After years of waiting on our end (and nearly three decades when it comes to Martin Scorsese), it is finally the week when Silence arrives. Our review proclaims it to be worth the wait as we called it a visually and emotionally complex rorschach test. Today now brings a wealth of new footage and images from the film, as well as some excerpts from Scorsese’s extensive press tour regarding his thoughts on film and what he’s planning to do next.
First up, he expanded on his earlier thoughts about the state of cinema, and they aren’t very positive. “Cinema is gone. The cinema I grew up with and that I’m making, it’s gone,” he tells AP. “The theater will always be there for that communal experience, there’s no doubt. But what kind of experience is it going to be? Is it always going to be a theme-park movie? I sound like an old man, which I am. The big screen for us in the ’50s, you go from westerns to Lawrence of Arabia to the special experience of 2001 in 1968. The experience of seeing Vertigo and The Searchers in VistaVision.” While those experiences are few and far between, indeed, Scorsese attributes it to the decline of interest in younger generations. “It should matter to your life. Unfortunately the latest generations don’t know that it mattered so much,” he says.
Despite this warranted pessimism, thankfully Scorsese is not hanging up his hat. Courtesy of his press tour, we have have a pair of updates on what is expected to be his next two films. Firstly, he plans to begin production next year for the crime drama The Irishman, starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and hopefully Joe Pesci. While it was previously known he’d be using de-aging technology for the film about Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, a mob hitman whose illustrious career is today best-known for a supposed involvement in the death of Jimmy Hoffa, Scorsese expanded on his approach further to Cinema Blend:
You don’t use prosthetics, make-up; they have acting and the technology is able to have them go through different time ages without the prosthetics. So we’ve seen some tests and it looks extraordinary. We were able to film Bob and just do a scene. We saw it come down to when he was like 20, 40, 60, so we’re looking forward to that, from that point of view, for The Irishman … Imagine seeing what De Niro looked like in The Godfather: Part II days, that’s pretty much how you’re going to see him again.
As for what hopefully follows that: it’s been well over a year since his next Leonardo DiCaprio collaboration was revealed and now we finally have an update. Based on Erik Larson‘s book, The Devil in the White City is being adapted by Billy Ray, and follows the dark and twisted events of Dr. HH Holmes, a man who may have killed upwards of 200 people during Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1893. “Right now, there is a script being worked on,” he tells Toronto Sun. “One of the things that I had to stop for the past six months was my meetings on that script. They want me to start again in January and see if we can find a way because it’s an extraordinary story.” So, with The Irishman aiming to arrive in late 2018, I’d doubt we’d see The Devil before 2020, but let’s cross our fingers that Scorsese and Ray crack the script.
Check out the new trailer below, along with a clip and video essay on the church of Scorsese, as well as Empire‘s debut of a batch of new images.
Silence opens on December 23 in NY/LA then expands on January 6 and January 13.