So what film is Martin Scorsese going to make once he’s finished Hugo Cabret? Until now, the answer has been The Irishman, a mob drama that would reunite him with Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci. However now a couple of news stories have thrown all that up in the air.
Variety reports that the director is back on The Wolf Of Wall Street, which would reteam him with Leo Dicaprio. Before they made Shutter Island together, Scorsese and DiCaprio were supposed to make the an adaptation of Jordan Belfort’s memoir about 1990s stockbroker decadence, but things fell apart at Warner, so the duo made the Dennis LeHane adapation instead. Nevertheless, Leo has stayed very keen on the project, set it up again at Paramount, and for a while had Ridley Scott attached to direct. That’s now not happening, and Scorsese is back on board.
The Wolf Of Wall Street is said to be funny, dramatic and fast paced, and makes a sympathetic character out of a stockbroker who supervises a cadre of brokers who squeezed clients to buy stocks that paid off – for the brokers, who used the funds to live extravagantly until they were brought down by the feds.
However it doesn’t appear this will be Scorsese’s next project, it’ll just go back into the pile of projects he’s endlessly developing. The Playlist spoke to his reps, and they said that the next film for the director will be Silence, a project he’s been attached to since 2006. Based on Shusaku Endo book, it’s about ‘two 17th century Jesuit priests who face violence and persecution when they travel to Japan to locate their mentor and to spread the gospel of Christianity’.
While a legal battle last year made it seem we’d never see Scorsese directing the movie, that seems to have been sorted out, and as it’s a bit of a passion project, it’s what he wants to do next.
So what happened to The Irishman? That’s the movie people really wanted to see, so let’s hope it hasn’t gotten lost in the mix.