularly
with Nicholson's character, is obscene, and we pushed that as far as we could,
but ultimately some of it fell away in the shaping of the film."
The Departed,
which runs to a tidy two hours, is Scorsese's third
consecutive project with DiCaprio, the 31-year-old
actor with whom the director has developed close bonds. "There's an inner
story going on with DiCaprio that somehow I was able
to tap into, which is similar to what I feel," he says. "Yes, it will
always be somewhat different because I'm older, but hopefully we can make a few
more pictures together."
For Scorsese
aficionados, however, the good news is that Scorsese is reuniting with Robert
De Niro for a future project, an autobiographical
story "about our lives together", which they will resume writing when
De Niro finishes his own directing job, The Good
Shepherd, starring Departed star Matt Damon.
De Niro and Scorsese grew up in the same neighbourhood
together and the project will look at their experience of the Italian diaspora in
"Even though
my father was born on
The
Departed opens on 6 October.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/film/article-
23367585-details/Scorsese's+mob+rule/article.do
The
ANNOTICO Reports
Can
be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico
Email: annotico@earthlink.net