Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman is finally in the making, and we knew as much back in October 2015 when Robert De Niro confirmed the project. Before you get too excited, you should know the movie, which tells the story of the mob hitman that supposedly killed Jimmy Hoffa, isn’t due until next year.
But a new report reveals that the production crew is looking to make De Niro, Al Pacino, and others, look young again without using prosthetics. Instead, new special effects technology will be used, the kind we saw in Rogue One most recently.
Star Wars fans were pleasantly surprised to see Moff Tarkin, young Princess Leia, and X-Wing pilots appear in the new
“Well, it’s an extraordinary technology that we’ve been looking at,” The Irishman’s producer Gaston Pavlovich told Cinemablend “You don’t use prosthetics, makeup, 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, and 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 2 days, that’s pretty much how you’re going to see him again.”
The Irishman is based on the Charles Brandt book I Heard You Paint Houses, which tells the story of mob hitman Frank Sheeran who supposedly killed Hoffa.
De Niro will play Sheeran in the movie, and it’s pretty clear why he needs to be rejuvenated for the role. As Business Insider notes, we’re going to have flashbacks where De Niro and the rest of the cast will look how they did in the 1970s. And he might look like he did in Godfather 2:
Unfortunately, there are no trailers for the new movie just yet, and there’s no footage showing De Niro or Pacino young again.
