Snubbed at the Oscars when “The Aviator” lost to Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby,” Martin Scorsese has assembled a dream cast for his new movie “The Departed,” setting the stage for a rematch with Eastwood.
Jack Nicholson plays a mob boss in Boston in the film about two informers, one a mobster planted in the police department, played by Matt Damon, and one a police officer who goes undercover in Nicholson’s mob, played by Leonardo DiCaprio.
Famed for his tales of Italian American mobsters, Scorsese turns his lens on contemporary Irish American crime in “The Departed,” whose story is based on the 2002 Hong Kong thriller “Infernal Affairs.” The movie opens on Oct. 6.
“To have Jack Nicholson join up with Martin Scorsese and play a gangster is something that I think a lot of movie fans have been waiting for,” DiCaprio told reporters at a press day in New York.
Scorsese’s last film “The Aviator” lost out in the Oscar race to Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby,” and “The Departed” pits the two head to head again, with Eastwood’s World War II drama “Flags of our Fathers” also out in October.
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences passed over “The Aviator” in 2005 Scorsese lost his seventh Oscar bid, despite making such celebrated films as “Raging Bull” and “Taxi Driver.”
The word “Oscar” was not mentioned at the New York press event for the film, but “The Departed” has an unusually strong cast of male actors. The three big stars are backed up by strong performances from Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen and Alec Baldwin as police officers.
Nicholson ‘made it more obscene’Damon said Nicholson was largely responsible for what became a major theme in the movie — the link between sexual prowess and power, with the mob boss’s sexual excesses contrasted with the impotence of his protege.
“Jack brought this incredible new element, this new layer to that character — he made it more obscene,” Damon said. “That felt authentic because these guys will sublimate sex into violence and violence into sex.”
The result is explicit sexual scenes, coarse language and unrelenting violence that may be too much for some viewers.
Damon said Scorsese called him the night before he filmed his first scene, in which his character meets the mob boss in a porn theater to discuss a police investigation of him.
“[Scorsese] said, ‘A funny thing has happened, Jack Nicholson had some ideas for the scene .... OK, I’ll just get to it, Jack’s going to wear a dildo,”’ Damon said.
Asked about tabloid reports of a very explicit sex scene involving Nicholson and two women that did not make it into the final cut, Scorsese said: “Ultimately I decided what’s implicit is better than explicit in that bedroom scene.”
DiCaprio, who plays the undercover cop constantly in fear for his life, said Nicholson kept him on his toes, particularly in a scene where the mob boss interrogates him over whether he is the rat giving secrets to the police.
“I remember coming in to do the scene one morning and the prop guy told me ‘Be careful, he’s got a fire extinguisher and a gun and some matches and a bottle of whiskey,”’ he said.
Damon said the gritty atmosphere in the film came from extensive research by all those involved — in his case that meant accompanying police on a raid of a crack-den in a scene recreated in the film.
“I was at the back of the line in my bullet proof vest,” he said. “The guys who are in the shot with me are the guys who were with me that night.”
“There’s an authenticity that you can’t fake and it’s because he uses real people,” Damon said. “Ultimately it’s a magic trick, we’re just trying to be believable.”
Despite his stature in the business, Scorsese said it was not easy to keep making films that interest him.
“What I mean by that is to keep the energy going, to keep the interest going, the curiosity going, to continue to make films ... they have to mean something to me. And that’s always been a struggle because of the nature of the way the system is now in Hollywood ... I’m still trying to find my way.”