Martin Scorsese is returning to a familiar genre with the crime drama The Irishman, which stars Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, but he's going to approach it a little differently when compared to his previous projects. The legendary auteur has spent years trying to get The Irishman off the ground, and after Paramount balked at the $100 million price tag, Netflix came in and is hoping to release the film in 2019. Scorsese and his team will get together this summer to start production, meaning at long last The Irishman is going to become a reality.

Cinephiles are quite excited to see the movie, especially since Scorsese remains at the top of his game. The Wolf of Wall Street, for instance, was directed with the gusto of someone in his late 20s, not an elder currently in his mid-70s. It goes without saying that the Oscar winner is always looking for new ways to challenge himself late in his career, and when it comes to tackling The Irishman, he's going to try other stylistic techniques in order to differentiate from his previous mob pictures.

Speaking with The Independent, Scorsese touched on his approach to this new film and how it will contrast from works like Goodfellas:

“I think this is different, I think it is. I admit that there are – you know, ‘Goodfellas’ and ‘Casino‘ have a certain style that I created for them – it’s on the page in the script actually.  Putting ‘Goodfellas’ together was almost like an afterthought, at times I was kind of rushing, I felt I’d already done it because I’d played it all out in terms of the camera moves and the editing and that sort of thing. The style of the picture, the cuts, the freeze-frames, all of this was planned way in advance, but here it’s a little different.”

Elaborating, Scorsese mentioned the characters in The Irishman are "older," meaning the main story will be about "looking back, a retrospective so to speak of a man's life and the choices he made." Several of some of the helmsman's standout productions like Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street cover the famous "rise and fall" narrative archetype by following someone in his youth who progressively gets deeper and deeper in over his head. Something that's a little more contemplative in nature certainly has the potential to be interesting, and perhaps even serve as a commentary on Scorsese's own legacy as a director who in many respects made the gangster genre his own. It'll be fascinating to see how Scorsese plans to film The Irishman, as he sounds like he won't be as meticulous early on. The director is famous for letting his actors improvise on-set, so that could happen here.

One major way The Irishman will be different from Scorsese's previous films is its reliance on visual effects. The budget is so high because the director plans on using digital de-aging technology to allow De Niro and Pacino to play younger versions of themselves in flashbacks. The technique has been used in several Marvel movies including Ant-Man and Captain America: Civil War to great results, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 showed this can be done largely with practical effects. With the renderings becoming more photorealistic than ever before, Scorsese isn't misplaced by putting his faith in the wizards at ILM to get this job done. In many respects, it seems The Irishman will be something of a change-of-pace for his fans, which is refreshing.

The Irishman does not have a release date as of this writing. We'll keep you updated on the latest information.

Source: The Independent