Something strange is in the air for Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. With rumors that the two would re-team for the first time in nearly 20 years have come some pretty bizarre suggestions. Taxi Driver 2 has been thrown out, including a recent rumor (said to be false) that Lars von Trier would assist in remaking the original film alongside Scorsese and De Niro. Now, courtesy of the MTV Movies Blog, we're hearing, straight from De Niro, that Marty may be planning to pull a Fellini.
De Niro has long been attached to a Scorsese project called The Irishman, an adaptation of Charles Brandt's I Heard You Paint Houses, the memoir of Frank 'The Irishman' Sheeran, an alleged hitman for the Mafia who, also allegedly, confessed to the murder of Jimmy Hoffa and claimed to have been involved with the Kennedy assassination.
De Niro explains in this new interview that the plan is slowly evolving to shoot The Irishman in two distinct parts or as two separate films. One would presumably be a straightforward narrative version and the other would be a film about the making of the film, delving into the history of their partnership. Unclear as to exactly what this may mean, De Niro cites 8 1/2 as an inspiration.
8 1/2, Frederico Fellini's absolute masterwork, tends to stand as the greatest film about filmmaking ever made, starring Marcello Mastroianni as a film director caught at a creative crossroads on his latest work. His work becomes blended with the images, memories and fantasies of his life, serving not only as a story within a story, but offering a larger metanarrative for Fellini's own autobiographical thought process.
With so many iconic films under their belt, I can see why the post modern route may be the road less traveled; Any gangster film Scorsese or De Niro do is inevitably going to be compared against some pretty hard-to-top predecessors. In the wake of Scorsese's announcement to shoot his next project in 3-D, I'm completely behind seeing him re-invent himself. Sadly, De Niro himself has sort of been treading a post modern take on his career for the last decade.
