The cast and crew recount the decade-long process of adapting of Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran’s story from best-selling book to big budget film. While Robert De Niro secures funding and Martin Scorsese assembles his cast—even luring Joe Pesci out of retirement—Industrial Light and Magic’s Pablo Helman turns back the clock with a technological proof-of-concept.
The cast and crew recount the decade-long process of adapting of Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran’s story from best-selling book to big budget film. While Robert De Niro secures funding and Martin Scorsese assembles his cast—even luring Joe Pesci out of retirement—Industrial Light and Magic’s Pablo Helman turns back the clock with a technological proof-of-concept.
Netflix Presents: BEHIND THE IRISHMAN
EPISODE 2 – “From Page to Screen”
[Music cue: Methodic Doubt]
MARTIN SCORSESE: Well, we were trying to subvert the expectation of the audience in this picture. We were totally comfortable with, how should I put it… not being subject to certain demands of the genre, demands of an audience, demands of studios, demands of—we just felt comfortable with what we were doing.
SEBASTIAN MANISCALCO (NARRATOR V.O. BOLDED THROUGHOUT):
Welcome to “Behind the Irishman.” Where we give you an inside look at Netflix and Martin Scorsese’s latest crime drama, The Irishman. I’m your host, Sebastian Maniscalco.
On the last episode we met Charlie Brandt, the guy who got Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran to confess his life’s story. Now that became Brandt’s best-selling book “I Heard You Paint Houses.”
In this episode, we’re gonna discover how the book got into Marty Scorsese’s hands and onto the big screen.
Charlie always had high hopes for the movie adaptation of his book
CHARLIE BRANDT: I was holding out for the big boys. I had in my heart that this material is perfect for De Niro and Scorsese. If I can only get it to them. How can I get it to them?
It was a long and winding road that leads back to Scorsese and De Niro’s roots.
MARTIN SCORSESE: Well I think part of it is the background of how we all knew each other that all sort of comes together. We all started around the same time, you know.
AL PACINO: We started…
SCORSESE: …in 1969, 70, whatever.
Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese are all new Yorkers.
ROBERT DE NIRO: We knew each other when we were kids.
SCORSESE: We knew each other when we're 16 years old, actually.
PACINO: You grew up in the same neighborhood?
DE NIRO: Well, I hung out in his neighborhood. And I knew, we had one guy who used to go between our group and Marty—
SCORSESE: Well you were on Kenmare?
DE NIRO: I was on Kenmare.
SCORSESE: And I was on Prince and Spring Street. Kenmare was like another country in a way, a little village in a way, there were different groups.
Long before they faced off in “Heat,” Pacino had his eye on Robert De Niro.
PACINO: I remember seeing you on 14th Street.
DE NIRO: I remember, you were with Jill.
PACINO: I was with Jill. And we were passing and said hello to ya. And I thought, “That kid’s got charisma.” You The Bronx too Joe, like me?
JOE PESCI: I lived in The Bronx. I was born in Newark, but I moved to The Bronx.
PACINO: You grew up in The Bronx, yeah. I was born in Manhattan, went to The Bronx.
PESCI: Ah.
SCORSESE: Al, how could you do that? [Laughter]
PACINO: I didn’t know! I was three at the time!
SCORSESE: You were taken. Okay. Joe, it’s a different thing. New Jersey I could understand you go to The Bronx.
Back in the day Scorsese first heard about this great young actor, Al Pacino, through Godfather director, Francis Ford Coppola.
SCORSESE: He was having dinner at my mother and father’s apartment on Elizabeth St. And said, he was telling my mother Katie, ya know, he was casting The Godfather and I want Marlon Brando and said that he’s great but they don’t want him and this sort of thing, I have to do a test. And he said, “I have this young guy to play Michael, who's this young guy. He's really great. His name is Al Pacino.” So since then, we've sort of been crossing paths for years.
Even after knowing each other for so many years, this is the first movie Pacino and Scorsese have ever made together.
De Niro, Scorsese and Pesci are longtime collaborators. They first met Joe after Bob saw him in a low budget gangster film.
SCORSESE: When we met Joe, was in 1979? Or 78? I'd say ‘77? Maybe? Because you saw Joe …
DE NIRO: “The Death Collector.”
PESCI: : “The Death Collector.” The director was Ralph DeVito.
SCORSESE/DE NIRO: Ralph DeVito.
PESCI: Ralph DeVito wrote and directed it.
SCORSESE: These were kind of New Jersey B-films.
In Pesci’s attitude and confidence, they saw a kindred spirit.
SCORSESE: That was the last person in a sense that knows where I came from, whom I knew, who knows that world. And that led to the pictures we made: Mean Streets.
PESCI: Yeah.
SCORSESE: There were Italian films made for the Italian-American community back in the early 30s in New Jersey.
PESCI: It’s funny that anybody would know that. [Laughter]
SCORSESE: I happened to get involved with that at one point. Ya know it’s amazing, about 2 or 3 films we made, we had them restored actually for the community. So regional filmmaking is ya know what independent films have become now.
PESCI: When I first saw Mean Streets I didn’t know much. Believe me. And I said it’s okay… but ya know, Jesus, it’s stupid in a lot of ways. And I saw it again, as I told ya, you get older, and you learn more. I saw it years later and I watched the whole movie. And I said, wow. It’s the feeling of the neighborhood and the characters and the whole thing that he does so well and he’s done it in every one of his fucking movies!
[MUSIC STARTS]
Over the next three decades, De Niro and Scorsese made landmark movies together—Taxi Driver, New York, New York, Cape Fear, and my personal favorite The King of Comedy. Pesci was part of the action on Raging Bull, Casino and Goodfellas, in which he won an Oscar.
PACINO: Before you got together for this, for The Irishman. Had you done something, Casino?
SCORSESE: Casino was 22 years.
PACINO: 22 years…
SCORSESE: You too. [Laughter]
They’d been on the lookout for the next project ever since. Here’s Bob De Niro’s producing partner, Jane Rosenthal.
JANE ROSENTHAL: We'd been looking for a project for Bob and Marty to do together since Casino. They just hadn't had that opportunity. There were other projects that they almost did together. But it was trying to find the right thing and trying to find the right thing that they want to explore so deeply and not be repetitive in both of their work.
At first, they thought about going autobiographical.
SCORSESE: We were thinking of doing something like a, well, we were talking about doing a film about our careers and life, working in Hollywood, how people change, and the Cannes festival and all that.
DE NIRO: Right.
But, eventually, they found themselves back in familiar territory.
ROSENTHAL: We had been developing a movie called “The Winter of Frankie Machine” based on Don Winslow's book.
And since it was about a hitman, De Niro picked up this book “I Heard You Paint Houses.”
ROSENTHAL: I believe Eric Roth gave it to Bob and I to read, probably 2006. And he thought that just for research, “Paint Houses” would be good source material.
But when he reads it De Niro starts to realize “this is a great movie.” So, the next step: convince Marty.
[music starts]
DE NIRO: And I said, well Marty, you gotta read this, ‘cause I think this is what we should be doing. This is more what we should—you’ll see.
ROSENTHAL: The more he got into that story, he felt it was something that was more special for Marty and he to work on together.
SCORSESE: I mean Bob, just seeing the black and white photos of Frank Sheeran himself cause Bob was perfect. We just knew he could inhabit that character.
DE NIRO: It’s a classic story about loyalty, about brotherhood, and betrayal. But betrayal for a reason people can understand.
SCORSESE: Necessity, yeah, necessity.
De Niro couldn’t shake this Irishman story. Even though they had a green light on the other picture... he couldn’t let it go.
Here’s Emma Tillinger, Scorsese’s producer.
EMMA TILLINGER: Bob decided he really loved the role of Frank Sheeran and we decided to hold off on ‘Frankie Machine’ and develop ‘I Heard You Paint Houses’.
How big do ya gotta be in the industry to switch movies?!
ROSENTHAL: And it was actually on a call that we had with Brad Gray, who was head of Paramount, and Bryan Lord, and Rick Yorn, and Bob, and Marty, and Emma, and I. And Brad was going to green light The Winter of Frankie Machine. And Bob started talking, “Well, you know, there was actually this other book that we're thinking about.” And Brad said, “Oh, wait a minute. So, you want to take a greenlight movie and turn it into a development deal?” And you kind of heard this awkward noise on the phone [clears throat] from everybody, from all the agents. But Brad said, “Go ahead.” That was sort of the moment in 2007, where Frankie Machine then took a backseat and we started to develop The Irishman.
TILLINGER: It was a pretty funny phone call. Pretty unique phone call. All the stars aligned and came together as they should. Ya know, finding the right material for them is challenging for obvious reasons, I think. And for them to have become so aligned and both so passionate about this project, was the sign that we should continue on with it.
They went public with their plans for “The Irishman.” Even though that’s not how De Niro usually rolls.
DE NIRO: And then I asked you, Marty, when you were in London doing… what was the movie?
SCORSESE: Hugo.
DE NIRO: Hugo. I said, which I never want to do because it's always bad. It's a jinx. In my experience, when you say you want to do something and you’re planning it, and it doesn't happen. But I said, in this case, “Maybe, Marty, if you're okay with this, maybe we will just sort of let it be known that we’re going to do this project. So then we could maybe get some interest.”
[music start]
SCORSESE: Yeah. And that also makes it real. In a sense, it gives us the impetus to keep pushing.
IRWIN WINKLER: They've always found the right material to come together and make it all work, going back to Raging Bull and Goodfellas and Casino after that.
18. That’s “Irishman” producer Irwin Winkler… He made Taxi Driver with Scorsese and De Niro.
WINKLER: I think the passion that Bob had over a long period of time, spilled over in a very positive way to Marty. And Marty felt very strongly that the script could be different. And could be the way to tell another kind of story.
Scorsese had made so many seminal movies in this genre – I mean, Casino, Goodfellas… But in this guy Frank Sheeran’s story he saw something different. So, he reached out to the author of “I Heard You Paint Houses,” Charlie Brandt.
BRANDT: He wants to know if the rights are available. De Niro wants to know if the rights were available. You’d have to be crazy not to also think of Scorsese in the same breath, you know. And so I was elated. And he was serious. He wanted to meet with me. And finally, it got all put back together by Netflix. [Giggles]
[Music transition / act break]
SCORSESE: What was interesting is that it just seemed to fall into place who could play these parts.
DE NIRO: And then I was talking to these guys, Joe, and Al. And we talked about what about if we did it? This thing, you know.
SCORSESE: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Scorsese and De Niro knew they wanted Joe Pesci in the mix. Only problem? He wasn’t interested.
Irwin Winkler knows how rare that is:
WINKLER: Well, number one I think if Marty Scorsese is directing a film, usually it's very, very seldom that the actors that he wants don't come and say “we want to be in it,” raise their hand and say, “where do we show up?”
Joe was already familiar with “I Heard You Paint Houses.”
JOE PESCI: So I read the book a long time ago.
DE NIRO: You had read it?
PESCI: Guy brought it to me on the golf course.
PACINO: That is interesting. Ya think, it is a page turner. Isn’t it?
PESCI: Yeah, no, it was a great book. Great book. And the guy even told me then, he says “So you guys are gonna make this movie someday.” I said, “Yeah, good. Okay, bye.”
Then, he got the call from Scorsese.
PESCI: And he said, “We’re going to do this movie.” And I said… It was well after Casino.
DE NIRO: It was about 13 years ago, 12 years ago…
PESCI: And I said, “Do we have to take cuts in our pay again?” He said, “No, no, no, we're all gonna get paid. We're gonna make the movie.” Then that changed.
DE NIRO: That changed.
SCORSESE: That changed a lot. Because we couldn't raise, we couldn't raise the financing.
PACINO: You couldn’t?
SCORSESE: No, no… I dunno, we had to convince Joe. To do it. For a while. That took a few years, actually. [Laugher] And I had to convince you to come out of the trailer. That's okay. It was just a general thing. And then Al said he was in.
PACINO: I was in.
DE NIRO: And we went over to see Marty at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
SCORSESE: I think Al looked at me and said, is this going to happen? I said yeah yeah yeah. It’s gonna happen [laughter]… three years later… ya know.
PACINO: Is this gonna happen?
PESCI: These guys took me out of the gutter basically. Brought me back. So I can appreciate everything a lot more. And I see everything a lot different too. It's interesting. Bob and I were talking about that stuff.
Russell Bufalino is different from the hotheads that Pesci usually plays.
SCORSESE: Russell is interesting, because it's just the opposite way than we normally…
PESCI: …See me play? Yeah, you told me, you’re not gonna be like the gangsters you always play. Al and I had some scenes together that I had read. I said, “Oh, God, I hope he doesn't start blowing up at me the way I know Al can blow up. Because then what am I supposed to do? Am I gonna blow up back?” And he said to me, “You don't blow up at all in the scene.” I said, “Great. As long as he doesn't blow up at me.” [Laughter]
SCORSESE: Hoffa was a different thing. He comes in hitting it hard right there. And he goes, bang! He goes to the end. You know these guys. That's what it's about, behavior. It's how you sit, how you stand. It's how you say “hello” to somebody. You know, how you digress in a conversation, so to speak.
PACINO: In another era, too.
SCORSESE: Yeah, a different time. 1950s, 60s, 70s. And cutting back and forth in time.
Marty and Al have wanted to work together for decades, but it didn’t come together until now.
SCORSESE: Bob and Al want to do something substantial together. And I never worked with Al before. We tried over the years, but never quite got together on a project. One on Modigliani we wanted to do, but for different reasons it just couldn’t get made. And so, for me, to see Bob, and I usually see Bob and Al, I see them at events and at dinners. Somebody's apartment, talking. And I saw the relationship between the two. It was very, it's as if we worked together, actually over the years, Al and I, somehow.
For Pacino, the feeling was mutual.
PACINO: I've worked with Bob a lot. I never worked with Marty. I must say I always wanted to, of course. So, it was a great treat for me to work with Marty.
SCORSESE: It was a real pleasure to be able to work together and watch the two of them perform, particularly in the scene at the appreciation night, where he finally, where Frank's character finally has to tell Jimmy that there's a serious problem that has to be addressed. And some of that was improvised, but you could see, just look at that, you could see who they really are, or the scene where Al Pacino as Jimmy kind of begs Frank to be become president of one of the unions. You could see the tenderness, you could see all to the love for each other as persons—as Al and Bob, as actors, as characters.
This isn’t a movie they could have made 20 years ago.
PACINO: It’s about our world, our America.
SCORSESE: That’s it.
PACINO: Almost 20 years.
SCORSESE: It happens to play out in context of organized crime. But that’s just the context. It’s really a picture that ultimately as we grew older, and we are, we were able to look at this thing, at these context and these characters with the humanity of people who are together, close, loyal to each other, love each other and then there has to be a betrayal.
[music transition]
With all the major players finally in place, they brought in screenwriter Steve Zaillian to adapt the book.
He’s the Academy Award winning screenwriter of Schindler’s List and Gangs of New York.
STEVE ZAILLIAN: The is book written in alternating chapters of Frank telling his story and Charles giving the events historical context. You have a biography. He is basically telling the story from the time he was born until the time he died. And it’s how do you put that into a dramatic structure.
He had to find a way to turn Frank’s entire life story into a 3-hour movie.
ZAILLIAN: It’s not just a matter of condensing it but it’s finding those parts in the life, not only are they the most interesting but they’re going to add up to something. Kind of the breakthrough for me was thinking of framing this story with this car drive. People have described it as a flashback within a flashback. I didn’t think of it this way. I just felt that, first of all I found it interesting almost in its banality. But it would also allow me to come back to something, a continuing story which was this car trip. And then when I went back to the main story I could go wherever I wanted. I’m sure people don’t have a clue where it’s going. I mean, it’s like why are we watching this long drive? Marking maps and taking cigarette breaks and all of these things… and then at a certain point the story catches up with it.
Like a lot of people, he knew of Jimmy Hoffa but didn’t know this story.
ZAILLIAN : I’ve never read anywhere else that Hoffa couldn’t stand anyone to be late, or hated watermelon. So again I would say that my first knowledge of Hoffa in any kind of detail came from Frank Sheeran. And from Charlie, Charlie Brandt, who wrote the book.
De Niro organized a table read to attract investors.
PACINO: Bob set up this reading for all the cast—Joe Pesci, Bobby Cannavale, Bob himself. We all read it as a script. And it was clearly a Steve Zaillian script, which is quite good. And there were about 50 people there. And we all read for them. And it was a very good idea because it made it almost theatrical.
PESCI: Al was going like this at the end of the light and I was like what are you looking for you’re dead? [Laughter]
PACINO: Well I said maybe I’d come back.
PESCI: No no no. I was like what are you doing? You’re dead, you can go.
PACINO: I can go… oh jeez…
PESCI: That was funny. I’ll never forget that.
SCORSESE: That was a good experience. It kinda has a life to it. Took off.
PACINO: It had a life to it, it really did.
With financing in place, the production started to take shape.
ANNA PAQUIN: Pretty much if Martin Scorsese says, “Hey, I want you to be in my movie,” there is no kind of needing for enticing…
That’s Anna Paquin. She plays Frank’s daughter, Peggy.
PAQUIN: I mean, it’s a really fascinating story. And I had read the book “I Heard You Paint Houses.” Ya know, it’s a genre I’m a fan of his. So yeah, he kind of pretty much had me at, “would you like to be in my movie?” I mean, there was definitely a feeling of getting to be part of the kids at the the big kid table with some of the guys that are the legends in my business, who are also obviously friends and seem to be having a blast reuniting for one last gangster movie. It's a genre he is a master of, and these are the men who have made those films come to life. And it’s not a bad day at the office when you're like, “Yeah, so Al and I danced for like five hours today and then, you know, just chilled with Bob.” And did some family photos. You're looking around on set and literally every single person is a somebody. In all of the departments.
[music break / act transition]
Despite the obvious power struggle and violence, this movie is really about growing older. Reflecting. Looking back. Relationships…
SCORSESE: Well, we were trying to subvert the expectation of the audience in this picture. We were totally comfortable with, how should I put it, not being subject to certain demands of the genre, demands of an audience, the demands of studios. We just felt comfortable with what we were doing.
The story of The Irishman takes place across decades – we see Frank Sheeran in his 20s, in his 80s, and everywhere in-between.
Most directors would simply cast more actors… but not Marty.
SCORSESE: About half the script was the younger characters. Although Hoffa, you were a little less in that way. You didn’t have a big range to go. You still needed it, but it was not… and you know, the whole idea was to make a picture together again. And at a certain point, when I had to do this other film, and then something else happened, and I wanted to finish Silence. And it got to the point where the scenes, the flashbacks, which almost comprised for Bob like half the picture, would have been played by younger actors. So there's a, “What am I gonna be doing? I gotta teach—I gotta explain everything to them? [Laughter] Here, you don’t have to explain.
This is what I love about Scorsese…. Sorry, Mr. Scorsese.
He refused to cast younger actors to play Frank Sheeran and Jimmy Hoffa in flashbacks. So how was this guy going to convince viewers that De Niro was in his 40s? I mean, e specially since audiences had been watching him since the ‘70s?!?
He found the answer on the set of his 2016 film, “Silence.”
PABLO HELMAN: We were having Thanksgiving in Taiwan it was a long table. And I had worked a little bit with Marty, but it was one of the first times that we were, you know, basically in front of each other.
Pablo Helman--of Industrial Light and Magic--was the visual effects supervisor on that picture.
ILM is the effects shop George Lucas founded to make Star Wars. They pioneered the use of computer graphics in movie-making.
…If you need to blow up the Death Star, liquify a Terminator, or unleash a T-Rex, you call these guys.
HELMAN: He started saying, "Well, I have a project." And he talked about The Irishman, and he talked about at that time, it was only De Niro. Only one actor. And he said, "Why don't I send you the script?" And that night, he emailed me the script. And I read it just overnight. And in the morning we started shooting, I went to him and I said, "I'm in.” …Marty Scorsese's vision was mainly the performance. It was a performance piece. It was really, really important that we got the performances right. That we capture whatever feeling and whatever kind of color in the selects Marty had found, and translated that into a younger version of the actors.
First, Pablo needed a proof-of-concept.
HELMAN: You know, why don't we do a test with De Niro, and maybe what we can do is shoot a scene that we all know, that will ground us into the ages that we want for the movie? Something like the fur coat scene from Goodfellas. And let’s redo it even if it’s two minutes or something like that, and let's bring him back to when he was 40-something.” So, he said, "That sounds great."
But Pablo had to convince the entire team back at ILM that it was a worthwhile experiment.
HELMAN: I got on the phone with ILM and I said, "I got the project. I got THE thing."I mean, we all work creatively, but also we are very responsible financially. So, the first thing was, this is a very risky project. So, I went immediately to Dennis Muren because Dennis is kinda like the creative heart. And so, I thought, "Well, if I can convince Dennis of this, then we can do it." So, the first thing that Dennis said to me is, "This is too risky. Don't do it." And I said, "Well, is this the way you felt when you did Jurassic Park?" And he said, "Well, okay, fine. You got me there."
Digital de-aging had been used in movies before… just, sparingly…It was the garnish, not the steak.
HELMAN: I never lost the faith. I mean, I knew that we could do this. So, we came back to New York. And I had a meeting with Irwin Winkler, and Jane Rosenthal, and Emma Koskoff, in which I proposed a scene from Goodfellas when he chooses a pink Cadillac.
That’s the scene after the big score where De Niro’s Jimmy ‘The Gent’ Burke berates Johnny Roastbeef for buying a new car.
HELMAN: [doing his De Niro impression] “What are you doing? Get rid of that pink Cadillac. What the hell are you doing? You're gonna get us all pinched?" We re-enact that scene with De Niro. At the time he was 74. So, we were there in New York. De Niro would reenact this scene, and we would make him again 41, the way he was in Goodfellas.
But De Niro put one additional stipulation on Pablo:
HELMAN: "You know, I ain't working with markers. I'm not gonna paint my face. I'm not gonna wear a helmet with the little cameras in front of me. I just wanna work on set with the real lighting, working with the other actors. We're going to adlib a lot. We're going to play a lot. And I just don't want any interference with the performances. And when you work it out, you give me a call.”
So not only did Pablo and his team have to convincingly create a 41-year old De Niro, they had to create a whole new technical process to do it.
HELMAN: It took about 8 weeks for us to develop some kind of technology so that we could prove that the concept would work. And after 8 weeks we showed the test to Marty and Bob De Niro, and they just looked at the test and said, “You know, we are making this movie.”
[Music Cue: ‘Theme for the Irishman’]
The test worked!
PACINO: And on the screen, there was something in the very essence of the film that just looked like this is something new.
Now, they had to scale up the technology to support an entire film – 3 and a half hours! 5 decades!! 295 locations!!! WOW!!!!
We’ll get into the technological nitty gritty on the next episode, when we take you behind the scenes with the geniuses at Industrial Light and Magic.
And we’ll learn how every department worked together to fully render this story.
This podcast was produced by Netflix with FannieCo and Crossroad. I’m Sebastian Maniscalco.
Thanks for listening.
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