(Credit: Netflix)

Martin Scorsese added to his canon of great films made with Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci in 2019, with the gangster epic The Irishman.The movie flows along at a leisurely pace, charting the progression of Frank Sheeran from a truck-driving teamster to the hired assassin.

But the length of the film itself is nothing compared to the time it took Scorsese and his legendary partner-in-crime Robert De Niro to produce it. In an interview with The Guardian at the time of its release, Scorsese said that he and De Niro had been discussing the project for around “35 years”. Finally, in 2004, De Niro gave the director a copy of the true-crime book I Heard You Paint Houses, on which The Irishman is based.

De Niro already had the lead role in mind for himself and had made the casting decision for Scorsese on who would play Italian mobster Russell Bufalino. “You know, this is an amazing part for Joe,” he told Scorsese, referring to their previous collaborator Joe Pesci. “If he wants to do it.” Pesci was soon on board, as was De Niro’s Godfather Part II and Heat co-star Al Pacino.

However, the movie was still years away from actual production, not least because Scorsese was busy making several other films during the process of supervising the development of The Irishman’s script. And with every passing year, an even bigger problem was developing.

Even in 2007, when De Niro, Pesci and Pacino had all signed on to act in the film, the actors were all in their mid-60s. Meanwhile, De Niro had to play characters who would be in their early-to-mid thirties during certain scenes, and Pacino had to play a man who first appears in his forties and who dies at the age of 62.

The longer the movie is in development, the further the actors get from the age of their characters. From a casting point of view, these age disparities made very little sense. As Scorsese put it to Netflix, “That means I’d make half the film with Bob? Why do it?” The chances of him actually making The Irishman were decreasing by the year.

That is, until technology caught up with Scorsese and De Niro’s vision for the movie in the mid-2010s. “I was shooting Silence in Japan,” the director recalls, “and Pablo Helman of ILM came up to me and said, ‘I think I can make them look younger.'” At first, Scorsese was sceptical. “I don’t know,” he replied. “I can’t have the actors talking to each other with golf balls on their faces.” His shooting method involves a lot of improvisational work on set, with actors playing off each other’s body language. He felt that CGI markers would remove elements of realism and spontaneity from their performances.

“If you could find a way to lessen the technical aspects of it, then it could work.” Helman committed to creating new technology which could achieve what Scorsese wanted. He was taking a leap of faith, but he backed himself and his team at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), the company behind the revolutionary visual effects in Jurassic Park.

The extremely advanced motion-capture and animation software required to make The Irishman meant that its budget spiralled beyond $150million, with Paramount Pictures backing out of financing in 2017 as a result. Netflix stepped in because no traditional film studios would put up the money, which ended up being as much as $250million.

All in all, scheduling issues, technological requirements and budget concerns meant that the movie took 12 years to complete from its initial development phase. It was worth the wait, with the big three of De Niro, Pacino and Pesci giving some of their best performances while the de-ageing effects proved relatively successful.

By the time the film was finally released in 2019, the lengthy production process seemed to have taken its toll on Scorsese, who suggested The Irishman could be his last movie. Thankfully, he’s since changed his mind. But he’s unlikely to be calling up ILM again any time soon.