The Irishman’s epic scope required unprecedented coordination between every department. Hear about the trials, techniques and triumphs in costuming, production design, visual effects and location scouting—from the award-winning artisans and long-time Scorsese collaborators that made it possible to tell an intimate story spanning five decades.
The Irishman’s epic scope required unprecedented coordination between every department. Hear about the trials, techniques and triumphs in costuming, production design, visual effects and location scouting—from the award-winning artisans and long-time Scorsese collaborators that made it possible to tell an intimate story spanning five decades.
Netflix Presents: BEHIND THE IRISHMAN
EPISODE 3 – “Making the Picture”
MARTIN SCORSESE: The scale of the movie is big, but it's intimate. It’s personal.
[Music cue: ‘Methodic Doubt’]
SEBASTIAN MANISCALCO (NARRATOR V.O. BOLDED THROUGHOUT):
Welcome back 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.
In our final episode, we look at the epic scale of production needed to bring this story to the big screen.
We met the digital wizards at Industrial Light and Magic – who created brand new technology to de-age the movie’s stars.
From location scouting, to set building, to costume design… you’re gonna be blown away by the unprecedented scale of this picture.
Now on the last episode, we heard about the de-aging test staring Bobby D. The idea came from this guy:
[music out]
PABLO HELMAN: Name is Pablo Helman, and title: Visual Effects Supervisor.
Pablo’s home base is Industrial Light and Magic. They’ve been the top Visual Effects Studio in the world since George Lucas founded them in 1975.
You’ve seen their work in Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, Harry Potter and Gangs of New York.
For the Irishman, ILM was up against one of their greatest challenges yet: de-aging three of the world’s most recognizable faces.
HELMAN: The first thing that I thought is that it's gonna give the movie context, the same way that you ask a production designer to provide a building that is 1950s, or a car, or something like that. Or wardrobe. Then, you put the visual effects, and you put the actors in the right context, now you get a story because then, the audience has that connection with the character. Just from working with Marty I knew that it was going to be a very extensive and long movie. It was a lot of pressure, but the project was so interesting.
With the Goodfellas test, Pablo proved his theory. But that was just a short clip. Now, he had to scale that process up for an entire feature film.
HELMAN: The next question is gonna be, okay, this looks good. But then, how do you actually produce this? And how do you turn this into a production model that actually supports, financially, 1,700 shots.
[music cue]
Digital de-aging normally begins with capturing the actors’ performances in all three dimensions. That means actors wearing markers… like white dots, and ping pong balls on their heads.
For De Niro, Pacino, and Pesci… that wasn’t in the cards.
HELMAN: The first thing is that marker-less on set. With no helmets, nothing in front of the actors. And we'respanning 40 years, and we’re starting with an actor that is already 75 through 78-years-old. And they're incredible performances, we have captured a performance without interfering with the performances themselves. So, we took the technology out of the performance, and you ended up with a completely marker-less capture.
To pull this off, ILM had to develop anall-new camera system.
HELMAN: For the capture itself, we had to basically make sure that we could triangulate the performances. Meaning we had, you know, three different points of capture taking a look at the actor performing, and taking a look at lighting and textures, and coming up with a piece of software that would actually take a look at all the information that these three cameras are capturing, and then create geometry that was the form, frame-by-frame.
To keep track of how all the pieces in a scene moved in relation to each other—from lights, to props, to the actors themselves—Pablo had to update an older technology.
HELMAN: We started thinking about, what is the best way to capture the most amount of data? You start with something and then you build on whatever you had done before. And we knew that Witness Cameras, when you're doing any kind of 3D creature render, are very important.
A “Witness Camera” records the action from another angle so the “V.F.X.” artists can render a scene accurately.
If this process was going to work, they needed to record at a much higher resolution.
HELMAN: Since we're going to attach it to the center camera, to the director camera, why not go with a really high-resolution capture for the Witness Cameras? So, we went with a film-grade camera which necessitated, two camera crews per rig. One for the Witness Camera, and the left and right cameras, and the director camera.
Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto has worked with Marty on Silence and Wolf of Wall Street—his main priority was creating a system that literally didn’t get in the way of Marty’s vision.
RODRIGO PRIETO: So we have to figure out a rig that that would allow for any shot that he would imagine, to work, but also for the lighting that that was one of my requirements to Pablo was like, “Listen, I understand, the complication of this technology and how important is to the movie but I need to be able to light it like it would light any movie, you know and be able to be free.”
Normally on a movie with this level of VFX, the director would shoot the scene with the lights all the way up to get the most information into the cameras as possible… and then re-light the scene on the computer, after the fact.
[music in]
But this being The Irishman, Scorsese didn’t want to mess with the lighting design.
HELMAN:That's impossible to do unless you move to a completely different spectrum that cannot be seen by the human eye. So, we started talking to ARRI.
ARRIcreates industry leading digital and film cameras.
HELMAN: Maybe the ALEXA Minis can be modified in hardware and software so that they can capture infrared light because that is the spectrum that we wanna work in. We wanted to make sure that we were generating the right kind of infrared light. So, we had to come up with an infrared ring that was put in front of every one of the Witness Cameras, that was bathing the actor in infrared light. And so, the software development went into, okay, let's take the information that comes from the center camera and the cameras which are Infrared, and let's combine all that data into triangulating whatever the actor is doing. It's just very simple stuff.
I’m gonna need some more experts in here to help explain.
[music cue]
JOHN LEVIN: My name is John Levin, and I'm a layout supervisor at ILM. In order to have computer graphics track perfectly with the motion footage, we need to completely reproduce the environment, the position of our actors, the lighting, exactly as it was on set. Otherwise, you’re going to notice the faces, the eyes, shifting around in the head. You’re going to notice the hairline moving against the face. We wanted to have an exact reproduction of what was on set. And that includes the position of the actors, relative to the camera, the lights, everyone else.
The VFX crew couldn’t just rely on the computer to do it all, they had to use even more cameras to check their work.
LEVIN: The Sony Camcorder that was on set was there as what we called a “god camera.” Where we can see where the lights were, the actors were, and where the actor's feet were relative to the set, because we really want to make sure we're hyper-accurate with where the digital model is relative to the cameras. If we can see where their feet are, then we're not really guessing.
That doesn’t mean they were eye-balling this.
LEVIN: So, we’ve taken an entire LIDAR scan, a laser scan of the set. We matched those with the main camera rig to where the position of where it was on set, we find the position of every light. So that we know exactly where everything is.
To handle all these cameras they has to build a completely new rig. Enter: “The Three Headed Monster”! Here’s Pablo to tell us about his creation:
HELMAN: The rig was a three-camera rig that was all attached to each other. It had to be 30 inches wide. No more than that because the frames of the doors are about 30 inches. So, we needed 30 inches to go by the doors. And we had to be flexible, and had to move that rig around so that, you know, sometimes the center camera would be in the center. And then, there would be a left and right sometimes, because Marty works with a two-setup camera. So if I’m talking to you and he’s “cameraing” us, he’ll have complimentary lenses. One over there for me and one over there for you. And so, those two things, if we're doing Joe Pesci and De Niro, or Pacino's in the middle, then you have six cameras going.
Scorsese knows how much extra work goes into keeping all of these cameras going.
SCORSESE: I want to go off and have two cameras shooting, but part of this new CGI technique involved three lenses on each camera which was quite a mass of equipment and people in on the set and on location. And I had to find my way through. I’m rather short and I had to get enough room. But it was, we can actually shoot in tight rooms and small locations with that camera.
Here’s Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto.
PRIETO: One thing that was very important to me was that Marty would not feel restricted in any way in the way he shot this film because of the technology. I didn't want there to be any sense of ‘Oh, that shot I have in my mind, that's going to be really complicated because we have these three cameras’ and all that.
When you’ve got this many cameras, you’ve gotta have a lot of people to operate them. Here’s John Levin again, the layout supervisor.
LEVIN: Martin usually likes to shoot on film. Here we were going digital. He's done that before but now we have these extra cameras flanking the main camera. Each of those cameras needed its own focus puller. The infrared cameras needed its own crew. Each camera needed its own set of lenses. The lenses needed to match. All the lenses needed to be low in distortion, they needed to be very clean lenses, optically. Each of the IR cameras had infrared lights mounted to the front of them. They had fans on them, which needed additional heat syncs because they were very hot. You could actually sometimes see heat distortion coming off the main cameras, the infrared cameras in the main camera view, so we needed to keep them cool.
None of the actors had ever worked with a contraption like this.
HELMAN: So, here comes Joe Pesci’s coverage and he looks at this stuff. And there are three cameras looking at him. There's infrared light coming on him. And he said, "Where am I looking? Where is it?" He was like lost.
The main goal was always to keep the technology out of the actors’ way.
LEVIN: Marty works like a composer. If you watch him on set, he is literally moving his hands like a conductor, listening to each line be delivered. He is a true artist, a craftsman and, and we did not want to get in his way. So, we wanted our rig to be as flexible and versatile as possible.
[act change / transition music]
After shooting wrapped, Pablo and his team started making their digital models.
HELMAN: Then Marty, the last day, you know, turned to me and said, “Okay, here’s my baby. Now, you know, you have it for about 35 weeks, and it better be good. {Chuckle]
So the team has a 3D model of everything that has been shot. Now any digital assets, like say, a younger version of Pacino’s face, can be matched to the real thing. John Levin explains how it works.
LEVIN: We positioned our digital model right over where the person was in a 3D space. From there, we can apply our digital makeup. So what the camera system did was allowed us triangulate in depth where the actors were. We could triangulate the depth of the face, the depth of the eyebrow, the mouth, everything, and accurately reproduce the scene.
Pablo and the team at ILM pored over De Niro, Pacino and Pesci’s past work in order to make their younger selves look believable.
HELMAN: We spent about two years researching footage for the three actors, and different movies. We created library for De Niro, for Pesci, and for Pacino. And we catalogued the footage in a specific way. But there were thousands of frames.
To accurately de-age the actors they had to becomeexperts in the physical effects of growing older.
KEVIN REUTER: My name is Kevin Reuter, and I was the Look Development Supervisor on The Irishman. We studied just the aging process in general. Your muscles relax, the fat in your face shifts, so a lot of times you see a lot of sagging and changes in the skin, its texture. And even your skull underneath changes as you get older. Your eye sockets actually get wider, the area around your mouth and jaw actually kind of shrink. So you end up looking like you have a larger forehead and a smaller kind of jaw shape a lot of times.
GRETCHEN LIBBY: What I’ve learned, and I’ve been here 22 years, is the human face is one of the biggest challenges of all, right?
That’s Gretchen Libby, VP of production at ILM.
LIBBY: And so, we look at faces all day and we know anything, if anything is wrong, we can tell because we’re experts. So that was the area where we, we knew there were no, would be no margin for error, and with these actors and this director, big stakes.
When you get so focused, the smallest detail can make the biggest difference.
HELMAN: By looking at the performance, you deconstruct the performance so that you realize that he's moving his chin in a specific way in combination with some of the nose, and maybe the eyebrow. The left eyebrow is moving differently than the right one. And then, you actually put the performance together with these three actors that are masters at what they're doing. And you understand, you know, how flexible those faces are and they're so used to also working with film, where the camera is so close to them that it's very minimal what they do to convey an emotion.
SONYA CONTRERAS: My name is Sonya Contreras and I was supervising a team of artists that was responsible for the facial performance capture of these three iconic actors. The software’s called Flux. The F stands for facial and the-the Lux is for the lighting component of it. With Flux, what we were trying to do is we were trying to capture the facial performance of the actors in order to be able to de-age them through the process of the film. And Flux uses the data from the camera to take the performance from the actors and put that onto the model. And then we deliver that down our pipeline so that it can be lit and rendered.
It’s basically a simulation engine to create digital masks for the actors.
CONTRERAS: It’s a brand-new system. The plate is the footage that is shot on the hero camera, the onset camera. So the images that came out of that camera was our main source of information.
The digital masks were always based on the actual footage shot on set.
CONTRERAS: We had information about the lighting sources. And so we would use both of those to help us analyze the images and create a 3D model and then de-age the actors that way.
This isLayout Supervisor Douglas Moore:
DOUGLAS MOORE: It’s about capturing the emotions. And capturing the subtle nuances which show up with a little twitch here, a little wrinkle up in the nose, that there’s no way we could actually generate with modeling. It’s the sort of thing that we have to capture from the plate footage directly. And that’s something that FLUX is really able to do, is actually generate a lot of detail directly from the plate and from the footage.
CONTRERAS: We would take that information and we would use the footage from that, analyze it in our software and then turn that into a 3D model that would capture, would retain all of those subtleties. The movement of the face. That way we would be able to take that information and retarget it to their younger selves.
[Music break / act transition]
For Marty and his longtime editor, the great Thelma Schoonmaker, the editing process started the way it always did. Here’s ILM’s Gretchen Libby again.
LIBBY: They make an edit with the guys at their current ages and then we go in and youthify them. And so Marty and Thelma hadwatched the movie for so long without our digital faces. It was a big adjustment for them when we started slotting in people at different ages. But I think the actual process itself of showing the director and the editor our work was pretty standard. What I think was different for them was seeing their movie one way for so long and then having to adjust and see it another way.
A movie of this size and scope presents challenges to every single dept.
SANDY POWELL: This movie is so huge, it really would have been incredibly difficult to have done it on my own.
That’s veteran costume designer Sandy Powell who worked with Marty on Hugo and Shutter Island.
For The Irishman, she had to call in reinforcements.
POWELL: It's really huge. I mean, it needed it needed to have two people just because there are times when I'm dealing with an actor doing a fitting at the same time as Christopher is. And Christopher was the only person I could think of that could possibly share this job with.
Sandy brought in Christopher Peterson—who had worked on Boardwalk Empire and the Departed--to share the load.
CHRISTOPHER PETERSON: It's extraordinary, because between Bob, and Joe, and Al, sort of collectively, it's about 215 costumes, and we had them essentially, in place by the time we began shooting. Which is one of the only ways to accomplish the rest of the film and all the other characters to have those touchstones in place.
POWELL: Bob has over 100 changes throughout all of these decades. With your timeline, we sort of figured out what he was going to wear. And we took photographs and we had a board in sequence, in detail, throughout every year, every outfit that he wears.
SCORSESE: You know, it was very complex there were many, many different changes. And I want the clothes to look lived-in. I don’t want it to look costumed.
POWELL: It's really difficult because we cover at least three decades, we cover mostly 50s, 60s, and 70s. And then we do a bit of 80s, and a bit of 90s. But even within those decades, we've got the early 50s and the late 50s, the early 60s and the late 60s. And there are differences between all of those and just getting your head around, even though, we've been on this for God knows how many months, it's still really difficult to switch between early 60s and early 70s, late 70s, early 50s. On the one hand, there are huge differences between the early 50s and the early 60s, but not huge differences between the early 50s and the late 50s. So that's that's where we start, you look at all of the real images, you read all of the information that there is. And of course there were a lot.
PETERSON: Masses on this but we were very fortunate I mean, to have Marianne Bower in place--
Marianne Bower is Marty’s longtime head researcher.
PETERSON: …who provided reams and reams of research and photograph after photograph that really helpedunlock at least like the basic tenants of what we're up to.
Any detail uncovered in research was fair game.
PETERSON: One thing that came up is that Hoffa lived in white socks, he never owned a pair of black dress socks. And so that's why you always see him looking sort of awkward with this huge white bit sticking out. And she was like, maybe that's an interesting thing.
POWELL: Yeah it’s something that we wouldn't have picked up on really, apart from maybe the one photograph that we know we can see his white socks, but it's good to know that that's what he did. So I think that’s great. That's a character point, we will always do that.
BOB SHAW: Marty is a stickler for detail. And he also loves the reference and he wants to know what was real.
That’s Bob Shaw, Production Designer. The production designer is in charge of the look and feel of each scene. Tools of the trade are props and set dressing.
SHAW: If there are times when we decide to deviate from what's real. It’s with everybody agreeing that that's what we're doing. You know, we have a barber shop, they had powder blue seats in the historical place. So we sent out five barber chairs to be covered in powder blue leather.
It’s all about doing your homework.
SHAW: This was really just following the headlines and following the research, as opposed to some kind of master plan. Relying heavily on Marianne Bower, who's been doing research for Marty for a long, long time.
Marty wanted to make the world of The Irishman look ordinary.
SCORSESE: It is everyday life and it should look like everyday life. To understand that there is no way to be able to tell how something of great import is occurring in history in a sense. Because very often a great deal of it is masked in the banal.
SHAW: On this one, I wasn't as aware of pushing things. I think that's it, he wasn't like “There'll be no red in this film, or we're going to use a lot of this color,” or certain things like that. That's why he started with saying, it looks like nothing.
It’s about subtlety…
SHAW: The Villa de Roma for example was one of our stage sets and originally he didn't want to build that location because he said it will never be the same as a real Italian restaurant. You can smell the sauce and the floorboards. So we kept trying to add more layers of dust. I mean, you wouldn't ever see it on the film. But I think Marty could be reassured to look and see that the air registers.We had them sort of spray all this stuff on it and then blow dust on it.
Authenticity is the hardest thing to fake.
SHAW: I gave everybody wrap gifts that we're like these Canvas bags it said on it, “We go to extraordinary lengths to give you the ordinary. You know, it was just volume. It wasn't anything fancy. It was just a lot of everything. I can't even really break it down. I know that we had a kind of astonishing 295 sets and locations, and we probably had at least 20 built stage sets.
There was only one person who could have found all those locations…
KIP MYERS: Kip Myers, location manager.
Kip worked with Marty on The Departed, Shine A Light, and Vinyl.
MYERS: I was up for the challenge, it was my fourth time working with Marty. And so I know his process really well. And so immediately I was like super excited.
Kip’s partner in crime on this job? His old buddy Bob Shaw.
SHAW: This film has a lot of very big, elaborate period settings that we only need to see for like half a page. And they just kept turning the page. And another one, and another one. So it was really the volume of work that struck me.
MYERS: So it was every single time I read a paragraph of something it would be like, oh yeah of course we have to show every single piece of what he’s talking about. So like one paragraph you would gave like 4 or 5 locations.
SHAW: Kip and I were driving around for like close to three months before anyone else even started.
MYERS: We basically covered every borough, all of the counties, I mean we went as far as we could and even further some days. We were on our own road trip, I put like 5000 miles on my car, just scouting, and not leaving New York State.
Location scouting is more than just finding an old Italian restaurant or a vintage gas station.
SHAW: we were scouting, Kip and I made videos, and when we actually showed them to Marty, he would say, “Well, I think I'm going to do this.” Long before we shot, it was scouted that way in order to see that it was suitable.
In the Irishman, the role of Philadelphia is played by New York City.
MYERS: At one point, Bob and I are “Let's go to Philadelphia” and maybe production has to be in Philly for a week, you know, just to kind of get some authenticity. And we went to Ridgewood, Queens. And we has scouted it and we sort of put two and two photos. next to each other. And we saw a few streets in Ridgewood that were almost identical to South Philly, including, like, the doorframe. Bob and I were like, “this a miracle.”Because there's a big church that sort of centers, this neighborhood. It's a historic neighborhood. So there's nonew buildings. So then we were like, “We're onto something here” if we can keep finding stuff like this we can keep make his happen. He admits this isn't a docudrama, but he wants to make sure this is as authentic as possible.I would say he is very particular about locations that he knows, like the Copacabana, or Umberto's, he gives a little bit of leeway on other things.
And even says, you know, “Show me what it really looked like.” And then we can go from there. One of the biggest challenges was Umberto’s.
That would be Umberto’s Clam House, a Little Italy institution. It’s also the place where my character, Crazy Joe Gallo gets shot down.
MYERS: The real Umberto’s in on Mulberry Street. He was very adamant that we go to where it was, which is no longer there. And we kept telling him, like, now Mulberry Street is a tourist nightmare now. There's no way we can recreate this particular scene, an assassination, basically, on this street and make it look period. And so we finally went a few blocks away to Broom and Orchard. It had the same fire escapes and a similar position on the block. And so we showed him photos and he's like, “Yeah I think… Yeah, Let’s go look in person.” So whenever he comes to location, it's also a big deal and you, you know you make sure everyone's quiet. You arrive early. His car pulls up, he gets out he's wearing a suit and tie, normally, hands behind his back, looking around very quiet for a few minutes. And you're just sort of waiting for him to approve or disapprove. He's looking around nodding his head. “I think I can make this work. Yeah, this looks right. Okay.” And then he turns to me he says, “The only thing is, how wide was Mulberry Street and how wide is Orchard Street?” I said, “Well, we can go measure it for you if you'd like. I'm not totally sure. I mean, I know the pictures look very similar, but I can I'll have someone go take a measurement.” He's like, “If it's close, I'll pick it. But if it's not, I will have to find a new location.” So we go and of course, Orchard Street is 24 feet and Mulberry’s 22 feet, but he made it work because it was only two feet difference, but this is the one scene out of hundreds of scenes in this movie. That he like really has 100% in each set, it's insane.
SHAW: We took it as a given that we can't show him the Goodfellas diner. And we never asked him, you know do you not want to shoot in that diner, we just assumed that he wouldn't want to. And we were showing him a folder “How about this diner?” And it's like, “You know, I can't really do this shot there.” And then we showed him another diner. And finally one day he said, “You know, there was a really good diner, we shot in Goodfellas, can we just shoot there?” And it's like, okay. We assumed that you wouldn't want to go near it. And it's like, well, I'm not going to shoot it the same way again.
MYERS: I guess it was in a meeting with Bob (I wasn’t at that meeting) and he said, “Does the Goodfellas Diner still exist?” And were like not only does it exist they renamed it Goodfellas Diner. He didn’t know that. So we took him there. We called the people, but we didn't tell them what movie was going to be because we're afraid they would freak out. Brought Marty there, the woman behind the counter is the same lady. It's the same family. So the woman who looks young, in the black and white picture that they have on the wall up in the diner? She comes and greets Marty, “Do you remember me?” And he’s saying “Of course I do.” They had a moment. We sat at the booth. And then Marty's daughter was with us. That was another really cool thing, is that during our small scout Marty brought his daughter along. And it really did change the dynamics of his enthusiasm. I can 100% tell you that every frame of that movie, he had such an impact on it. It could be the smallest scene in a phone booth. And he will have looked through photos and photos, gone in person to scout it. Which I mean, nowadays, I feel that doesn't even happen as much anymore because the TV is so fast. And this is someone who he really cares about every frame of the movie.
SCORSESE: We tried to cut away the unnecessary. And say, just give me the essentials of this place. And when you get the essentials let’s make sure it’s weathered. Make sure it’s lived in. We got to created the lived in feeling and then that takes on its own life. The fact that we were doing something special made it very exciting.
[Music Cue: ‘Theme for the Irishman’]
That does it for “Behind the Irishman.”
We’ve taken you back in time and behind the scenes to explore this story’s journey from page to screen.
Now that you know how this incredible film came to be, go back and watch it again. I’m sure you’ll appreciate this cinematic achievement even more the second time around.
Behind the Irishman was produced by Netflix with FannieCo and Crossroad.
Our Executive producer is Rae Votta for Netflix.
Our executive producer is Patrick Rizzotti for Crossroad.
“Behind the Irishman” was directed by Fannie Cohen,
written by Rob Hebert and edited by Nic Bannon.
Several interviews were conducted by Craig Byrd, and coordinated by Banks Farris and Kathryn Hollis.
Special thanks to the entire filmmaking team from The Irishman.
Thanks to Nightbird Studios in Hollywood CA for additional recording.
I’m Sebastian Maniscalco. Thanks for listening.
Now go watch the movie!
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