Director Martin Scorsese not only worked with Leonardo DiCaprio several times. Robert De Niro (GoodFellas, Casino) is also one of his regular actors. The two have worked together ten times in the last 50 years – and both Scorsese favorites even appeared in Killers of the Flower Moon.
However, De Niro stayed away from his gangster epic, for which the filmmaker finally received a directing Oscar 17 years ago.
Robert De Niro didn’t want to star in the Martin Scorsese gangster film Departed
In fact, Martin Scorsese asked his go-to actor De Niro if he would appear in the gangster drama Departed. But as the director recalled when speaking to Deadline last year, he got a no: “We talked to Bob about it, but he didn’t want to do it.” But he didn’t take offense at his star, after all, the two had an on/off relationship throughout their careers.
Scorsese continues: “I didn’t work with Bob for ten years until we did GoodFellas; we went in different directions. Then we did two or three more films. And then for another 19 years we didn’t.” He should simply go to the Departed offer “No, I don’t want to do that” have said. The two then got together again for the Netflix project The Irishman.
Departed is a remake of the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs and features people like Di Caprio, Jack Nicholson and Matt Damon in the cast. The Moviepilot community currently rates the film with a round 8, and on Rotten Tomatoes the audience score is even 94 percent.
Where to stream Departed by Martin Scorsese?
Unfortunately, the gangster epic Departed is currently not available in a streaming flat rate anywhere. You can stream the Scorsese film as a rental or purchase title on Amazon, Apple TV and Co. The same applies to the East Asian film Infernal Affairs.
This article appeared in a similar form on our sister sites SensaCine and Filmstarts.